Building an internal creative agency: What brands need to get right

More brands are investing in building their own creative and marketing capabilities. I’m a big believer in this model, having spent years building and running internal agencies. But I also think many brands are getting some of the fundamentals wrong.

The first question I’d ask any CMO is quite simple. What are you actually trying to build?

Is it an adaptation studio producing large volumes of content while your lead agency develops the big ideas? A social-first creative team? Are you bringing media into the mix? Or are you trying to do everything?

Because these are very different types of agencies. And from my experience, trying to do everything is often where things start going wrong.

Biggest needs

Brands need to identify where their biggest need sits, rather than trying to replicate an entire advertising agency internally.

I’ve recently been working with a QSR brand that has some really good internal capabilities, particularly around in-store marketing and menu creation. But where I see the bigger opportunity is in building a social-first creative capability that can identify trends, react quickly and produce content that consumers actually want to engage with.

That’s a very specific need, requiring a very different type of talent and operating model.

The second challenge, and perhaps the bigger one, is corporate culture.

How do you build a creative agency inside a large corporate without allowing it to become completely absorbed by the corporate environment?

Creative people need room to think differently, challenge briefs and move quickly. Yet we often put them into environments with multiple reporting lines, lengthy approval processes and structures that aren’t designed for creativity.

Different skills

And then we wonder why the work isn’t particularly creative.

At Hoorah, we’ve built internal agencies like Revolve for Nestlé and Junction for Alexforbes. Both have their own identities, but more importantly, they have very different scopes of work, teams, technologies and ways of operating.

We don’t have a standard agency model that we simply roll out across brands. What works for one business doesn’t necessarily work for another.

There’s also something I think gets overlooked far too often. Knowing how to market a brand and knowing how to run an agency are two very different skills.

I’ve audited numerous internal teams where the people simply don’t have the capabilities to deliver the work expected of them. Often, it’s not their fault. Someone has designed an agency structure without really understanding how agencies operate.

Experienced agency operators

Capacity management, briefing processes, resource allocation, hiring the right talent and managing creative quality are all specialised skills. Get these wrong and even a talented team will struggle.

This is why I think brands should be bringing experienced agency operators into the process of building these capabilities, rather than assuming an internal marketing department can simply take it on.

I’m convinced internal agencies will continue to grow. And rightly so. But that doesn’t mean every brand needs to do everything in-house. External agencies still have an important role to play, particularly where specialist capabilities or fresh creative thinking are required.

Perhaps the more important question for CMOs isn’t how much agency work they can bring in-house, but which capabilities genuinely belong there.

And once you’ve answered that, are you prepared to build the right environment for those people to succeed?