From in-housing to win-housing.

Written by Mick Entwisle, CEO and Co-founder

Marketers have traditionally had to choose between speed, cost and quality. That trade-off no longer cuts it. Today's teams are expected to deliver all three at once, with budgets that aren't growing. Gartner's latest CMO Spend Survey puts average marketing budgets at 7.7% of company revenue, down from 9.5% three years earlier, and half of marketing leaders are working with 6% or less. Doing more with less isn't a phase. It's the persistent operating condition for modern marketers.

In-housing is here to stay

For two decades the industry has cycled through answers to the same question: keep creative and production in-house, or outsource it? Internal agencies, decoupled production, onsite models, offshoring. Each promised the balance of creative control, specialist talent, cost efficiency and scalability that marketers were after.

In-housing of work is an undeniable trend and it’s here to stay. The ANA reports that 82% of its member brands now run an in-house agency, up from 42% in 2008, and those teams keep taking on more. Two-thirds of in-house creative leaders expect their remit to expand further over the next two to three years, according to IHALC's latest benchmarking.

The pressure on the traditional agency model tells the same story. Agencies still play a critical role for large brands, especially at the strategic end. But the model wasn't designed to produce content at the scale modern channels demand, and it definitely wasn't designed for efficiency. In Gartner's survey, 39% of CMOs plan to reduce agency spend, and agencies' share of the marketing budget continues to shrink.

A new set of challenges

In-housing delivers on control, brand closeness and cost per asset. But it creates a new set of problems, and they're structural.

In-house teams are overwhelmingly built on fixed, full-time resources. Fixed capacity in a market of variable demand means teams sit underused in quiet periods and overstretched in busy ones, while costs stay constant either way. Scaling for a launch, a new market or a seasonal peak means hiring, and hiring is slow, expensive and hard to reverse.

Adding freelancers should be the release valve, but IHALC benchmarking has found that 57% of internal agencies have difficulty accessing freelance talent when they need it, mostly because of internal procurement and onboarding hurdles.

And the ambition has evolved. Ask in-house leaders their number one priority and the answer isn't volume. It's quality: 67% say raising the standard of their creative work matters most. That's a hard brief for any fixed team of generalists, however talented. Distinctive work needs a diversity of skills, perspectives and cultural insight that no single team can hold on the payroll.

AI raises the bar, it doesn't clear it

Generative AI is delivering real efficiency. Among CMOs, 49% credit it with time savings, 40% with cost savings, and 22% say it has already reduced their reliance on external agencies for creative and strategy. It belongs in every marketing team's kit.

But efficiency isn't effectiveness. AI can produce a thousand competent variations. It struggles to produce the one idea nobody saw coming. As content becomes easier to generate, distinctive human creative becomes the scarce asset, the thing that separates a brand from every competitor running the same tools. People create. Systems support.

From in-housing to win-housing

For most brands the long-term answer is a hybrid model. In-house teams handle high-volume, brand-close work. Agencies add the most value at the strategic end, where time and budget support their model. The question is what fills the space between, because that's where most of the growth in demand sits: platform-native video, always-on social creative, creator content, localisation and performance variants. That work needs specialist craft at a speed and cost neither fixed model can match.

This is where flexibility wins. A model with in-built flexibility realises the benefits in-housing promised, while designing out the problems it created. A variable-cost creative layer that scales up and down with demand, and plugs specialist skills into the team the moment a brief needs them. Fresh thinking and authentic local insight from any market or culture, on demand. That's what helps move from in-housing to win-housing.

Technology makes it work

You don't have to look far to see what happens when software rebuilds an outdated model. Technology transformed the media side of marketing years ago. The creative and production process barely changed for decades.

That's what a creative delivery system changes. A curated global network of independent creative businesses, talent and social creators, connected to your team through one platform that runs everything from brief to final delivery. No hiring. No procurement headaches. Capacity when you need it, not when you don't.

Anyone who has managed freelancers directly knows the time and admin involved even in that model, let alone hiring and downsizing full-time staff. The point of a system is to remove that friction, so your people spend their time on the work.

The structure that lasts

Change is the only constant in marketing, and the pace is accelerating. The brands that win won't be the ones that picked the right side of the in-house versus agency debate. They'll be the ones that stop having it, using a hybrid model with core flexibility built in.