Designers in the house: Part 2

Getting the right people for your in-house agency.

In my first?article?I discussed some of the factors that will help you decide if setting up an in-house agency or studio is the right move for your organisation. If you have made the decision to do so, the next part of the process is hiring the right people.

This is without a doubt the most important consideration in ensuring the success of your in-house agency. You can invest in the best (and most expensive) technology. You can establish globally recognised, best-in-class processes to drive maximum efficiency and minimal errors. But without the right people in place, nothing will work the way it should. In fact, an in-house agency with the right people in place can overcome a lack of investment in technology and processes.?

Finding the right people is critical but they also have to be able to fit into your corporate culture. For example, the kind of creative designer that would thrive in a casual tech start up where the CEO has more tattoos and body piercings than they do might find it a struggle to adapt to the business attire wearing, hushed environment of a consumer bank.

Fortunately, creative people come in all shapes, sizes, temperaments, experience levels and skill sets. So there are bound to be talents that are a perfect fit for you and your organisation. The critical question is, how do you decide the particular skill sets and experience levels that you need?

The first step is to look at the work you will want your in-house agency to do. There are essentially two levels of creative work: conceptual creative work and executional creative work.

Conceptual creative work?

This is the kind of creative work you would normally ask an external agency to do. The team would be tasked with coming up with complete campaigns to launch a new product or service, strategies to reposition your brand, new ideas and initiatives to get market attention and so on.?

In this case, your in-house agency would act just like an external one, taking briefs from the various stakeholders and business units in your organisation and turning those briefs into campaigns and creative executions. The in-house creative team would be able to work very closely with your marketing team and arrive at solutions far faster than an external agency could.?

You will need to evaluate the team’s experience and skill sets based on the type of work required now – and in the future. Will they have to originate concepts and complete campaigns just as if they were a full-service agency? Or are you, like so many brands, looking to create your own video and digital content completely in-house? Each of these will require different levels and blends of skills and experience.

What follows are some very broad descriptions of the people you would be looking at to do this more conceptual, ‘big idea’ type work.

Creative Director:?As the name implies, this is the person who leads and manages the creative department. To do so effectively, they will need at least 8 – 10 years’ experience. Coming from writing or design background, creative directors are hired for their conceptual and leadership abilities and would work closely with the marketing team to develop marketing and advertising campaigns.

Art Director:?This is somebody with design skills who is also very strong in terms of ideas and concepts. They would be responsible for the overall look and feel of your marketing material. They will typically either be strong in print-based design or digital execution – rarely both, although people with these hybrid skills certainly do exist. Ideally they should also have strong photoshop skills.

Writer:?Also referred to as copywriters, their skills can be easily applied across all types of marketing material from print to digital to video. While they can be biased more towards being better at concepts or long form writing for example, a decently skilled writer should be able to pull off most writing assignments.

For an in-house agency, the critical requirement for all of the above roles is that they have the willingness and skills to roll up their sleeves and see work through to completion – up to and including doing the ‘grunt work’ themselves. Whereas the majority of creative agencies have a strong infrastructure in place to move ideas from concept to execution to production, in-house agencies rarely have that luxury – especially start up ones. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of hiring ‘hands-on’ people for these roles.?

The next important consideration with hiring people to do conceptual creative work is understanding the creative concept process. Or rather understanding that there is really no such thing. If your only prior experience with creative work has been when it was presented to you by your agency partners, then you will be in for quite an eye-opener when you see what goes into producing it in the first place.?

Coming up with good creative is not a linear process that goes from point a to point b in a straight line. It’s more like hacking your way through densely thick jungle, falling into rivers, getting bitten by God-knows-what and frequently finding yourself completely lost. In other words, it’s usually pretty messy. Sometimes, rarely, a good solution comes quickly and relatively painlessly – especially if the creative team are very experienced. Most of the time it will take longer than you expect it to. This is perfectly normal and is something that needs to factored in when deciding if you really want to have high-level creative work developed in-house.?

If all of this sounds too messy for your organisation, then it’s probably best to leave the concept and ideation part of your marketing efforts to an external agency. However, asking that same external agency to do the executional and adaptation work can be pretty expensive and inefficient. This is where having your own dedicated in-house creative execution studio can make a big difference.

Executional creative work?

In cases where you rely on an external creative agency to come up with the main campaign ideas or you have to adapt and localise creative work from your global headquarters, having a dedicated onsite creative execution team can be a very good idea. This kind of work is much more process-driven and can be likened to a factory assembly line that produces work quickly and efficiently – provided, once again, that you have the right people in place. These people could include the following:

Studio Manager:?If the workload requires a number of designers to manage the workload, then hiring a senior designer with people management skills and around 8 -10 years of experience would be a good idea. For an in-house role, the studio manager would have to be a ‘doer’ as well as an ‘organiser’. Having good project management skills and great attention to detail will be vital for this role.

Designer:?Classically a designer will be focused on the look, design and layout of your marketing material. Less skilled when it comes to concepts and ideas when compared to an art director, they will be better at things like logo and publication or digital design. Like art directors, they are typically either print or digital focused but increasingly have hybrid skills.

Mac Operator/Desktop Publishing Artist:?While less skilled and experienced than art directors or designers, Mac Operators really are the factory of the studio and the efficiency of their output is critical if you need a lot of documents to be set up for print or digital distribution, or to churn out a lot of adaptations and re-sizings of externally developed concepts and campaigns.

Now before people in agencies and design studios completely freak out, I will be the first to say that these descriptions and job scopes are very abbreviated. To keep this article at least little shorter, I’ve also left out important roles like traffic coordinators (who manage deadlines and deliverables), digital designers, motion graphics designers, video editors and many more. But the above should provide some idea of the different kinds of talents that it takes to set up an in-house agency or studio. And all of these roles depend upon the type of work that this department will be doing.

Getting started

If your ambition is to set up a full in-house department that handles both creative concepts and execution, then hiring the right creative director for your needs is the most critical component. Once the creative director is in place, it should be their responsibility to work with you to select and hire the rest of the staff required – from art directors and writers to the studio manager and designers or Mac Operators.?

If the plan is to have a dedicated studio for executional creative work, then your key hire will be the studio manager. From that point they will work with you to hire the right people with the right skill sets to get things up and running.

If you want to start off at a smaller scale as a proof-of-concept and then grow the department in managed stages, I would recommend hiring someone a level above what you think you might need. For example, if you reckon that hiring a Mac Operator would be all you need for your current workload, you should instead hire one level above and bring in a designer. The designer will not only be able to do all the basic work required, they will also give you additional flexibility to address unanticipated opportunities that require more advanced skills.?

As you go through the selection and hiring process for these talents, it is very important that you keep in mind the environment in which they’ll be working and your corporate culture. Coming from creative agencies or design studios which are far less formal than most corporate organisations, they will still have to adapt to a working scenario and expectations that will probably be very different from what they've been used to. Creative agencies - regardless of the name above the door - are very similar in the way they are organised and the way they work.?So moving from one agency to another is usually a very seamless experience. However, transitioning to a corporate environment will present quite a culture shock for most creative people. This needs to be expected and managed as part of your hiring process. Open, honest and clear communication as to where and how they will be working in your organisation will be essential to avoid any misunderstanding or indeed mis-hires.?

So now we have identified the kind of in-house agency you need according to the work required and have a good idea about the kind of people that will be needed. In the next and final article in this series, I will look at how you can equip them with the right processes and technology to operate as efficiently as possible.?

If you have any further questions or would like to hear more insights in this area, please do reach out to me.