Going Brand Side Was Supposed to Save You.
Turns out it's a lateral move into the same problems.
My end goal was always to work in brand. I think that’s part of any creative agency’s late-night conversations when they’re doing round 12 revisions. If we worked for the brand, we would get it.
So, eventually you go (I did). Thousands of people went, and with it came the trend of the “in-house agency” between 2018 and 2024, where brands hired media buyers, copywriters, designers, producers, and strategists. They built studios, they bought lights and cameras. I was working at the kid’s clothing brand Hanna Andersson during part of this boom and saw them build out an internal studio, invest in brand content shoots, and spend real money on social to drive awareness. I got to do fun, creative work, and it made a ton of strategic sense.
PepsiCo built an entire internal creative studio, Keurig Dr. Pepper did the same, so did dozens of mid-size brands with CMOs who saw what Nike and Apple were doing and wanted to create content that told stories and sold products.
What actually happened was quite predictable.
The people who went brand-side ended up trading one version of instability for another. Agency instability is obvious. Somebody loses a pitch and by Friday there are boxes on desks. It's blunt and scary, but at least it’s honest.
Brand-side instability is quieter. It shows up as a reorg or as a "strategic realignment." A new CMO who wants to "evaluate the current team." You're not getting fired because you lost a client. You're getting fired because someone three levels above you decided to prioritize performance marketing over brand.
PepsiCo ended up handing parts of its internal studio to VaynerMedia, and Keurig Dr. Pepper pulled the plug entirely on their creative studio concept. Hanna Andersson (I had left by then) reduced spending on brand awareness style content.
Building an in-house agency (turns out) is very expensive. Maintaining it when the economy tightens is a line item that's very easy to cut. In-house creatives were promised they'd make the work they always wanted to make, with no middleman.
What they ended up with was 10 internal stakeholders with opinions and a Slack channel that functions as an open forum for people who took one marketing class in business school. It was always going to be dulled down because of so many voices, so many perspectives, and seniors’ unwillingness to take risks.
I was absolutely sold brand-side as an escape hatch, but it really isn’t. The brands wanted agency talent without agency costs, and when costs started to balloon anyway (in salaries and software and studio space) they did what brands have always done, they called an agency.
The difference is now they're calling with less budget and more urgency, and the agency on the other end has fewer people to do the work. Both sides are thinner, both sides are more desperate, and the person in the middle, the one who just wanted to make something good without burning out, is updating their portfolio again.
Nobody went brand-side because they hated advertising. They went because they hated what advertising was doing to them. Whoops.
Xx, Caitlin
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
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