Digital transformation isn’t the only process that has accelerated in recent months: so has in-housing. Gradually becoming more popular over the past few years, the trend has suddenly become table stakes for some brands amidst production challenges.

“Whatever creative that you need to develop has come, in a great part, from in-house capabilities,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice told Campaign in an interview about marketing challenges during the pandemic. “So, I think it’s actually been a boom to be able to lean on that infrastructure that has, in many cases, developed quite significantly over the course of time.”

That’s great for brands that have built up in-house capabilities over the past few years—but for those that have relied heavily on external agency partners until now, how can they adapt to continue serving their audiences? “In-house teams will do more of the work that companies would have previously sent to agencies, but that doesn’t mean the internal agency is ready themselves,” says Warren Chase, COO of Firewood, which merged with MediaMonks last year.

The true measure of who will not only survive but thrive in the coming months are brands that are prepared to digitally transform, he says. Simply seeking short-term gains that don’t provide longstanding value won’t cut it. “You have to adapt to the mindset of how to become productive when you can’t have your creative team around you,” says Chase. “But people will adapt—they’ve been forced to catch up.”

Strategic Alignment is Key to Long-Term Success

As many brands embark on their in-housing journey for the first time—or seek to adapt new skillsets and ways of working within an existing in-house team—collaboration and alignment is critical to long-term success. “It’s not just about the marketing department,” says Marco Iannucci, Senior Director of Strategy at Firewood. “What is the CMO’s relationship with the CTO, CIO, CSO and the rest of the C-suite? More than ever, the CMO must be a true partner with the rest of them—and if not, everything fails.”

This heightened need to align marketing’s efforts throughout the organization reflects the nature of marketing today. “Intertwining of marketing and technology is inevitable,” writes Thomas Husson, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, in a recent report. “As the designer and orchestrator of personalized customer experiences, the CMO must increasingly leverage big data, real-time analytics, and a host of technology platforms.”

This means strategic success relies on solving the CMO-CIO paradox, ensuring that tooling and workflows enable collaboration throughout the organization. Iannucci notes that dashboards and new tools have made it easier than ever for teams to take specific capabilities in house, but “everyone loves their specific tools, and whenever something isn’t working, they say, ‘If we only had these tools, I could do my thing.’ But then you end up with tools that aren’t syncing up or talking to one another, making it hard to see things big-picture.”

Prioritize, But Be Open to Shifting Gears

In establishing an in-housing strategy, brands must be committed for the long term. Chase balks at the idea that things will ever go back to normal as we knew it. “We have to create the next normal, and that requires feeling comfortable with being uncomfortable, and recognizing all the opportunities to do things differently right now.”

He notes that this idea of adapting to discomfort or inconvenience is something that external agencies are already used to managing, though in-housing brands can achieve stability by ensuring their priorities are clear and in order. Consider the primary motivators that drive the in-housing trend: cost savings, faster speed to market and consistency over the brand narrative. Brands must carefully prioritize which is most important to them and instill a sense of purpose in the existence of their in-house team.

While that might look different for everyone, Chase advises that enabling faster speed to market should be a top concern for most brands, as it puts a strategy in place to quickly come up with solutions to new, unprecedented challenges. As shifts in the digital and economic landscape continue to reverberate, brands must be ready to act. “When you have clarity on your priorities and need to put one in front of the other, right now it’s time to act quicker, adjust and pivot, and that’s where being in-house gives you an upper hand.”

Embrace the People Factor

Acquiring and energizing creative talent has historically been a challenge for in-house agencies—a challenge that may feel compounded when the need for new skillsets emerge and budgets tighten. This presents a new challenge to in-house teams: how do you keep teams inspired and build space for innovation?

“Bring in the people that know how to do this well, that have gone through this and can speak that language,” says Chase. “We all know we have to accelerate, but the big question is: how? Bring in the folks that are comfortable with that ambiguity.”

In discussing the embedded team model that Firewood is known for, Chase notes, “Across the board our culture is fundamental in making things work. We are zooming along again because our focus is on, ‘How can I help you do better for our client?’ And that attitude really spills over beyond our internal team and permeates into our client culture as well.” Despite the talk of upskilling tech, strategic alignment and agility, don’t overlook instilling a purpose-driven creative culture—a critical factor in long-term in-house success.

