This week, New York welcomed not only foreign leaders and dignitaries at the United Nations headquarters—the city also embraced some of the best and brightest in the world of advertising, marketing and technology. Yes, Advertising Week New York—one of six Advertising Week events held around the world—came to offer thought leadership, workshops and more with 1,216 speakers and over 290 different events.

There was much to ponder and celebrate throughout the week. At the Clio Awards, eight awards were distributed among three projects that we contributed to: the Uncensored Playlist, Mind the Gap and the geolocation-based revamp of the “Runaway Train” music video. We also made placement on Adweek’s 100 Fastest Growing Agencies list, and our VP of Marketing Kate Richling was shortlisted for Advertising Week’s Future is Female platform.

But that’s enough patting ourselves on the back. What were the brands up to in all the fray? Our recap explores three big topics from one of the biggest weeks in advertising—namely what’s driving the in-housing trend, how brands are working creatively with data and the new collaborative partnerships that are helping brands respond to both those opportunities.

Getting Closer to Consumers through In-Housing

One thing that’s become undoubtedly clear across the course of the week is that brands are seeking ways to take back control. For many, this has manifest in a trend to take their creative and media capabilities in-house. Often attributed to goals like lowering cost or time to market, there are in fact many reasons why brands feel they can do creative better on their own terms and turf, as explored at the Brand Innovators summit, which coincided with Advertising Week.

A major goal behind the in-housing trend is a need to get closer to the consumer. As traditional brands grow with widening product lines and more channels to communicate through, they risk losing coherence or consistency within the brand-consumer relationship.

At a panel on in-housing, Spencer Gordon of Anheuser-Busch discussed how going in-house ensured that a dedicated team in the brand would always be thinking about creative. This enabled them to pursue consumers with greater relevance and brand understanding. But Gordon noted that the initiative achieved big results by first starting small; with four employees focused on providing social assets solely for the Michelob Ultra product, the team has since scaled to 63 members that deliver for all of AB InBev’s brands.

In the same panel, Ryan Riess, Director of Social Strategy and Content at the Hershey Company, similarly discussed how supporting such a large variety of brands (15 of them!) drove them to become more consumer-centric. Hershey felt they could do creative better on their own—particularly in creating platform-specific content that would better connect with their customers. That’s a very specific way that brands can better drive relevance by maintaining an always-on relationship with their consumers, requiring brands to have a clear idea not only of themselves, but their consumers as well.

Purposeful Use of Data for Empathy and Impact

How brands can gain that understanding of the consumer was another major topic of discussion throughout the week. But businesses have come up with interesting ways to accomplish this; a notable example is Target’s internal media company Roundel. In the Advertising Week panel “Climbing Over Walls: Real People Data in an Automated World,” Roundel’s VP Dave Peterson noted: “The data is extremely important, but it’s as much on the human side as it is on the data. We call it the IQ side for data and the EQ for the human side of things.”

This purposeful interplay between both the technical and emotional sides of data provides Roundel with learnings they can use to strengthen the relationship between the retailer, their customers and the CPG partners whose products line the shelves. “Going back to our enterprise view at Target about putting our guests at the center of everything we do, our goal really is to enhance the shopping experience,” Peterson said. “Media works best when it’s in everyone’s benefit.”

And that’s a point that resonates well with MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar, who gave a keynote address at the Brand Innovators event on Tuesday afternoon. Exploring the challenge between what he calls “personalized pleasure versus personalized panic”—that delicate balance between consumers’ desire for relevance and concern for privacy—he honed in on the need for empathy to become a driving force in everything you do. “We can never stop prioritizing empathy,” he said. “Empathy and engineering must work hand-in-hand in the future.”

Closing the Creative and Data Divide

While Roundel is an interesting example of bridging together the intelligent and emotional quotients in data, they’re not alone: several brands noted the need for marketing and IT to come together to deliver unforgettable customer experiences that build brand love. On the panel “Rethinking TV: Driving Growth, Relationships and Experience Through Data,” Sir Martin Sorrell joined GM’s Global CMO Deborah Wahl, where the two examined how brands must look beyond the typical TVC approach for more scalable, personal and relevant creative.

Wahl gave her brand’s perspective on how impact and effectiveness are table stakes today, and how she works closely with data to achieve it. “We have a chief data officer at GM. We spend a lot of time together, really understanding: ‘What are you learning, what are the insights, how are we going after it?’” she said. “That helps you form better creative briefs so you get a big idea, and then really make sure we can execute that across different channels.”

It sounds like GM has a good rhythm going, but for many brands, closing that IT and creative gap can feel like a struggle. Showing teamwork in action, the S4 family—Sir Martin, ter Haar and Emily Del Greco (President of the Americas, MightyHive)—came together the following day to join Joana Coles (Founder and CCO, Boudica) in a panel discussion about the S4 Capital model and its place within the future of advertising. Coles set the scene for discussion: if you’re not a holding company, she asked, “What the hell are you then?”

The trio’s responses became a multi-faceted examination of collaboration and partnership. Sir Martin drew a line between how S4 operates versus holding companies that impose constraints around the businesses they contain. Instead, he suggested, S4 took inspiration from tech companies who are disruptive by nature. Ter Haar added: “With traditional work, there’s a conservatism that you can’t marry data with being creative.” It’s precisely that challenge that brands are grappling with now, driving that need for control examined above.

Del Greco noted how aligning data and creative so closely together enables brands to take more risks with confidence. “MediaMonks is about taking the risk, and MightyHive comes quickly with feedback [backed by data],” she said. As iteration and agility have become key to success in today’s always-on environment, this ability to experiment and take learnings will become crucial for future-focused brands.

