Is your In-House Agency like an all you can eat Buffet?

by Jim Hubbard

This is the first of a series of bite-sized posts for In House Agency leaders, focusing on the common tripwires they’re likely to encounter - and sharing operational solutions based on decades of experience in the field.

Research carried out by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers suggests that many in-house agencies (IHAs) are fast and cheap but struggle with creativity. So much so that it was cited as marketers’ greatest concern about IHAs. 

But often the convenience of having an in-house agency can mean that it’s all too easy for it to be treated just like an ‘all you can eat’ buffet. And that means you get what’s served, not what you really want, or actually need.

As many leaders and internal clients of IHAs have found, the perceived cost of using an in-house agency, versus external agencies, is one of the key things which drive this behaviour. Internal resource is seen as either extremely low or even zero-cost. And without costs there is less filtering of demand. In fact, demand can become almost infinite. 

Yet the agency’s capacity is clearly finite. This is a recipe for log jams and insufficient bandwidth to generate really effective creative work. 

One of the simple remedies open to IHA leaders is to attach a cost to your in-house agency’s work. Even when this is simply an internal accounting cost never touching the business’s P&L, it provides the foundations for balancing capacity and demand. 

The truth is, it is entirely possible for your in-house agency to be cost efficient, timely and creatively effective. As is so clearly proven by the likes of Lego, Specsavers and BBC Creative (the last two both WDC clients, by the way). But to achieve this, you need to value what it does – and what better way of doing that than by putting a value on it?

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