Speed is the first thing you will win by moving things closer to your business. Skipping all the steps and hurdles required to go from your project manager to your agency’s project manager and then to the team of creatives and specialists by just simply walking over to a desk is, without doubt, a great benefit. We are not saying that you should skip the brief or the planning or not do your homework before you involve the creative team, but when things need to move quickly and your organization is screaming for creative deliverables “now”, there is an inherent benefit of just sitting next to each other.

By breaking silos and consolidating business purposes, you can react faster when things change. And in business these days, things change frequently. With an agile team of experts devoted to only working with one company, you will have people who can promptly jump on a new project as the opportunity arises. And with fast feedback loops, your time to market gives you an edge.

Speed and agility from in-housing give marketeers a competitive advantage. In a 2020 study conducted by Bannerflow and Digiday, 37% of the respondents said that having quicker reactions to marketing trends gave them a competitive edge when they in-housed.

In addition, you want to make data-based decisions without relying on information that is interpreted by someone before you can look at it. You don’t need reports—you’ve got dashboards with live data.

The benefit of having your team living and breathing your brand is that they can fully identify opportunities and present them in a reactive fashion. They can just pop over to each other; within an hour, rather than weeks, a solution is created. The model is always evolving to the business’ changing needs. As the business changes, the in-house team changes with it in real time. It is a genuinely collaborative relationship and process. The in-house agency evolves with the brand it represents.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have external partners involved in your creative development phase. We will get to this in a later chapter. For now, let us just say that when your own team is set up to act with speed and agility, it is easier to bring in experts for smaller tasks when you need it. When you have your workflows and processes in place, you can easily switch out a role or a position or bring in a creative team for one part of the journey.

The problem with most agency relationships is that they often have a hard time understanding your business. Please don’t get us wrong; agencies are great at making complicated stuff understandable and easy to digest. But before doing that, they must understand what you are doing. And when it comes to something just slightly more advanced than selling chewing gum, it just takes a while to get there.

By having a dedicated team working only with one client, sitting at their location, the wins are obvious when it comes to speed and agility. Your team knows the brand, knows where to find the right assets, knows the processes, and knows how the client works.