In-house creativity

In-house” is the buzzword with global brands as they try to do away with external creative agencies and produce all or most of their content on their own.

Unilever, Red Bull, Pepsi, L’Oreal, Marriott are some of the biggest names that have of late started their in-house content and creative studios, giving them “greater control over the content produced.”

This rage has consumed brands to such an extent that a survey report by Forrester Research and the In-House Agency Forum (IHAF) states that over 64% of corporates and brands in America today have in-house agencies, compared to only 42% a decade ago.

This trend is believed to have gathered momentum due to a host of benefits which brands think they derive from “insourcing” content, the first being the ability to optimise costs.

The Forrester and IHAF report further notes that 44% of the work produced by the in-house studios is for print, while 38% is focused around digital. And a brand spending $1 million annually on digital advertising can save almost a quarter of the cost by doing away with external creative agencies, believe experts.

“Factoring in the economies of scale to amortise fixed costs and overheads, I would put the savings at around 20-30%. But that won’t happen in year one, perhaps even in year two, and will only happen if the content is being produced at scale,” says Roopak Saluja, founder and CEO, The 120 Media Collective.

In the recent past, Unilever claimed to have saved about 30% on agency fees after taking its creative work in-house.

The rise in programmatic advertising, which relies on algorithms to purchase and sell ads real time, is said to be another key reason for brands to insource creative content. Globally, programmatic ad spends are predicted to reach $210 billion by 2020, as per industry data, making it a key component of the advertising sector. A study from Infectious Media notes that today 71% of advertisers think external agencies struggle to adapt themselves to programmatic buying.

Thirdly, insourcing of content allows brands to track consumer behaviours and buying patterns real-time and effectively leverage this data in building newer creative ideas, say experts. “In-house creative teams churn out faster and more agile content,” believes Rohit Raj, creative chief and co-founder, The Glitch. “So instead of doing 10 pieces of content in a year, a brand ends up doing 200. In today’s economy of zero second creatives, this scale can help deliver better results than placing all bets on a few creatives only.”

However, the drawbacks of insourcing seem to equal the number of advantages.

Monotony and lack of exposure appear to be the biggest disadvantage of in-house creative teams. Anushree Pacheriwal, co-founder and creative navigator of creative and digital marketing agency Gemius, says when it comes to creative concepts, wider exposure to different brands is required. “In-house creative agencies have proven to lack that bandwidth and have a missing link. In-house studios have limited exposure since they work on only one brand and can have a thought-process which can get monotonous.”

Experts say an infamous example of in-house creativity having gone awry is Pepsi’s 2017 Kendall Jenner Black Lives Matter ad, which was severely mocked for being “tone deaf” and ultimately pulled down. “In-house teams are a part of a certain brand culture; the same culture into which they walk day in and day out and get surrounded by the politics, hierarchies and job-related worries. There is no fresh thought that they apply, as new content needs fresh minds and this can result in creative fatigue,” said an expert.

According to Raj, brands should take a judgement call about what to internalise and what needs expert eyes. “Setting up a content production setup internally is an option. But the real magic happens when a strong creative is attached to the setup. Churning out creative requires a smart human interface.”

Saluja says insourcing can make sense when the ability and propensity to spend on content is either extremely low or extremely high. “For the vast majority of brands who occupy the in-between, agency and publisher partnerships are the sensible way to go. A brand/advertiser could conceivably produce content in-house and lean on media agencies or other specialised partners for distribution and audience developments.”