In-house agencies navigate a new phase of purpose and pressure

And this may just be the start. 

With inflation, interest rates, tariffs and global unrest tying the economy in knots, businesses are scanning for cuts. Marketing budgets are an obvious target — easy to dial back and often the first to go. In-house teams, in particular, sit in a precarious spot. They live in the tension between big expectations and limited authority, a dynamic that becomes more difficult to navigate when the floor starts to shake.

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“It’s a new era for in-house teams now in so far as they’ve gone from being in that growth phase predicated on doing a specific thing better, faster and cheaper,” said James Sanderson, global president at in-house marketing specialists InnerGroup. “Now they’re facing a different kind of pressure.”

Different but not entirely new. If anything, those pressures are sharper, more unforgiving versions of familiar challenges. Chief among them: closing the gap between what in-house agencies are expected to deliver and what they’re actually built to do. As expectations rise, that gap is only going to get harder to ignore. Strong CMO support can help but that’s hardly a guarantee. CMO tenures are shorter than ever, and when leadership changes so do the priorities.

“What tends to happen with these things [in-house agencies] is there’s an erosion over time of their premise,” said Fred Schuster, CEO of InnerGroup. “That leaves those teams with a big question: ‘What do we need it [the agency] for today versus what we needed it for yesterday? And is the wider organization aligned to answer it?'”

Chasing convenience versus unnecessary pressure

In-house agencies have always occupied a tricky space. The promise of embedded, always-available talent sounds great — until convenience turns into constant pressure and pressure into burnout.

“If you launch an in-house agency primarily to save money then it’s tough to think of it as anything else, especially once it’s hit a certain target,” said Quinn O’Brien, CMO at Carnegie Learning. 

Since joining in 2022, he’s grown the education services company’s in-house team from nine to 30, expanding its remit to cover everything from creative to media planning. 

“If they [the C-suite] see it as a big expense item on their budget then it becomes something that needs to be cut continually or as a necessary evil,” said O’Brien.

But it doesn’t have to.

Laurie Schiada, avp of brand management and content development at Humana, knows the tradeoffs firsthand. She oversees the Hive, the health insurance firm’s in-house agency of 65 specialists and has seen how being too available can backfire.

Her solution: draw smarter boundaries.

Rather than field endless on-off requests like how to build an email campaign, The Hive has developed templates, toolkits and self-serve resources to help teams help themselves. It’s a simple shift but an important one. It frees up the agency to focus on higher-impact work without becoming a help desk. 

“Even in just this first quarter we had 400 unique requesters who all have various biases towards who we are as a team and what we do and what we’re capable of,” said Schiada. “We have to try to serve a lot of purposes. I think that’s one of the bigger challenges.”

It’s a clear-eyed view of in-house reality. This isn’t splashy Super Bowl ads and lunches with platform reps. It’s mid-funnel messaging. Sales enablement decks. High-volume, often low-glamour work that powers the business behind the scenes — and requires discipline to sustain.

That discipline matters more than ever, especially as in-house teams are swept up in broader shifts across their organizations. Take Disney. Last month, the media conglomerate brought together its in-house creative agencies together under its chief brand officer. Moves like this can reshape how these teams operate — for better or for worse.

“The idea of an in-house agency has matured as we’ve gone through a brand transformation,” said Beth Ann Mandia, director of brand and creative services at insurance firm TruStage. 

That transformation began three years ago when TruStage consolidated its internal creative teams, marking a turning point in how creative work was managed, measured and valued. What had once been three separate production arms were brought under Mandia’s leadership, expanding her team from five to 36 and laying the foundation for a unified in-house agency model. For the first time, the company’s creative expertise was working as one. 

“During that transformation some people stayed, some left and others we brought in,” said Mandia. “Either way, the goal was to shift the culture from reactive to proactive — from order takers to business-minded and flexible.”

Doing so also reshaped the makeup of the team beyond traditional creative types to include those with UX backgrounds or strategy specialists, Mandia said.

It’s a point O’Brien echoes. At Carnegie Learning, the in-house team isn’t chasing splashing tent pop campaigns. Instead, they focus on a steady stream of smaller, more frequent work — the kind that may not appeal to younger creatives hoping to make their mark on global brands.

And that’s fine. O’Brien said: “There are seasoned creatives who actually value the slower, more stable rhythm of in-house life. It’s not always about the spotlight. For some, it’s about impact and consistency.”

When Schiada joined Humana in 2019, the in-house team was around 20 people, largely focused on production. Now, the team has tripled in size, has a new CMO and taken on a much broader scope — including determining how to adapt to the accelerating impact of AI on the business. That, Schiada said, is fast becoming one of the most urgent challenges she faces.

“A lot of what I’m focused on now is not really about how we govern AI when it comes to our creative or stop the advancement of it — there’s no sense in that,” she continued. “I’m more interested in how technology can help and aid the development of more ideas within the creative profession. The last thing I want to do is use AI to democratize creativity. It’s a skill you have to train to understand.” 

Because in-house agencies aren’t meant to mirror external ones. They’re not replacements, they’re reinforcements. Built to move fast, stay close to the business and bring institutional knowledge and strategic depth where it matters most. 

That’s why many companies still keep external partners in the mix. 

Humana, for instance, retains an agency of record for TV and direct response work. At TruStage, the in-house team partners with specialists for digital advertising and video production. Carnegie is the same. Everything it could bring in-house it has done over the last several years with the exception of media buying. 

“We looked at bringing it [media buying] in-house but it was just too complex and the systems we’d have to invest in were too much,” said O’Brien. “That said, we’re hiring across the gamut, from those from media backgrounds to those who can help with traffic.”

And that’s the thing about in-house agencies. More than most marketing teams, they’re in a constant state of flux — molded by leadership, by business priorities and how well they can manage the weight of what’s being asked of them.