Lessons about facilitating in-house content from an expert (and how to create new income streams you didn’t know you had)
Anne Miles
Intuitive Freelance Marketer | Writer | Designer | Multi-dimensional Oracle Medium | Podcast Host
Marketing teams are moving to bring more full service strategy, creative, production and media in-house rather than through the traditional ad agencies and are taking on deeper responsibilities in the strategic and creation chain in ways they haven’t done before. Even the ex-agency creative leaders who are brought in-house to take on these roles haven’t actually experienced all the necessary skills first hand to facilitate every aspect of the process either and don’t have all the skills needed to optimise the process fully. Having spent the last couple of years facilitating in-house projects and campaigns for businesses I thought these useful lessons would help anyone considering taking on more in-house control and the profitability advantages of this control.
Firstly, I should explain why I am in this position to offer this advice. I am lucky to be one of those people who hit the glass ceiling in every role I’ve had in agencies at a time when diversity and inclusion wasn’t even in the language or on the distant radar. As a result I moved sideways often to get my intellectual stretch and to feel I was growing and developing my skills and experience - my value too, when forward promotion was not available to a woman (rarely anyway). I have therefore dug deep into video/film content and TV production, print production, post production, event production, visual effects, business strategy and operations, research, strategy (brand, digital, production, media, social, marketing and content strategy that is), client side marketing requirements and the required internal accountability and ROI, data and insights, segmentation, creative strategy and direction, concept development and copy, art direction and design, technology including those that help with project management and workflow, those that help produce content effectively, even produced the odd app and website from scratch by hand. Even experience in creating Quality Assurance standards for agencies from zero and the principles of conscious capitalism. I’m struggling to think of a part of the marketing chain that I haven’t had experience from the top end strategic thinking right down to hands on getting things done. This used to feel like I didn’t have a traditional place in the industry, but now I am lucky that it provides a completely unique way of drilling deeper than most into every step of the process from strategy though to getting content out to the world and affords me the opportunity to advise on process optimisation, how to set up a functional in-house team and to develop new income streams even when you don’t even know there is the opportunity to turn your cost centres into a profit stream.
In many positions I’ve held and as a qualified coach (many qualifications in various types of coaching in fact) I have enabled in-house activity whether that was to be the first agency to bring production in-house, editing in-house, design, finished art, motion design and VFX in-house or to change business models and workflow to improve profitability or even improve resale value for buyout (back in the days when that was considered blasphemous and scandalous in fact!). I now add to my experience training as a business coach, executive coach, performance coach, marketing practices and certifications, creative processes, copy and design skills and plain old curiosity and problem solving. There is nothing better than bringing new and better ways to do things and to turn costs into profit centres for me. I hate wastage and the bad habit in the industry of engaging the wrong people doing the wrong tasks which impact budget, ethics, stereotyping and harm to customers, and profitability. Another pet hate is the mistake that chaotic creative process is mistaken for creativity when all it does it takes from the amount of content and outcomes that can be produced for clients.
This list really could be the TOP 100 and not just 10 insights here but this is a good place to start to improve profitability of the in-house process and capture the best of the process.
For any sized brand, or businesses, with or without in-house teams, either big or small marketing departments, the opportunity is fundamentally the same - there will likely be new opportunities that you can’t see beyond the current landscape. That old adage applies here - “You know what you know, you know what you don’t know, but you don’t know what you don’t know”.
A common thing I hear is that ‘We already have an in-house team for marketing’ or ‘We already have an agency’. The number one sign you don’t have growth or profit on your mind and happy with the status quo (that’s sometimes code for ‘lazy’!).
Many in-house teams are not really building your business and driving revenue, but behaving like the marketing department is a ‘business as usual’ and reactive team. You’ll be just getting by and even consider the marketing team as a service to the HR team without a proper Employee Brand strategy and they are just responding to requests from the rest of the business in chaotic ‘first in best dressed’ fashion and not considered a part of driving business growth or profitability.
The question to ask is ‘What is the opportunity that we’re missing and how can we turn a cost centre into a profit making department?’. If you treat your marketing department like a small business or agency consulting to the rest of the business they may start to ‘own’ the process and drive profitability. Getting an objective, outside assessment of your opportunity can’t be ignored as a key business growth strategy.
