CREATIVE AGENCY, MEET IN-HOUSE AGENCY
Elizabeth DeMaso is the President of Triptent, the advertising industry’s best kept secret. She regularly taps into her business development roots to bring new math to client relationships. Wendy Lurrie joined Triptent to spearhead the agency’s expanding B2B practice. She has a deep background in both agency leadership and heading marketing departments at a variety of tech companies.
Recently, Elizabeth and Wendy sat down to chat about agencies, clients, and specifically, clients’ in-house agencies and how to best work with them.
In-house capabilities, in-house agencies
To avoid using long-winded phrases, which hardly trip off the tongue, we’ll refer to them as IHCs: in-house capabilities.
Recognizing the proliferation of IHCs, Elizabeth and Wendy shared their individual experiences and perceptions of working with them. What goes well, what could go better, and what they’ve learned. It’s an increasingly important topic as more and more companies invest in their IHCs – external agencies need to work successfully with them.
Our shared experience with IHCs from two perspectives
To give you a sense of what Elizabeth and Wendy bring to the party, here’s the math. Triptent has a specific approach for working with IHCs, which can be challenging for many agencies. TT has a strong track record and currency working successfully with IHCs. Wendy wanted to understand how and why the agency is so successful in this area. Elizabeth wanted to understand the client perspective, i.e., why IHCs exist, why they matter, how marketers use them, best practices,and what Wendy learned when she had oversight into an IHC.
The Origin Story
Elizabeth shared the agency’s origin story of working with IHCs. It started with a major retailer who needed a more efficient workflow to get promotional work done, something being handled by its big brand agency.
Promotional work is not always attractive or profitable to the big shops but is vital to the client business. Elizabeth remarked, “We embraced the promotional work as a business driver, which is exactly what it is for major retailers. The client has a multitude of incentives to bring shoppers in and retain customer loyalty. We took that very seriously and every communication we develop with that client is designed to think about the entire customer experience."
Wendy stressed that “IHCs understand that there’s a ton of marketing work underneath the brand work that must be executed well to drive the business. It may not always be the sexiest work, but it’s the kind of run-the-engines programs that client businesses depend on. What many agencies see as tier 2 or tier 3 work is actually hard-working programs that deliver results.”
For Triptent, the client’s IHC was (and still is) a key client. TT understood what a capable and knowledgeable team they were working with and developed a way of working together that allowed the IHC to shine. It is less agency-client and much more shoulder-to-shoulder. It is a partnership of a different sort, developed from a place of respect and a peer-to-peer approach.
It didn’t stop with that client, not even close. Triptent continued (and continues) to work with IHCs across categories, bringing this approach each time, learning and optimizing. It keeps getting better. It works. There was a key ingredient in the TT formula: empathy. It’s an empathy with IHC client partners and empathy with the client marketers, yielding a true sense of partnership at the heart of the relationship.
Or, as Elizabeth put it, “We walk hand-in-hand with these in-house agencies to create in tandem.”
It is a different way of working. Typically, the agency’s client leads are members of the marketing team - brand managers, product leads, global marketers, demand marketers. But IHCs are a different tribe, they’re creative people. They may have come from agencies and chose to work in-house for a lot of the reasons people choose to work in-house, including work-life balance, passion for the brand, and belief in the organization. But they have the souls of creative folk who want to ideate and innovate and create. Like all creative folk, but in a different context. Triptent gets that. According to Elizabeth, “I’ve seen arrogance at external agencies. There’s this feeling that anybody working at an in-house agency is a second-rate creative. And that’s just not true. We don’t need to try and outshine them. We need to be supportive members of their team. We need to make their successes our successes.”
“We walk hand-in-hand with these in-house agencies to create in tandem.”
Context matters
We’ve heard for decades that content is king, but we’d argue that context rules.
Wendy shared her experience working with IHCs from multiple organizations. Elizabeth wanted to understand the what and the why: Why invest in-house? What are the expected returns? What was surprising?
Wendy shared, “We started using the IHC for the reasons most clients do: speed. But we quickly learned that they brought tremendous value. They knew the brand better than anyone. They knew the space. They understood the organization's capabilities. They were SMEs in an industry that’s hard to learn, and hard for agencies to get up to speed. One of the most rewarding parts was learning how innovative and creative they were.”
Back to context. Yes, in-house teams understand the brand/biz/category, but they understand something else, something that external agencies don’t always get. They understand how decision-making flows in the organization, the complexity of the decision dynamics, and how ideas get buy-in and sell-through. From Wendy: “Those are often things that frustrate agencies, but in-house teams understand how much internal marketing and selling it takes to gain consensus. The layers of approval, the many meetings and presentations, the stakeholder management, the list goes on. What a lot of agencies don’t get is that that’s how things get sold through and executed at a large organization.”
She went on to say, “You can’t have empathy and connect to your client if you don’t have understanding.”
The role of empathy
There’s a lot that clients and agencies don’t understand about each other, but in client-agency relations, that lack of understanding can lead to a lack of empathy, which is the critical component to making the relationship effective, lasting, and sustainable. Wendy spoke about this, and each time she left agencyland and went client-side (three times) she returned with a better, deeper, and more relevant understanding of client realities, which are often not what agencies think they are. Clients are under tremendous pressure to deliver results for sales and revenue, all while navigating and negotiating highly complex decision-making dynamics, supporting stakeholders, working as a player-coach with their teams, and much more.
Another thing that external agencies can learn from IHCs is how to successfully navigate the organization to achieve real and lasting outcomes.
Elizabeth asked, “What can external agencies do to better support IHCs?” Wendy talked about what external agencies bring that complement and support IHCs. “Agencies bring diversity. Diversity of opportunities. Diversity of ideas. Diversity of talent. Diversity of industries. And that can really inspire in-house teams.”
In conclusion
Empathy may seem soft or squishy, but the centrality of empathy to an effective, lasting partnership cannot be overstated. It’s what we try to do when we’re marketing to consumers or customers: demonstrate that we feel their pain because we understand their pain. We can leverage those same skills and techniques to better empathize with our client partners to be the best possible partner. So let’s end where we began: with IHCs. And let’s rename them to what they are: IHPs—in-house PARTNERS.
As Triptent founder Joe Masi said,“I have spent a lot of time on set with both big agencies and clients. What I quickly realized was that there was a total disconnect between the two. Each has its own agenda and that never ends well. I saw that there was room for something new, something that would become an extension of the client’s own in-house creative team. We built harmony.”