We talked about it before: Your Win-Win-House team has tremendous advantages when it comes to being close to your organization. They know the brand, the products, and can act quickly because they don’t need to be briefed from scratch when something urgent comes up. But there are pitfalls in terms of in-housing. Not everything is better just because the team sits next to you.

Often you are stuck with the same people; it’s hard to develop talent since you only have so many options to move them to, and since the teams are often smaller than at a typical advertising agency, and tasks are less diverse, the people at your in-house often struggle a bit when it comes to developing their skills.

Scalability is another issue that we have experienced when we have helped companies in establishing and strengthening their in-house teams. The in-house teams are very often limited in their size and their ability to scale up when needed. Of course, it’s possible to bring in freelancers—and that is also the solution almost all the companies we have worked with resort to, but they often don’t know the brand very well, and they usually don’t challenge things or see them in a bigger picture.

And finally, the outside-in perspective. All the great things we see with in-house teams knowing the brand, the services, and the product has a flip side to it. It can be difficult for in-house teams to see things in a new light. We have often seen in-house teams create campaigns with the same company jargon that the company marketing people use and forget to see things from an outside-in perspective.

And that leads us to the last argument against the in-house teams: They are too reactive. It’s often the case that the in-house creative agency is more a graphic design department than a real agency. And they don’t challenge the briefs or even suggest ideas without a brief.

But luckily, there is a way—a third way—because it’s not about in-house versus external agencies or freelancers versus company workers.

Co-creation involves bringing in creative specialists for a day or a week and locking them in a room with members of your team for them to come up with new ideas together.

Why is this different from using an external agency, you might ask? Well, simply because the people work more closely together. With an external agency, their magic is to take things home, work on it, and then come back weeks later with a new—and often very finished and polished—campaign that you can either accept or reject. With co-creation, it’s different: the outside creatives will only bring their creative talent to the table—not all the project management or the finishing varnish. Your in-house creatives and project managers will be able to steer the ideas in the right direction, keeping them on brand and have a solid understanding of how far the company might what to take things.

From our experience, these sessions need to be at the idea level—no computers are allowed for anything other than looking up facts or data. It doesn’t matter how good people are at drawing; stick with pen and paper during these sessions. If an idea is good with a big black maker on some photocopier paper, it will be good on final assets. It’s easy to disguise a poor idea in a nice layout with the right stock photos and typography. And it always takes a longer time to do it that way. By keeping things at an idea level, your team also inspires each other in the process. We used to say that the first 20 ideas are usually rubbish. But without those, you can’t get to the great one at number 21.

Arranging co-creation sessions might be the tricky part. We have worked with both agencies and individual contributors over the years, and some like the idea and some don’t. Some agencies fear that they are losing control over the process, which, in all fairness, might be right since you are now taking over that part with your Win-Win-House. Some people have difficulties seeing a financial upside to this way of working. You will have to be fair and pay what is suitable for the work the outside creatives bring. And remember, it’s not their time, but the value they bring to the table, that you should pay for. There is an old tale of French painter Picasso being stopped on the street and asked to draw a rooster in one of his famous one-pen stroke paintings. So, he takes out a piece of paper and, in five seconds, draws a hen, and demands a lot of money for the sketch. The woman who asked him for the sketch is surprised and says, “But it only took you five seconds.” Picasso replies, “No lady, it took me forty years.” Bringing in top-notch creative people isn’t cheap, but you should pay what it costs. Because in the long run, it’s money well spent not having to go back and forth with agencies for weeks.

CASE: Say Watt?

Let us give you an example of what we mean by co-creation. Last year, the giant Scandinavian car reseller, The Nic. Christiansen Group, which is behind Hyundai, Jaguar, and Land Rover in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, established their own Win-Win-House.

The Win-Win-House is fully set up to run all the day-to-day tasks involving websites, email, social media marketing, and in-store and out-of-home marketing. They are a small agile team with all the roles from copywriters, graphic designers, project managers, and digital specialists. But sometimes, the team needs a little extra on top of what they do.

So, when the task came to create a launch campaign for Hyundai’s upcoming electric car, IONIQ 5, they called in for help. The task was clear from the Head of Marketing, Lars van het Erve: “We want something new; something that sets this car apart from the competition.”

Instead of using the traditional approach of an external agency, the Operating Officer at the Win-Win-House decided to do it herself with some on-site help. The deadline was tight—there wasn’t time to go back and forth with external people for them to understand the brief and the intent the car reseller had for the campaign. “The job was more about getting the messages clear and crisp than doing something nice and pretty,” says Mary Fausbøll, Operating Officer at the Win-Win-House at The Nic. Christiansen Group.

“We can always make things look nice if the idea is right. But we can’t take a pretty picture and add cleverness to it later.”

Mary Fausbøll, Win-Win-House Operating Officer,

The Nic. Christiansen Group

“Instead of going to the creatives at the agency, the creatives came to us,” says Lars van het Erve. The setup was simply two senior creative people added to the Win-Win-House team for two days, co-creating with the team. We worked closely together and tested ideas on the spot. Simple drawings with headlines. We came in with the outside-in perspective and a bit of freshness to the process, and the local team had the knowledge of brand and tonality. And that produced results. The entire campaign was produced in just three days.

That is the perfect example of co-creation and one of the cornerstones of the Win-Win-House mindset—both in relation to the customer and when there is a need for “an extra creative gear”.

According to Carat’s brand tracking analysis from April 2021, 19% are considering buying a Hyundai after the campaign launched. An increase of 18.75%. And in just five months, Hyundai went from being the 12th most-sold car brand in Denmark to number one. Lars van het Erve believes that the campaign is a “perfect example of the strengths of an Win-Win-House”. 

“Our Win-Win-House is close to us and understands us and our business. But they also challenge us and have the objective, outside-in look that is so important in good marketing,” he says.

Lars van het Erve believes that one of the significant advantages of having the agency in-house is that as a marketing department, you are very close to the creative process: “Both the planned and the spontaneous. It gives a strong symbiosis to be able to comment and discuss so that together we create the best possible campaign.”

Oh, and the campaign itself? Pretty simple idea: two words (one even spelled incorrectly). Say Watt?

That was all it needed. That framed it all—that this was a surprisingly gorgeous car, which was also an all-electric car. It contained everything from the fact that the car can reach 482km from just one charge to the fact that you can charge it in just 18 minutes. Brilliant simplicity. And from that simple idea, the win-win-team could develop the rest of the campaign and roll it out.