Questions to ask yourself:
2. You are looking for someone to hold accountable
The old process of treating the agency team as a supplier to jump at your every whim is an outdated way of behaving and thinking, and when you bring these resources in-house it is even less appropriate. When you are managing the process in-house you take responsibility. Rather than looking for blame it is much more effective to look for how to bring the team together and own the process with you - whether full time or a mix of full time with part time or freelancers. This can be inflamed particularly by the HR and sales teams who behave as if marketing is the enemy, and vice versa.
A conversation that is still difficult to muster in my work as a facilitator of in-house projects is how the brands can effectively have the resources and team they need to meet their objectives and changing business needs. How can you own the process completely, rather than looking for someone else to pass off responsibility to and expecting the full service old way of working, pandering to their requests like an agency might?
When you OWN the process truly, there lies the opportunity to further capture the profitability and the efficiencies that come with that instead of pushing off the responsibilities. If you want a no touch model, then you are not suited to enabling in-house services and also the opportunity to reap the benefits that come with that on the flip side.
3. Your IP is your responsibility
There are extremes that take place here - either absolutely no control or effective management of assets and working files in a chaotic process, or total reliance on an agency with a retainer agreement in order to answer your never-ending requests for content to be sent to different stakeholders and to absorb storage costs in a hands-free process without thinking about it or the costs to service those requests.
When you become the in-house service you have opportunity to have total control over all your own assets and use effective technology to help maintain that control and approval processes during development and production too. Not only the storage of the assets but the related royalties, licensing and rights information including costs.
Having seen the client side feeling beholden to their agency as the owner of their IP so often, I can’t help but gasp at the misunderstood role an agency plays here. To see a client fearful of upsetting the agency because they hold the IP seems ludicrous to me. Time to take control and remove the smoke and mirrors that come with the process too.
4. Don’t mimic the agency outside the agency
One of the downsides of working with a traditional ad agency is the set workflow process for mass produced work which requires siloed departments and multiple levels of authority and multiple touch points within each team. Work in the account management department can touch three or four levels, and in creative and strategy it could be the same. Likewise sideways to the operational side of the business like production, creative services and tech or distribution teams. Given the agency model is all about the head hours and time sheets there is no incentive to change the process to be more efficient either by resourcing with multi-talented individuals, pulling a pod of specialised talent together to service just your business with your individual business needs in mind or to change the type of work you do so that it sits outside the traditional agency as well.
If you want the traditional agency service and same way of doing things then you’ll be happy with the agency you have, most likely. When you move to in-house you need to stop those old behaviours of looking for someone to offload your expectations to and take control of the team and resource the way you actually need. If you get into that same habit you’ll just re-create an inefficient team in-house and then wear the costs that come with that and you’ll find you have a department that is no longer offering the value which is possible for you.
This means you also need to own your own approval process and the impact on costs and time to the process too.
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5. Use the best talent for the right jobs
In my past survey of Marketing Directors and CMO’s it was evident that the number one complaint about ad agencies was the lack of category experience and business knowledge within agencies. Not only is that a symptom of the fact that agencies are moving to inexperienced and cheaper talent (including those few who secretly resource offshore to unskilled sweatshops, or slave trading on the dark web) to maximise the profit per billable hour, it is also an issue of the cumbersome workflows within those agencies that ends up pushing the best talent outside the agency and layer unnecessary time sheet charges to the process.
The agency also will push their in-house talent as a priority even if they are not the right talent to deliver the job purely to maximise their internal utilisation statistics.
There is a HUGE diversity discussion to be had here with many (can I even project it may be most) agencies failing badly in diversity and inclusion and despite best intentions can’t deliver on it and don’t know how to move intention into action.
As an in-house department you risk the same mistake unless you establish the structure of the team to allow for injections of specialised skills at the right time and have an inclusive talent base that is more aligned with the true customer out there.
6. Freelancers are not just an invisible hourly or daily resource
Agencies are set up for their own teams to dominate the workflow and when things get busy they bring in freelance talent in the back to support the core team. Freelancers in agencies tend to be hired on an hourly, daily, weekly or even for the term of a pitch or project but once that’s over they are gone forever. So is the continuity on the brand and the skills they bring to the project too. Don’t fall into this trap yourself.
Not all freelancers are a commodity like this and as an in-house team you are more likely to be able to access committed, ongoing teams who are there to support you for specialised work or overflow until the demand is big enough to bring that freelancer as a transitional role or another employee in-house. Not only that you are likely to find better talent with category and specialised skills (see the survey here on that).
