By Brad Rees, CEO of Mediacells
The big new brand trend is In-housing and it’s growing fast but is attracting blunt criticism in some quarters.
Recent internalising moves from two global brands with a combined value of £20bn substantiate the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) insight that 66% of megabrands now have in-house agencies, with a further 21% actively considering developing one.
Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) new Copy Nothing in-house campaign was met with a tirade of ‘vile hatred and intolerance’ when it was unveiled last week, according to Jaguar’s managing director Rawdon Glover.
Elon Musk even weighed in at one point on X posting ‘Do you sell cars?’ to which Mister Glover replied, ‘Yes. We’d love to show you’.
Round about the same time the Daily Mail was claiming Gen Z are ‘waging war’ on sandwiches by opting for ‘fancy woke’ fillings.
The Chris Morris-esque assertion backfired on the newspaper, sparking speculative culinary discussions on Facebook about potential woke sarnie fillings.
Mass market resistance to outlandish brand transformations are predictable but JLR stands by the campaign and pledges it will reach a younger, cash-rich, time-poor demographic with the reimagined product proposition.
The homegrown agency output was applauded in Adweek by Interbrand’s chief strategy officer as ‘showing up like a creative business rather than a car manufacturer.’
Meanwhile, the other global brand moving away from the outsource model, the English Premier League.
The world’s leading football league recently announced its intention to establish an in-house media operations business to replace the incumbent IMG production company, Premier League Promotions (PLP).
After a 20-year tenure PLP will hang up its boots at the end of the 25/26 season and hand over media production and distribution to salaried Premier League producers and distributors.
The remit, to deliver PL content to 180+ countries, providing full coverage of all 380 matches, is not trivial undertaking but the corporate tendency to nail a Not Invented Here (NIH) sign above the door is on the increase, with two thirds of major multinationals rooting in-house agencies and a further fifth considering establishing one.
The research claims 56% of respondents expect to move more digital production from external agencies to in-house by 2026.
Interestingly, 22% of brands with a total ad spend of $60 billion expect to transfer more data strategy work but only 11% of them plan to move more data management and insight and analytics tasks client side.
The tendency of internal insights and measurement teams to mark their own homework is a potential driver for maintaining a third eye approach as well as cost efficiencies; data scientists, analysts and engineers are a fickle bunch, tricky to manage and motivate.
The biggest revelation from WFA report is the difference in how success is measured for external and internal agencies.
External agencies are measured on results and effectiveness, whereas in-house measurement is output- not outcome-focused; the top three KPIs being quality of work, speed to market and cost savings.
The output metrics may work well for the Premier League media production and distribution teams but for the internal Jaguar rebrand team, it may be that the Emperor’s New Clothes become transparent sooner than later.
