You can hire great managers. You can staff your Win-Win-House team with top-notch creatives and have the best workflows and tools. But unless you, together with your agency partner, develop the kind of culture that celebrates creativity—something outside agencies do so well—you will struggle to create anything groundbreaking. Culture is hard to quantify. It is even harder to develop, but it is vital for your Win-Win-House team to succeed.

From our perspective, there are two fundamental elements you will need to consider and accomplish if you want your Win-Win-House team to blossom.

Firstly, the team should feel that it contributes to the company and that it isn’t just a cog churning out low-level collateral. The more ownership you give them over the creative process, the more they’ll be able to push the boundaries. Hence, the more recognition they will gain in the company and the greater work they will create. The second thing that you will need to accomplish is the room to take risks. There is always a danger of becoming complacent as a Win-Win-House team. But by giving the team the room to take risks and encouraging them to be creative and try new things, you will be able to fix this.

Ultimately, moving your brand’s digital marketing in-house is a choice. The size of your business, your budget, and your products are all key motivators. There’s also the changing role of agencies and more agile ways of working to consider. All of which will affect your decision. But in our opinion, having more control over your campaigns and costs, gaining more speed and agility by owning your data, and being able to scale up things faster without losing consistency are the main arguments to start rethinking in-house and build a Win-Win-House agency.