In-housing is not just growing, it's growing up

It was good to be at another in-person in-housing event last week. The Campaign UK In-housing Summit brought together a great set of speakers, panellists and presenters from a healthy mix of CMOs, creative leaders and in-house agency leaders.

AAR was pleased to support the event in a number of ways. Our CSO, George Porteous , was on a panel around Inter-Agency Collaboration, while Vicky Gillan and I talked to attendees from our AAR stand. Both gave us the opportunity to explain our in-housing capability and how it is part of AAR ’s marketing consultancy offering.??

Helping IHAs succeed?

Before the event, there was a lot of anticipation for the “In-house Agency Manifesto - what IHAs need to succeed” session, and it didn’t disappoint. It was a great, interactive presentation led by Patrick Burgoyne and the themes it teased out reminded me of my days running in-house teams. For me, the key themes of the session were:?

• Having a manifesto is a vital part of setting up an in-house agency , and is always time well spent, and a worthwhile thing to do.
• One thing that inevitably came up in that session (and also in a few of the other sessions) was the importance of defining your North Star, and then crucially repeating repeating repeating it throughout the business.
• This is linked to another recurring theme on the day: the in-house agency needs to know their remit. So too does the wider business, along with external agency partners, to avoid a mismatch of expectations. As Pete Markey , CMO of Boots, said: it’s worth the time and effort to set those expectations.
• Something that was mentioned multiple times was that cost saving can be an output of in-housing, but shouldn’t be an input.

Is in-housing coming of age?

My overall takeaway from the event was that the world of in-housing is maturing and becoming more confident as a result, compared to the findings from research we did with The Drum last year when producing the Marketing Ecosystem Blueprint . The examples above show that, but there were lots of other clues.

Perhaps most encouraging is the fact that, as Lisa Moore said, there used to be snobbery around not being very good if you work in-house, but that’s now not the case.?This echoes James Turner CMgr FCMI saying that in-housing ‘used to be the poor relation’.

Another indication of shifting attitudes is that, increasingly, in-house agencies don’t like to be called in-house agencies because they see themselves as an integral part of the business; the creative vision is linked to the business plan and has an influence on business planning and driving innovation.

There was also an acknowledgement that to overcome any sense of going stale, you need to over-invest in training and inspiration for creatives. Similarly securing the budget to enter awards schemes - either mainstream ones or specific in-house ones like the Inside Out? Community – helps with recruitment and retention, just as it does in external agencies.

The discussion also explored how best practice is to have a charging model in place in-house – or use a virtual currency as Beehive do at Lloyds TSB – rather than running what is perceived to be a ‘free bar’, as Natalie Brewster eloquently put it.

Finally, event speakers considered how strategy & planning roles are becoming more prominent (being in place in most of the featured in-house teams), and both Nancy Croix and Dries Mertens said that, commercially, creativity is a lever for growth.?

This touched on something we’ve been investing a lot of thought into at AAR with the Creative Capital Manifesto, which you can download here . Creative Capital is something we strongly believe in, and would love to discuss with you.?

The presenters had all been on this journey and had a story to tell. It was both interesting and useful to gain an insight into their experiences and hear their perspective.?

If you’re contemplating setting up in-house, have recently set up, or have an existing set-up that you’d like optimised, AAR can help. Please feel free to get in touch with me via a LinkedIn message, at [email protected] or visit our website .?