For the first ten years of his career, Andy Epstein worked as a freelance illustrator and designer before venturing into inhouse creative agency management, starting in the toy and gift industry and later moving into the pharmaceutical, finance, consumer goods, and energy industries. For over 30 years, he has built and led multidisciplinary creative teams ranging in size from 10 to 100+ individuals at both large and small organizations. Andy has been very active in the design community having written for Graphic Design USA, Dynamic Graphics, and HOW as well as publishing “The Corporate Creative,” a book on all things inhouse. Having cofounded InSource, he then went on to lead INitiative, the AIGA program dedicated to supporting its inhouse membership. Andy has also presented at numerous AIGA and HOW conferences, Adobe Max, and RGD virtual and live events. Andy now consults with inhouse agencies supporting their efforts to establish and enhance their organizational and operational infrastructure and team culture. He also publishes a Substack dedicated to supporting middle and frontline managers in all disciplines at https://epsteina.substack.com/
***
Like many in-house agency leaders, my in-house career started as a random accident. I was working as a freelance illustrator and designer for a toy company at a time of business growth that led them to establishing a small in-house team to meet their expanding marketing needs. They asked if I’d take on all their packaging, catalog, and product marketing projects and I, jonesing for a full-time gig, said, “Yeah…sure…why not!”
Unfortunately, at that time, (we’re talking the early 1990s – yep, I’m that old) that was how many in-house agencies (IHAs) were born – as a knee-jerk reaction to immediate business circumstances with absolutely no strategic mandate for these newbie creative departments.
My experience was just one example of what was occurring throughout corporate America. That with no long-term business rationale for investing in an IHA, bean counters across corporate America who were getting annoyed at the ever-increasing cost of ad agencies and design firms, saw the creation of internal creative teams as a means to reduce overhead. Unfortunately, after all these years, no matter what any design business thought leader will tell you, that is still the primary IHA value proposition that senior executives erroneously default to. For us inhouse creatives, it ignores and worse, devalues the true contributions we can and do bring to our host companies.
Upper management naively assumed you could throw a bunch of creative professionals together in a cube farm and voila! – you’d have a high-performing creative team without even knowing or establishing what success would look like (let alone the means to measure it).
More to the point, though, that lack of a clear strategic vision for internal creative teams left these business-critical groups rudderless with their very existence subject to the whims of Procurement and the c-suite. These circumstances made it almost impossible for creative professionals having little or no leadership training or support and who were suddenly being promoted to management positions, to design appropriate org structures and operational infrastructure for their newly formed in-house agencies.
So, we muddled through. We started to band together through organizations like InSource, the INitiative at AIGA, and HOW Design Live’s inhouse programming. We gained expertise through on-the-job boot camps and well, basically, baptism by fire. We called each other up and shared war stories and best practices.
Riffing off of those early industry organizational successes, new groups like IHAF were established and staffing and consulting firms such as Cella, The Creative Group, and Aquent put an increased focus on the inhouse community by pushing out relevant content and designing professional development programming.
In their comprehensive surveys, the ANA captured a big swing towards the adoption and growth of IHAs from the late 90s to the mid 2000s. Though this growth was still driven primarily by cost savings goals, or as they say in Procurement-land – cost avoidance rationale, through expert leadership by inhouse team leads, IHAs started to achieve the holy grail of strategic positioning often referred to as “a seat at the table.” Design Thinking, as championed by the Stanford School of Business and the design firm IDEO, accelerated the growth of IHAs, both in terms of headcount but more importantly in the level of strategic assignments being shifted from external agencies to IHAs. Adding to that accelerant was the advent of social media and the associated need for quick on-brand marketing responsiveness that in-house teams were best positioned to address.
Both driving and as a response to these hard-won successes, IHA leadership adopted, albeit reluctantly, the language and metrics of business. We defined KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and the means to track them, we took a page from the agency world and established and elevated account and project management as core functions of our teams, we expanded the umbrella of our services to include video, social media, and environmental design. At the same time our community, with support from publications like GDUSA, HOW magazine, and organizations like IHAF, established in-house competitions that showcased our creativity, innovation, and contributions to the companies where we worked.
The inhouse cohort built on these successes, and we expanded our value proposition beyond the 3 pillars of quality, speed, and cost savings to now include adaptability and innovation – critical drivers of business success given the acceleration of change in the economic and technological landscape. We even evangelized the value of an enterprise-wide culture of design as a means to increased profitability and overall business success.
Those heady days of growth and success, I’m sorry to say, to a great degree, are now behind us. Senior executive-level design and creative positions that had been established within companies are dwindling. Inhouse design leaders are finding themselves sidelined and struggling to reestablish quality creative as a driving force of business success. Speed to market and “good enough” are now the mantras of marketing departments with AI not only impacting IHA headcount, but also in increasing unrealistic expectations of productivity while making creative team output generic.
These realities underscore the call to action that we must all recommit to the early practices and behaviors that previously bolstered our community just a couple of decades ago if we are to maintain our relevance and very existence. If we are to again gain stature and strategic positioning in our organizations we must double-down on establishing our value in ways that resonate with business leaders. We must strategically embrace AI in ways that augment rather than automate how we create high-quality communication and marketing materials, and we must proactively and aggressively insert ourselves into the strategic decision-making process within our organizations.
This is occurring in pockets in the business world, but to scale these successes, we need to extend our personal and professional networks, support and reignite existing industry organizations and even establish new ones that are designed to address the current realities, opportunities and challenges of our collective creative professional community.
It won’t be easy, but we did it before and we can certainly do it again. The first step each of us can take is to personally reach out to our colleagues, recommit to existing industry organizations, and together, carefully and strategically create a path forward. Given the value great creative brings to business and society as whole, this will be, as they say in the business world, a real win-win.