As Advertising Week draws to a close, we’re energized by the creative wins that brands have have been able to share. Looking at the next year into the future, it will be interesting to see how the landscape further evolves—and how new partnerships will enable brands to achieve a more customer-led focus by closing the gap between data and creative.

The growing trend in brands taking their content production in-house has prompted both agency partners and their clients to do some soul-searching. Growing at what feels like an exponential rate—78% of ANA member organizations have taken work in-house, according to an ANA webinar on agency partnerships—some have said that the trend is just a fad.

But is it? Not likely. Half of ANA member organizations work with an agency of record, according to the same webinar above, but only 14% are satisfied with the model. Experimenting with in-housing has the promise of releasing brands from frustrations they may feel with juggling several different partnerships and vendors, though their malleability—every brand’s IHA operates differently, after all—can make it tough to understand which setup works best.

With each organization taking a different approach to in-housing, what are the shared benefits to the trend, and where do traditional agencies fit within them? Tackling both these questions together will help brands ensure their IHA is equipped to support their unique needs.

Why Everyone is Going In-House

There are numerous factors that encourage brands to work in-house. A major one is the need to produce content faster; the proliferation of social channels and their always-on nature requires a constant stream of content for brands to retain relevance. The idea is that in-house agencies offer greater proximity to decision-makers in the organization and can therefore produce content at a greater speed than an external agency relying on briefs and back-and-forth feedback. Though whether an IHA achieves this is dependent on how well aligned and integrated it is with its organization’s business needs, and whether it has the talent or workflows in place to support rapid content production at scale—more on that below.

What IHAs do offer over the traditional agency model is extensive brand knowledge. Though this is a double-edged sword; wholly focused on the brand, in-house agencies often lack the broad experience that a traditional agency offers, which in turn can inhibit creativity. IHAs can enjoy the best of both worlds by tapping into new agency models that provide dedicated teams armed with broad, extensive creative experience.

And one can’t forget that in-house agencies can also save their organizations a significant amount of money. One of the key offerings of our sister company, MightyHive, is to help brands save by taking their media and programmatic in-house. The move not only saves them money, but offers transparency into a previously esoteric practice. As brands embark on taking on these new capabilities, partnerships will remain essential.

A Key Challenge for IHAs: Talent

Despite the benefits to in-housing outlined above, key challenges still remain for IHAs, especially those driven by a need for increased output of digital content. A shift to digital requires organizations to bolster their teams with new skillsets, and IHAs designed to support a growing need for digital content are likely to feel challenged in hiring and retaining this talent. Unilever CEO Alan Jope said as much in the Campaign article linked above: “It turns out that when you’re shifting directly and aggressively into digital, the constraint is not money in the [brand and marketing investment] line, it’s people to run the digital campaigns.”

This skillset gap is where in-house teams will continue to benefit from working with external partnerships, often organized into specific skill rosters. We have worked a lot alongside sportswear brand Adidas in platforms and digital activations, perhaps most notably with the brand’s Run for the Oceans initiative in collaboration with Parley.

The global run united nearly a million runners from around the world to raise money for educational programs benefiting those in coastal communities affected by plastic pollution. We lent our technical and creative expertise to build a web platform that pulled running data from partner apps like Joyrun and Runtastic, which we translated into a hypnotic WebGL visualization that grew and changed based on the number of participants and distance run over the course of the event.

The platform is unique for visualizing the initiative’s theme of unity—but not every experience requires a best-in-class WebGL experience, nor does every brand need to hire a WebGL developer. In this case, the technology fit the goal of the campaign very well—and by reaching out to a partner, Adidas was able to meet that one-off need with ease.

Brands Still Draw on Agency Knowledge & Experience

And while an IHA’s dedication to its brand is certainly a unique benefit, this often means sacrificing the breadth of experience provided by an agency or production partner, which can make it more difficult to support new technologies and formats. Unilever is no stranger to tapping partnerships to augment the creative capabilities of its in-house teams. For their Magnum sub-brand, we put together a Snapchat game that’s almost as addicting as the ice-cream bars themselves. We also produced a series of educational Facebook AR Camera Effects for Unilever’s Signal toothpaste brand, which teaches children healthy toothbrushing habits.

MediaMonks is a preferred partner for both Snap and Facebook platforms. The Signal Camera Effect was one of the first educational AR effects on Facebook Messenger, demonstrating the kind of innovations that IHAs can achieve by tapping into partners with a comprehensive understanding and experience in current and emerging digital platforms.

So, are Agencies Obsolete? Not with New Partner Models

As you might imagine from the shared challenges held by IHAs detailed above, agencies aren’t obsolete in the trend to go in-house. Rather, they must evolve their offerings into hybrid models that help “fill in the gaps” in their clients’ in-house capabilities. But there’s no simple answer to this; IHAs will each have different ways of integrating within their organizations, and might focus on different capabilities in the creative, production or media-buying processes. This is where partnerships can truly shine by offering more consultative services—like helping brands align their goals across the organization or achieve more agile workflows.

Partnerships can also solve the critical challenge of scalability. Resources are often tight within IHAs—but work is abundant. We saw this need in some of our clients, resulting in a partially in-house model that effectively allows clients to view us as extensions of their own teams, and dedicated content studios that make them achieve greater global and local relevance, like the one we made for Avon.

Given brands’ dissatisfaction with the traditional agency model, it’s clear that the shift in-house probably isn’t going away. In fact, it may just be the first step in an ongoing evolution in how agencies and clients can work with one another within a fast-changing digital environment.