SaaS technology firm Encodify looks at how retailers can improve their in-house creative operations

While it might seem like we’ve been talking about in-house teams and the importance of content for a small eternity, in-house creative operations is a relatively new concept. If we look just 20 years back, even global brands had most of their creative operations managed by external agencies.

Companies like Specsavers, who’s been successfully running creative production in-house since the 80’s, stories like their award winning “Should’ve” campaign were few and far between.

But over the past few years we’ve seen many brands and retailers in-house their creative operations.

Boots launched an in-house agency and production studio The B-Hive, the mobile operator Three launched an in-house agency to take charge of everything from concept origination to production, and as late as December last year Sainsbury’s announced a plan to expand its in-house creative efforts.

At this point we’ve talked about the benefits of in-housing ad nauseum - It’s faster, it gets creative production and asset ownership closer to the core business, it’s more efficient.

But is it?

In-house agencies are getting more ambitious

Even as we’ve seen more and more brands establish in-house agencies, largely as a result of a growing number of channels and an increased demand for content, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

In fact, as late as 2023 only 15% of in-house agencies saw themselves as the lead agency for their own brand, but this isn’t without reason. Many in-house agencies fail to operate as agencies, and essentially just operate as small creative teams.

As a result 65% of in-house agencies were missing a strategic planning function, which was especially hurtful to the collaboration between in-house agencies and marketing. In fact, more than half of in-house agency leaders rate the quality of briefs from marketing with a below average score.

But in-house agencies weren’t planning to keep playing second fiddle, in 2023 half of in-house agencies had an active ambition to take over the role as lead agency in the future.

Will in-house creative teams replace dedicated agencies?

This might sound like we’re expecting that the rise in retailers building in-house agencies will be the end of external production agencies, but that’s not the case. Even with more retailers and brands building in-house agencies, external agencies are still thriving.

This is because in-house agencies and studios usually don’t see external agencies as competitors. The vast majority of in-house agencies see them as partners, while some see them as both partners and competitors.

Even big, international retailers like Boots, who have likely spent a small fortune building their own award winning creative agency and production studio, haven’t cut ties with their agencies. In fact, The B-Hive has kept collaborating with a number of agencies including The Pharm, VMLY&R, Ogilvy, Hogarth, and Mediacom.

So really, the question of in-house creative teams and agencies isn’t an either or situation. It’s not an in-house agency vs external agency question.

Successfully in-housing creative operations is found when in-house creative agencies collaborate with external agencies.

The biggest challenge for an in-house creative agency is collaboration with other stakeholders

Just because the benefits are obvious, and doesn’t mean it’s easy to succeed with in-house creative operations. There are a number of challenges that retailers face when they launch an in-house agency.

Surprisingly, the biggest challenge isn’t access to creative talent. The thing most retailers struggle with in their in-house creative operations are related to processes and collaboration.

One of the big draws of in-housing creative operations is to get the creative process closer to the rest of your business, as this lets you increase production speed and quality.

But many in-house creative agencies end up being walled off in separate systems with a low integration into the wider business.

Internally this creates friction between the creative agency and the brief owners in marketing and product who rely on the in-house agency to make the creatives. This results in creative teams complaining about the quality of the briefs and the brief owners complaining about the quality of the final assets.

And difficulty in collaborating with external agencies is even worse. In a best case scenario slow collaboration on things like briefs, reviews, and approvals will completely negate the benefit of in-house agencies being quick and agile. But more importantly, most in-house agencies look to external agencies for access to skills, talent and fresh perspectives, which means that the worst case scenario is not just being slow, but making bad creative decisions.

How we help retailers all over Europe structure their creative operations and improve collaboration

At Encodify we’ve spent the past two decades helping retailers and agencies alike structure their operations and collaborate effectively, and this puts us in a unique position to help retailers who are in-housing creative operations.

While our presence in the UK has been focused on supplying agencies with a wide range of work management tools, the Encodify platform has been a fixture in retail marketing operations across continental Europe for years.

The platform helps retailers manage everything from private labels and product information, to creative production, reviews, file storage, and distribution in a single, flexible platform.

We help align in-house agencies with outside stakeholders

It goes without saying that you need creative talent to be successful with your creative operations, but the main reason why some brands fail with their in-housing while others succeed isn’t necessarily a difference in the quality of creatives.

More often than not it’s the ability to manage operations and collaboration that makes the difference.

With Encodify you can manage every step of your creative operations from initial idea, through planning, execution, distribution, and all the way into reporting. But the real benefit is that you can easily bring in everyone from brief stakeholders to channel managers, finance or even external agencies and freelancers to collaborate on everything from production, reviews and approval to reporting.

We help automate your creative operations

While production speed and agility is one of the big benefits of in-housing creative operations, it doesn’t happen automatically - unless you set it up like that. So while some parts of creative production will naturally take time, we help retailers and agencies alike automate as much of their creative operations as technically possible.

Whether we’re talking asset reviews, approvals, managing digital assets, or updating product information there’s usually a lot of manual steps involved - sending asset versions back and forth for approval, fetching data from the PIM system before updating labels, and managing and storing finished creatives so they can be distributed.

With Encodify you can set up automated rules for everything from notifications, reviews, and even storage. That way you eliminate all the manual parts of the operations side, so your teams can focus on the creative side of creative operations.

And it’s not just speed in the in-house creative team we help increase the speed of all aspects of your creative operations.

One example is our dynamic templates which can be used by employees outside of your creative teams to generate variants without starting a new creative project. For instance, an in-store employee managed to set up 1,200 signs with updated prices for a promotion in just 90 seconds. Everything was created in accordance with brand guidelines and didn’t involve any creative team members.