How Have Publishers’ In-House Creative Agencies Adapted to Changing Advertiser Priorities?

By Chris Sutcliffe March 8, 2024

By: Chris Sutcliffe

In the early-mid 2010s, media companies, including Time Out Group, Gannett, and Guardian News and Media, launched their own in-house creative agencies in an attempt to diversify revenue. It was a smart move: these publishers had the best understanding of the audiences that consumed their articles, and advertisers hungry for a better return on investment around advertising (ROIA) jumped at the opportunity.

As a result of that hunger, outlets like Vox Creative, Guardian Labs, and Condé Nast’s CNX made that understanding—powered by first-party data and proprietary analytics—the major selling point for their in-house creative agencies.

In 2019, right before the Covid-19 pandemic began in earnest, various other publishers entered the fray. In that increasingly crowded market, publishers sought new selling points beyond their audiences. Time Out launched its own in-house creative agency with a pitch based around the fact that, by using its in-house team, clients would reduce the number of stakeholders—and thus overall cost—involved in the process.

In the face of global advertising declines – including those caused by the pandemic – publishers’ overall priorities are shifting. In October 2022, for example, Bloomberg Media’s CEO Scott Havens announced that it was shifting away from dealing with intermediaries in its digital advertising ecosystem: “We don’t believe it makes sense to allow marketers to reach our valuable audience at a low cost with sub-optimal creative. We prefer to create a more mutually beneficial relationship by partnering with brands directly.

Digital advertising at scale is no longer the draw it once was, so on the face of it, in-house creative agencies with bespoke services would appear to be more relevant than ever. More importantly, their first-party understanding and content capabilities should still, in theory, be drawing advertisers and clients into the publisher ecosystem.

Amanda Phillips is the VP of marketing for Active Interest Media. She says that its in-house agency has always been predicated on the idea that advertisers’ priorities can and will shift: “The evolution of our marketing services proposition is primarily based on the clients and the change in their needs over the years. There have been ebbs and flows between greater needs for lead generation, paid search and social efforts, research, creative services and content creation.”

As a result, she says that the changes in the advertising ecosystem tend to lead to opportunities – rather than threats – in the marketing services division at AIM. She highlights the fact that, as the play for mass reach becomes less important than targeted advertising to some clients, the internal team can use its content chops to help fill in any skill set shortfalls the client may have:

As clients look at shifting from their normal habits, they may need skillsets they don’t currently have on staff. We may be training and consulting with clients on paid social media or stepping in as their graphic designer to create ads or in many cases working behind the scenes to write the content that fuels their websites and collateral.

Data, data, data

Geoff Schiller is the chief revenue officer at Vox, which runs Vox Creative as an in-house creative studio. He agrees that an unreplicable strength of the in-house creative team is that it has a “finger on the pulse” of what audiences are currently interested in, which allows it to create relevant content across mediums with high ROIA:

“Our editorial brands are at the forefront of media and quick to grasp changes in audience consumption habits. Unlike the social platforms, we can guarantee advertisers that they will be surrounded by premium editorial content and that they will reach our highly qualified and engaged loyal audience.”

He says that is possible through Forte, the team’s first-party data platform, “which uses our owned and operated brands and Concert partners to understand how audiences are engaging with content. This gives us the ability to understand content trends and how best to target and reach audiences.”

He notes that one product the team is “really excited about” is a dynamic, machine-learning AI-powered ad product that combines first-party data and Vox Media communities at Eater, Thrillist, and SB Nation to “deliver personalized creative.”

Lee Joselowitz is co-founder of The Quality Edit, a recommendations and affiliate-based publication that operates an in-house studio on behalf of clients, most of whom are in the beauty and lifestyle space. Her background is in marketing, which gives her a rarified view of how the changing digital advertising space has created an opportunity for publishers’ in-house agencies:

I think from a performance marketing standpoint, there have been the iOS updates that have just trashed data… cookies disappearing. One thing that’s going to be really important as that continues to unfold is first party audience data, and really owning that audience, not being reliant on some of the bigger platforms to reach bigger audiences. [Advertisers] will continue to seek out media partners that have audiences that they can reach that are aligned with their brands.

Despite those strengths in content capabilities and first-party data, in-house creative agencies are as exposed to the vagaries of digital publishing as their parent companies. The rise of retail media—and the commensurate growth in in-house agencies at huge retailers—means that publishers have a new set of competitors in that space.

Phillips believes, however, that the existing relationship publishers’ in-house creative agencies have established will continue to pay dividends as the ROIA of their activity becomes apparent in a cookie-less world. Moreover, she says that the relationship allows in-house agencies and clients to learn together, deepening that relationship:

“Our brands are trying to stay on top of marketing trends and changes in technology and platforms as well. Our clients have the benefit of learning from our own successes and failures. Because we are targeting the same end users we can use our learnings to help them.

“On the flip side, by being an agency and listening to our clients’ goals and ideas, we can work with them to execute the next big idea.”