To Change or Not to Change the In-House Approach

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Today, Ad-Lib.io’s Adit Abhyankar shares his framework on how to think through creative and media. Below, in his own words, he explores why in-house agencies have risen. The challenge The trend to bring creative or media capabilities in-house has grown tremendously. In 2018, 78% of ANA members reported having some form of an in-house agency, compared to 58% in 2013 and 42% in 2008. But why the interest in taking this on after decades of reliance on agencies? The growing importance (finally!) of building better creative at scale for digital advertising. The process To understand if this investment is worthy of CMO attention, it's useful to have a framework. Is it important, urgent and valuable? Over the next few months, I’ll be using this framework for a number of topics. Applying this to the need to bring creative and media teams closer together helps solve this challenge for myself and others. Important: Yes, it's time to change the approach. Digital-first thinking is critical for building creative ads that stand out. But the creative agency model is built on the big idea, and the media model is based on buying based on data. With creative and media teams working toward the same objectives, the content of the ad and the relevance to the audience are more closely aligned and perform better. Urgent: DTC, frequent product introductions and consumer behavior change require extreme agility. If the past year taught us anything, it showed us that companies now have to scale up or scale down with little warning to capitalize on fast-changing consumer preferences. A three-month process of briefing, developing and approving content before delivering to the media team no longer works. It’s time to build a unified team that can move fast and flex with the moment to be competitive. Valuable: There are different ROI levers at work. The economic value of bridging creative and media is tangible. With our own customers, when media and creative teams collaborate up front, assisted with technology, we see reduced time-to-market from months to days, greater ad variety and relevance, and campaign performance that is multiples above the benchmark. The takeaway While in-house agencies are not right for every brand, it becomes clear why brands are flocking to in-house agencies to try to bring the creative and media teams to the same table. This should be a top agenda item for every CMO in 2021, as it is for me. Pendulum is swinging to creative plus media. Opportunity is moving toward creative.