Five mistakes to avoid when in-housing paid media
My lessons from supporting 150+ companies in tech and e-commerce.
My agency, Bamboo, has managed more than $1 Billion in paid media spend for clients like Adobe, DoorDash, Dropbox, and Uber.
A very common path for successful brands is to eventually transition from 100% agency support to managing at least some of their paid media work in-house.
In an ideal transition from agencies to in-house, companies can accrue valuable advantages like cost savings, faster day-to-day control over their ad accounts, and better cross-functional alignment.
Unfortunately, the majority of in-housing transitions are not ideal.
After navigating in-housing with so many brands over the years, I want to share the five most common mistakes I see brands make. Hopefully you will avoid them.
Underinvesting in talent quality
Marketing leaders often pitch in-housing to executives as a way to drive the same outcomes with lower costs.
While it’s true that in-housing is often lower cost than leveraging agencies, companies often underestimate the seniority requirements (and associated costs) required to perform on par with their agencies.
Agencies staff clients with talent of all levels. It’s unlikely that an in-house team made up only of junior staffers will be able to achieve on par results.
Talent quality underinvestment is the most common mistake made in failed in-housing attempts.
Underinvesting in talent quantity
In the same way marketing leaders underestimate the talent quality required to keep hitting goals in-house, they also underestimate the work quantity involved as well.
Agencies have a lot of flaws, but work output per employee is rarely one of them.
Most agency employees are singularly focused on hitting client goals. It’s very common for agencies employees to work longer hours and spend more time in client ad accounts than in-house team members do.
In-house folks will spend 10% of their time or more in meetings, participating in company chatter, taking trainings, on PTO, etc…
Agencies have redundancies in place for when team members are away from client ad accounts. In-house teams need to invest into those same redundancies.
Lack of cross-functional support
Driving paid media outcomes is not limited to buying ads.
There are many scenarios that require support from data analysts, designers, product, etc…
Agencies divide this supporting talent across their clients. In-house teams often have these folks too, but rarely is paid media their #1 priority. Usually they are focused in other orgs such as product and engineering.
This means marketing ends up lower priority and the paid media results can suffer as a consequence. Even when this type of support is properly prioritized by the company, the costs involved are generally not priced into the cost/benefit equation of in-housing in the first place.
Insular paid media strategies
Agencies have visibility into all client ad accounts. They have close relationships with ad network partners. They regularly attend conferences, networking events, and are very plugged into the advertising community.
Internal teams can lack this breadth of visibility, which can lead to insular thinking and a more narrow perspective on paid media strategies. Many in-house teams use years-old best practices.
Some of the best opportunities to improve paid media results come from speedily adopting new trends, best practices, tools, creative formats, etc…
Make sure your in-housing plan includes time and money for regularly seeking external perspectives at industry events, within online communities (like Bamboo’s Efficient Growth Community), and for partnerships with outside experts.
Treating the transition as all-or-nothing
Many of the most successful in-housing processes we’ve been a part of were executed in a measured and phased way. Some in-housed one channel at a time, some in-housed one line of business at a time, and others maintained agency support for creative, data analysis, and/or external thought leadership workflows.
In a recent Ad Age survey of 70+ multi-national advertisers, 27% said they have brought at least some of their paid media in-house. Only 16% of them managed more than 25% of their paid media in-house.
In-housing isn’t an all-or-nothing choice.
Don’t introduce unnecessary risk by trying to in-house the entire paid media or make transitions too quick if you don’t need them to be.
If you are considering in-housing within the next year or if you want advice on your current resourcing, I’d be happy to help you think through the decision so you can learn from my mistakes.
My email: daniel@growwithbamboo.com