From new ways of working come new ways to engage.

Social distancing has radically transformed the way we live and work, forcing teams to collaborate with one another remotely and requiring brands engage with digital audiences in new ways. Despite this unprecedented moment of change, one thing remains constant: customers’ desire for connection, entertainment and content. How can in-house agencies keep up?

Meeting these needs will test the strategies and models driving brands’ in-house agencies. While IHA’s are known for their proximity to the client, cost efficiencies and speed of delivery, they must adapt in navigating the “new normal” we’ve all found ourselves in. Below offers some tips on where to focus your efforts in continuing to meet your audience’s needs without sacrificing quality and efficiency.

Double Down on Customer Obsession

Brand experiences thrive on inspiring an emotional connection by bringing people together and meeting customers’ needs where and when it matters most. With this, in-house agencies have a big advantage: they know the brand better than anyone else, often serving as a conduit between decision-makers and consumers. By aligning an understanding of customers’ needs and the brand’s purpose, in-house agencies are ideally positioned to recognize the new needs of their audience and enhance the customer experience.

“The first thing that brands are faced with is to go back and look at their brand purpose,” says Warren Chase, Chief Operating Officer of Firewood Marketing, which merged with MediaMonks late last year. “How are they anchored in that purpose and keeping their customers interested and engaged?”

At this time, having a clear dedication to purpose means recognizing how customers have been impacted by COVID-19—whether it’s a need for entertainment, managing stressors in their lives, a drive for connection or something else. “How can brands empathize with customers?” asks Chase. “Just be honest, transparent and open. Once you have that openness and transparency, people understand.” And that sentiment isn’t limited to customers alone; Chase mentioned how Uber, just as COVID-19 began spreading significantly in the United States, notified users of proactive steps the brand was taking to protect their drivers.

Next, consider how well set-up your in-house team is at acting fast in response to shifting customer needs. The mass push to staying at home might be only the first big change we see this year; as consumers come together through new ways of interacting and engaging, brands and their internal agencies must keep on their toes to realize opportunities for connection.

“All brands operate differently and say they involve the agency at different stages—some further upstream, some further down. When you’re in house, there’s proximity to leadership, to insights and data, and to decision-makers,” says Chase. “You get alignment super-fast when new needs or opportunities arise.”

Working From Home Doesn’t Sacrifice Quality

Having a brand strategy and to recognize opportunity is one thing, but how do you continue producing content when your in-house team is literally working at their houses? Production at home is still doable; even if mobility and personnel are seriously limited, you can still strategize around offering impactful content with just a single room, a single actor and a smart media plan.

This is an excellent opportunity for your team to heighten its creative efficiency through a fit-for-format approach to producing content. One of the simplest ways to do so is by refreshing or optimizing existing content in a way that quickly results in relevant assets at scale. We’ve taken a similar approach in transforming a handful of existing assets into a social awareness campaign that grew more effective week after week, using performance metrics to continually optimize and drill deeper into audience segments.

This same method could be incredibly useful for brands who must reassess a content strategy, optimizing it to better reach consumers at home via digital channels. When high-quality stock video is added to the mix, you can keep your creative content current by translating the brand narrative to different contexts with the footage available. And through fast, scalable digital animation techniques, you can continue producing fresh, new content without missing a beat.

Proactively Build Digital Maturity

While digital transformation has been slow and incremental over several years, brands have only begun to recognize the imperative to elevate the need for creative, differentiated digital experiences due to COVID-19’s rapid spread around the world. But for in-house teams lacking the digital maturity and skillset required to make such a rapid change, brands can fill in capabilities gaps through partnerships.

Marketing Dive notes that filling these skill gaps can be challenging amidst hiring freezes and cost-cutting in response to the pandemic. “My belief is that marketers and companies will not look to take on full-time employees in lieu of [third-party services providers] during the downturn, the reason being that there is a tremendous amount of costs with doing so,” Forrester Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall told the publication. “Companies will likely want to outsource those to the extent that they can, because in the long-run, that’s a more cost-effective way to deal with it than making significant investments in employee infrastructure.”