7. Technology is your friend; own it
Using technology is not a new concept and you’ll no doubt see tools like Trello, Bootcamp or other project management tech to keep track of workflow and approvals. Having road tested most of them and worked collaboratively on a lot of them I can vouch for the fact that the technology chosen can really enhance or limit the opportunities for the in-house profitability and efficiencies.
Having a system that doesn’t give you a total job view in one view of all the key steps and status, and an overview of all the jobs in a linear fashion that replicates the traditional agency ‘Work in Progress’ document and doesn’t have approvals inbuilt into the system you won’t have the efficiencies you need. Sorry - that excludes Trello and Slack which are too chaotic, separated and non-linear with the key information hidden in unpredictable and closed windows and where the assets are separate too. They’re Ok to chat or to track tasks but with poor oversight for the whole ‘studio’ which as an in-house service you need to know what is going on and where the blocks are at a glance. Without promoting other technologies without scoping the need here, I’ll be so bold as to say those platforms mentioned are good for some things but not the whole game and there are better options.
What the real opportunity for the in-house team is to OWN those platforms and the information and uploaded content for full visibility and transparency - and on an ongoing basis. You can always track back and follow the workflow to be sure you have the right assets and answer any issues long past the project archive if you own them. If you leave this to the project team or the agency then you lose this control and rely on costly time to get basic information available. Who owns the data owns the project!
8. Past sales data is not your compass for potential growth
Ask many businesses who their customer is and they’ll dig out sales data and passionately and unwaveringly lean on that as their customer (yes, that means past shopper data and media audiences!) This is a complex story, but in a nutshell if your sales data has been collected with biased insights, biased creative, biased media and is continually perpetuating this on auto-pilot you are likely missing out on who the potential audience might be. With some innovation and market research that proves who your future customer is it opens up new opportunity. This is not just an in-house opportunity of course, but because the customer strategy often lives inside the client/brand business it is the start of the journey and also the cause of ineffective agency content creation and marketing strategies. This is one to address regardless if you move in-house or not! Having been through a research project in the past on agency strategy process it was evident that most insights didn’t make it past the strategy department and make it though the creative process at all despite the costs injected into strategy and insights. Crazy. This is such an easy and quick win to begin with right here.
9. Have someone run your in-house team who knows how to run it
Commonly we might see a Senior Creative Director appointed to in-house teams and to work with an existing framework of in-housers but there are often huge gaps in capability that not only cause frustration and conflict for the senior creative to do their job effectively, but also to be able to deliver on big ideas and get them outside the building for growth. The senior creative is not the whole game. If the internal team doesn’t have what is needed there will need to be a plan for seasonal and tactical support, migration from freelance to part time or a full time acquisition strategy. Typical freelance rosters and recruiters are not equipped to do this whole business planning and merely there to respond with suggestions for possible talent as requested in a reactive way. Creative directors are not project managers, traffic managers, studio managers, or creative services managers and some fall foul of wanting to resource the way they always did before in big agencies if you’re not careful too.
10. Rotate talent for growth and fresh eyes
Whilst it is easy to fall into a routine and have the same talent doing the same things over and over because that feels ‘easy’, you can limit potential growth and fresh ideas. Keeping certain roles open for fresh strategic input, big ideas or objective input from time to time keeps the business focused on growth and also gives new energy to the existing core team too.
There is so much to say on this topic of in-housing, but hopefully that’s a fresh perspective to help either to transition, optimise or even stay where you are.
If you are one of the many that don’t know what you don’t know, it is worth a chat with an expert to develop a strategy for moving in-house either at a certain single point in time, or to evolve and move slowly, but surely. It all starts by considering where the business wants to be at a certain point in time and align with business goals. Working with an external point of view will open up possibility that you may not currently see - in profitability at least, but let’s not also forget this includes the possibility to grow using more diversity and inclusion in this process too and remove the bad habits that are either limiting growth or harming your customers (knowingly or unknowingly) in the current agency system.
Anne Miles is founder of Suits&Sneakers and is an expert in setting up in-house services, creating new income streams, business optimisation and with a speciality in removing harmful stereotypes in the process for business gain, individual empowerment and societal impact. Feel free to call for a no-pressure chat to see if something is possible for you to take control of your marketing.
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