When the In-House Creative Team Grows Faster Than the Way It Works

More brands are building serious creative capability internally. That is not especially new anymore. What is interesting is what happens next.

I’ve been around in-house creative teams in different forms for much of my career. I was at Red Bull around the early days of the Red Bull Media House, when a brand building that level of content and creative capability itself still felt relatively unusual. Later, at the BBC, I saw almost the opposite end of the spectrum: huge amounts of specialist expertise sitting inside one organisation, spread across multiple teams and disciplines.

Since then I’ve spent years agency-side, eventually owning and leading an independent creative agency and working with internal brand teams from the outside. So I’ve seen quite a few versions of the relationship between in-house teams, agencies, freelancers and production partners.

The thing I keep coming back to is that building the creative capability is only part of the job. As the team grows, the operation around it has to grow too.

The team can outgrow the model surprisingly quickly

A small internal creative team can often work quite informally. Everyone knows what is happening, priorities are reasonably obvious, people talk constantly and problems get solved as they appear.

Then the team grows. More departments start using it. More work comes in. More disciplines get added. Expectations get higher. External partners become part of the mix.

Ways of working that were perfectly fine for a small team can suddenly become a problem. Everything feels urgent. There are too many ways for work to enter the team. Senior creatives spend too much time managing traffic. Project managers spend too much time chasing decisions. Freelancers get added reactively. Internal teams and external agencies start overlapping.

Everyone is busy, but it can be surprisingly difficult to see what the team actually has capacity for.

That does not mean the in-house model is failing. Often it simply means the team has outgrown the way it was originally set up.

Better creative does not always mean more creatives

This is where the current industry data gets interesting.

IHALC’s 2025 benchmarking study, based on responses from almost 80 businesses and organisations across the UK and EMEA, found that raising creative standards was the number one strategic priority for in-house agencies. But the biggest barriers to producing better creative were not mainly about talent. The top two were quality of brief and lack of time or forward planning.

That feels significant, because sometimes the answer to getting better creative work is not hiring another creative. It is fixing the system around them.

The same research also found that many internal agencies want to expand their remit over the next two to three years and take on more work currently handled by external partners. So the pressure on the operating model is only likely to increase.

Does this mean the end for external agencies?

I don’t think so. But I do think it changes the role agencies need to play.

The growth of in-house capability means external agencies can no longer assume they will automatically own every part of the creative process. More brands now have strong internal strategy, creative, content and production teams, and in some cases those teams are perfectly capable of handling large amounts of work themselves.

That does not make external agencies redundant. It makes the relationship more selective.

The strongest agencies will increasingly be brought in where they can add something the internal team cannot easily replicate: specialist expertise, fresh perspective, senior strategic thinking, cultural insight, scale, production capability or simply the ability to solve a specific problem quickly.

That is a different proposition from being the default destination for all creative work.

It also means agencies need to get better at collaborating with internal teams rather than seeing them as competition. The question becomes less about who owns the work and more about how the right mix of internal and external capability comes together around it.

From what I have seen, the best relationships are the ones where everyone is clear on the role they are there to play.

In-house does not have to mean everything in-house

I also think the conversation can become too binary. Bringing capability in-house does not mean every piece of work should automatically sit there. Having worked on both sides of that relationship, I think the more useful question is:

Where is the best place for this work to happen?

Some capability makes sense to own permanently. Some work benefits from an external agency bringing fresh thinking or specialist expertise. Sometimes freelancers give the team exactly the flexibility it needs. Sometimes production belongs somewhere else entirely.

The important thing is that those decisions are deliberate rather than reactive.

A strong in-house model is not necessarily the one that does the most internally. It is the one that understands what it should do brilliantly, what it needs to flex, and where external partners add real value.

The operational questions matter more than you think

If an internal creative team has grown significantly, there are a few fairly simple questions worth revisiting.

How does work actually come into the team? Who decides what gets prioritised? Is the team clear about what it should and should not own? Can you see capacity before everyone gets overloaded? Are roles and decisions clear across brand, marketing, creative, production and project management?

And are agencies, freelancers and production partners being used intentionally, rather than being brought in whenever the internal team runs out of space?

They sound like operational questions, and they are. But they have a direct impact on creative quality.

The conversation has moved on

You can see that shift in the current in-house creative landscape.

The 2026 Inside Out Awards include internal teams from Wise, Ocado, what3words, Tails.com and Domino’s among the shortlisted teams. And it is not only creative output being recognised. There are specific categories around technology within creative operations, cross-functional working and collaboration with external specialists.

That tells you something about where the sector is heading. Internal studios are no longer only being judged on the work they make. They are increasingly being judged on how effectively they operate inside the wider business. The question is no longer simply whether brands should build creative capability internally. Many already have.

The more interesting question now is how those teams become better businesses within the business, without losing the proximity, speed and creative ambition that made bringing the capability inside attractive in the first place.

For me, that is where the opportunity is.

The best operating models do not add process for the sake of it. They create just enough structure to make the creative work easier to do.

Final thought

Creative teams rarely need more bureaucracy. What they often need is more clarity: clearer roles, clearer priorities, a better view of capacity, a more intentional mix of internal and external talent, and a way of working that has evolved at the same pace as the ambition.

If the creative capability has grown faster than the model around it, that is usually where I would start looking.