This is the time for brands to act boldly, with a need to reach customers like never before. Whether adapting production efficiencies or finding new ways to reach customers within a shifting digital landscape, there are many options available for in-house agencies to better respond to audience needs through customer obsession. Thankfully, in-house agencies are well-equipped to adapt, and despite these rapid changes one thing should remain: a dedication to solving consumers’ needs through creative expertise, a clear sense of purpose and unparalleled brand knowledge.

It’s time for IHA’s to reassess strategies and reactivate customer obsession.

A common challenge that in-house agencies (IHAs) have always faced is difficulty in training and hiring the talent they need to pull off excellent creative. Unfortunately, this strain doesn’t seem to be going away. According to a survey by the ANA, 44% of US IHAs cite attracting top-tier talent as a primary creative content concern. And it’s not just about merely acquiring talent: an even bigger challenge they face lies in keeping their talent energized.

It’s no surprise, then, that so many external partnerships for IHAs revolve around two key capabilities: executing ideas in new and interesting ways, or offering access to specialized skillsets. Both are key in today’s digital landscape, which is defined as an age of hyperadoption, in which users adopt and drop new behaviors at an unprecedented rate. In addition to all of the channels that are cropping up, you don’t even know which will stick around a few years down the line.

As brands gauge the next big channels they’ll use to connect with consumers, they must adopt new digital skillsets in lockstep. But given the talent concerns mentioned above, how can IHAs keep up with these shifting user behaviors? The answer lies in new breeds of partnership that give IHAs the skills and tools they need to fulfill the brand promise in ways that not only stand out and “wow” consumers, but make sense to them.

Stand Out by Innovating Strategically

In his talk at the IHAF Conference this week, which brings together and celebrates hundreds of in-house agency professionals, Forrester analyst Jay Pattisall discussed the importance of creative differentiation. Most digital experiences look and feel the same, opening an opportunity for brands to stand out through best-in-class creative. Fitting well within the conference’s theme of “Futureproof,” Pattisall set his focus on recent shifts in the creative landscape, and where IHAs fit within it.

IHAs have thrived thanks in part to their unrivalled brand knowledge; they understand the purpose, intricacies and nuances of their brand. As Darren Abbott, SVP, Creative at Hallmark said while noting the power of IHAs to their brands: “We’re not part of Hallmark, we make it Hallmark.”

Yet executing their vision in an environment that encompasses so many emerging channels can be tough. New partnership models that aim to augment in-house teams’ understanding of technology, or that push them to think in new ways, can aid in both forecasting future opportunities and identifying the best channels available today for bringing the brand experience to life.

If you’re intrigued by some of today’s emergent technology, consider putting it through what MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar calls the “trend lens.” Discussed in his skill session at the IHAF Conference, “Extending Beyond the Horizon,” ter Haar described the trend lens as a strategy through which you can gauge the maturity of emerging tech as it rises up—or drops off from—the hype curve. It’s how we help brands arrive at solutions that best fit their capabilities and needs.

Let Your Brand Story Drive Tech Investment

The assessment specifically measures how a technology or platform meets user behavior (what consumers are doing with it) and distribution (how widely it’s adopted). VR, for example, isn’t distributed among consumers as well as AR is; this makes the former more ideal for installations and trade shows, while the latter serves as a popular way for consumers to simultaneously connect with brands and communicate with friends on mobile.

The trend lens works because it asks brands to really consider how their audience naturally behaves on a given channel. But brands must ensure that the creative idea is aligned with a clear business goal. At MediaMonks, for example, we don’t strive to sell brands on whatever the hot, novel technology of the day is. Instead, we experiment to push technology to its limit ourselves, then pay those learnings forward to help brands approach emerging tech strategically and tell their stories the best way they can.

Again, an IHA’s strength stems from its passion and knowledge of the brand. External partnerships that challenge their approach to creative and assess new opportunities granted by emerging tech are essential for futureproofing and connecting with consumers as the digital landscape continues to evolve.