We were invited to join the recent Campaign Media360 panel discussion on Investing in-house – developing internal capabilities and improving collaboration with agencies.
The panel sought to find answers to the fundamental questions still surrounding marketing and media in-housing. Questions like: with agencies under more pressure than ever to deliver, can they provide the 360 view brands need or can brands step up to plug this gap themselves? Can brands use a ‘blended companies’ model to balance their internal/external capabilities? And ultimately, how do brands measure the success of in-housing--what are the right metrics to capture the long-term transformation benefits?
The panel was very strong, with media and marketing heads from four leading brands, including: Andrew Wynd, Head of Media, Just Eat; Nancy Croix, Marketing Director, Creative and Media Europe, PepsiCo; Dom Dwight, Marketing Director, Yorkshire Tea; Kepler client Caroline Harrison, Head of Digital Marketing, HSBC; and our own CEO for EMEA & APAC, Martin Kelly. The panel was chaired by Campaign's premium content editor, Nicola Merrifield.
[Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity]
Q - Should advertisers be in-housing?
Andrew - Having an in-house team is important for us because we have lots of in-house data, so we we need to be close to that data as a department.
Martin - I’d ask the question, what is in-housing? It is different things to different people. The in-housing trend is a few years old and we are most recently seeing it going in reverse. The concentration of spend going through agencies is now going up, not down. A reason for this is the media landscape complexity is increasing. But to effectively work with advertisers now, agencies need to unbundle their offer to give advertisers a model that works for them.
Q - Why do advertisers in house?
Andrew - There are hard and soft costs. In terms of hard costs, media agencies were charging too much for digital, so there was a drive to take that in-house. There was a soft cost in the distance from digital that comes from having an agency. As an advertiser, we need to get closer to this internally. But it’s difficult for brands to justify the talent development needed to facilitate that.
Caroline - For us, cost was at the forefront at the beginning. But within 12 months we saw CPAs were down. We work with Kepler, and they manage some channels end-to-end, but then act as a consultancy on our in-house channels. This is important for us; they catch us when we fall.
Andrew - How you integrate in-house and agency teams is crucial. You have to use clear briefing to connect the agency to the business.
Martin - Cost does play a part. Some in-house clients are taking a break in expanding that model because they can’t afford to scale their team. This is when agencies can give them a more flexible resource.
Q - Is there a healthy competition between agency and in-house?
Nancy - Our model is blended intentionally. We want to stimulate a level of tension between teams, we find this improves their performance.
Dom - I used to think when you have an in-house creative team you know yourself better, but you sometimes need an agency to get a new more external perspective.
Martin - I’m interested to learn if in-house teams are held to the same standard as agency teams. I doubt they get beaten up as much as agencies!
Caroline - When we went in-house we realized things the agencies had been telling us were true. So supposedly simple things like billing were in fact really hard.
Q - How do you decide where to use your in-house team?
Dom - Strong relations are key. You want to get to a place where those people working for the brand and those working for the agency are indistinguishable.
Caroline - We get our internal and external teams to plan together and execute together. But more than that, we are looking across the business so now everyone in our performance team has brand metric targets, so we are prioritizing both the short and long term.
Martin - Even when mainly in-house, advertisers still need to work with a partner. We have an in-house training programme designed to get our people up to a high-level of expertise, and brands see this as a very valuable resource for their internal teams. Clients are saying, we have too many tech platforms to manage and we need a load of support. As client teams get more sophisticated in media they might not always need help with the buying, but are likely to still need help in things like measurement, billing, innovation and training.
Q- How do you measure in-housing?
Caroline - I look at sales. So when we in-housed I looked for the blip in sales, but we couldn’t see one. Other metrics we look at are health scores, CPAs, channel growth and even awards, because these motivate the team.
Nancy - You have to write everything down, remove middle men, and give access to data where it's needed. But we think agencies shouldn’t get too comfortable, they should always feel a little nervous.
Q - Can brands reverse out of the in-housing if it's not working?
Martin - An in-house model can go stale. If there are only 2 or 3 people in an internal team and someone leaves you can lose momentum and your strategy can quickly become out of date.
To learn more about how to successfully in-house your brand read more in the Kepler whitepaper on 5 Things We Learned in 5 Years of In-Housing, or reach out to us directly!
