Digiday Research: How working moving in-house affects the client-agency relationship

“There was a lot of tension, especially when there were talks of internalizing the whole programmatic stack,” said one marketing executive surveyed. Another respondent found their agency desperately tried to “pull a land grab for responsibilities” to protect certain areas of their work they deemed most profitable.

For at least one marketer, its agency has attempted to stymie its ability to do the work themselves. “Since in-housing, they’re more challenging to work with and have pushed back on our requests for help,” they said.

“They are definitely more suspicious of us,” observed another marketer. “In-housing had lead to some strains with our agencies regarding budgets, but also trust and expertise,” commented another.

Mike Boyd, svp of enterprise brand marketing at Nationwide’s in-house agency noted that upfront conversations with their agencies about why it made sense for certain portions to done internally, rather than blindsiding them, did not damage their relationship with their agencies, Ogilvy and Universal McCann. “These conversations can have potential economic consequences for them, but our external agencies are not the bad guys. They’re helping us be successful” he said.

In fact, some survey takers found that having building internal marketing capabilities improved their work with agencies.

“There’s more, clearer, and better direction on our part and more oversight on performance. The agencies are being held accountable so execution is improving and they are clear that they need to provide value,” said a survey taker.

“Rather than looking at us as clients, they started looking at us as partners,” said another marketer.

Marketers taking a greater share of the workload internally can also free up the agency to more important tasks. “Our in-house team allows our agencies to focus on bigger creative solutions rather than basic production work such as resizing ads or creating a simple ad from a bigger campaign,” one marketer said.