Why don’t brands make their own advertising?

It seems like a crazy question, but is it? What’s stopping a brand manager from doing creative themselves? Canva ’s user base has been growing 35% year-on-year, and even Adobe is getting easier to use because of its built-in AI. There’s no question more brands are doing creative themselves. So, surely we should be teaching brands to use these platforms and equip them with creative support and tutorials instead of making everything for them? Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime - right? Wrong. Here’s why —?

As I write this, I know how to fish; I was taught as a kid. If I needed to catch a fish, I would, no problem. At the same time, the piece of hake in my fridge that I’ll be frying up tonight was not caught by my fishing prowess; no, it was caught by my going-to-the-grocery-store-prowess. I’d like to update that famous adage to the modern day: Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll go to the grocery store. The most valuable thing in the modern world is convenience. Look at delivery apps; despite everyone in the service chain being ripped off, these apps do tremendously well purely because it’s more convenient to press a button and get something than to go out and get it yourself.

But hold up, what about inhousing? Aren’t these brands making work themselves? Take OLIVER Agency ; they essentially invented inhousing and made it what it is today. The idea is that the Oliver team is part of your brand team - one and the same, an extension. But on the ground, there is a clear difference between who is brand and who is agency. Oliver’s real innovation was just removing some of the Mad Men advertising agency inefficiencies that make advertising needlessly expensive. So, while the inhouse agency is more effective than a legacy agency, it is by no means the brand doing things for themselves.??

There is a point we’re missing here. Who is the brand, and what is their budget? There is a large sector of the market who are solopreneurs with zero budget to run their business, let alone pay for marketing. Because they have no budget, these small businesses will forego convenience for survival. These people NEED to be able to make creative themselves, just like there are people who live pastoral lives who need to catch a fish everyday. Do these companies need to be serviced? Yes. Is there a business there? No. Leave the Canva tutorials to the YouTubers.

There’s a catch (pun intended). Convenience is a loaded word. There are loads of examples (and even public video case studies) of brands with budgets who turn to companies like Design Pickle or Penji because their model is so convenient. However, the quality of work and the experience are so bad that the brands spend way too much time worrying about their creative. And soon, working with these companies becomes inconvenient. To be fair to Design Pickle and Penji, their negative reviews are often from clients who expected more out of what the model promises. These businesses are not set up for strategic and creative work. But what about the brands?

That’s why Stratia exists. Brands with budgets need strategic insight. They need people who can bring things to life, and they need everything in one convenient package. So, at Stratia, we take a strategy-first creative approach to everything we do. Brands that make creative with us have such a pleasant experience that it seems like they did it themselves.