It wouldn’t be a period of penny pinching in advertising without the in-house topic coming into sharp focus again. So here it is, the perennial reality check on how (and how not) marketers are using in-house teams to exert more control over how their ad dollars are spent.
On the surface, not much seems to have changed since Digiday’s last recap (which we published in April 2021). The big advertisers continue to take on more of the skills that are going to be of strategic importance to their businesses while leaving everything else to their agency to handle. Dig a bit deeper, though, and there are clear signs of something more transitory.
Namely, that there’s been a pivot on the things advertisers take in house. It’s not biddable media anymore — i.e the stuff that isn’t scalable, doesn’t deliver much competitive advantage and is riddled with hidden costs
Instead, advertisers are prioritizing skills like data science, analytics, insights and commerce. Or rather, the areas that are of strategic importance to businesses. A rudimentary search of the jobs boards’ for some of the top advertisers bears this out.
Unilever wants a data analytics specialist for its commerce team; Procter & Gamble is looking for a marketing technologist; Diageo wants a global head of commercial insights and analytics; Nike is looking for a consumer direct marketing specialist; Nestle wants a direct marketing lead.
None of these roles are typical of the in-housing wave of recent years.
“The direction of travel for the in-housing trend is increasingly toward hybrid and away from tactical media buying,” said Ryan Kangisser, managing partner of strategy at media advisory firm Mediasense. “These businesses still want in-house media and ‘heads to keyboard’ expertise, but in areas which deliver strategic value to the brand such as analytics, audience management, customer experience and e-commerce.”
It’s more valuable because the premise isn’t based…
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