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.

That 78% of businesses have taken their marketing efforts in-house doesn’t mean it’s time to shutter up the windows and work by one’s lonesome. The latest trend in advertising is set to change the way businesses work and collaborate creatively.

The IHAF SHIFT Conference recently brought internal agencies together to celebrate their victories and discuss the biggest challenges they faced in the past year. The organization is dedicated to supporting in-house agencies through content, tools, and networking opportunities, and its roster includes members like Bloomberg, McDonald’s, Verizon and more.

Rather than rely solely on external agencies to conceptualize and deliver marketing materials and campaigns, these businesses have taken those responsibilities back within the organization. It sometimes feels like everyone is going in-house: according to an Association of National Advertisers report, 78% of polled businesses said they had some operations in-house. In addition to that, 90% of respondents with in-house operations said they saw an increase in in-house workload over the past year. There are many reasons why a business might take their marketing and media production internal, though every brand wants something different: lowered costs, faster turnaround times or to simply increase their marketing expertise.

In-house agencies aren’t just growing in numbers, though. They’re also growing in size, which means many find themselves tied to business-level results that were previously outside of their scope. This means cross-organization collaboration is more important now than ever: in this unprecedented territory of marketing, there’s safety in numbers.

Finding the Need with All Stakeholders

According to Teresa Herd, VP and Global Creative Director at Intel, many in-house agencies face several challenges from the inside. The problem isn’t just competition against other companies or external agencies, but rather the culture, strategy and infrastructure of the agencies themselves.

One of the biggest issues Herd says many in-house agencies grapple with? “I spoke to VPs of marketing at a large company who said they now have to pitch for every project they do,” she wrote over at AdAge. The problem, she mentioned at the conference, is that good chemistry between internal creative teams and the C-suite is essential for success. She attributes the achievements of Agency Inside, Intel’s own creative team, to its leadership’s willingness to take the time to define the business needs, then building the agency to support those specifically. The alternative is to go internal simply to save money or time without exploring what, exactly, the internal team will do and why.

In addition to understanding what the business needs, you must take a hard look at what it can do. What tasks are you equipped to accomplish? Agency Inside is a best-case scenario for an internal agency because it’s closely tied to Intel’s business strategy. But aligning with business goals doesn’t need to mean wearing all the hats in a project; while in-house agencies can own the creative concept and strategy, external agencies or production partners are available to help execute them. When you notice gaps in your resources or talent base, it’s time to consider specialized external partnerships that can meet those needs and help you realize your vision.

Restructuring to Execute the Need

While Herd discussed the importance of chemistry between creative teams and C-suite, Georgetown University Faculty Director Wendy Zajack went into more detail about how to revamp a business so their departments work together like a well-oiled machine. The best way to get all the cogs turning in harmony is to share skills and techniques in response to boundary-disrupting. For example, marketing and IT teams must come together to provide a better user experience by sharing objectives—perhaps even with team overlap. This is easier said than done: how do you create such cohesion between departments?

The answer may lie in freeing data from silos. Limited in benefit when hoarded away, a freer data strategy has the potential to inform holistic business strategies that inform daily responsibilities across all departments in the company. To achieve this, businesses must first define where analytics can make the biggest impact, then prioritize use cases for that data. They might support more use cases when resources allow over time, but it’s important not to lose focus on where it’s most needed in the beginning. This process relies on team members who can “translate” this data and their uses between departments—like finding the overlaps between marketing and IT objectives mentioned above. Zajack says it’s increasingly important for organizations to use such innovative methods to “communicate in an increasingly crowded business environment.”

Collaborative Efforts Have a Huge Payoff

What does it look like when an internal agency uses their data more effectively? One example provided at the SHIFT conference was Avocados From Mexico, whose Super Bowl ad spot made in collaboration with GSD&M became one of the most talked-about campaigns of the year. While guacamole makes for a popular snack ingredient for the game, Avocados From Mexico noticed sales drop afterwards—and noted that Super Bowl ads alone aren’t that effective with loyalty or brand recall.

“The Super Bowl is an underrated opportunity,” Alvaro Luque, President of Avocados From Mexico, told the IHAF audience, perhaps turning heads. He elaborated: “If you see that as an ad, it will never pay off. But if you see this as an excuse to create a two-week campaign for the company, there’s no way you can do that and be that successful investing those dollars compared to the Super Bowl.” The sustained campaign was an effective response to slumping post-game sales. Compared to five years ago when the business had no digital marketing presence, Avocados From Mexico gained 14 billion additional brand impressions per year and increased Mexican imports by 73%.

“Here we’re seeing that the market is especially eager to create digital extensions of their campaigns,” said Louis Moncouyoux, Creative Director at the MediaMonks Mexico City office. “We’re working to educate and translate our global insights to them quickly, because campaigns are most effective when built comprehensively.”

Building such campaigns is exciting, though agencies without the self-awareness discussed by Herd or the agility championed by Zajack might struggle to pull off such a big win. This is why it’s so important for businesses to get a handle on what they and their audiences need, how prepared they are to meet it and who to turn to when filling in all the gaps. This level of chemistry between departments and partners makes all the difference between campaigns that explode with a bang versus those that just fizzle out.

See our 2018 Year In Review for IHAs.