When you’re on an in-house team, you’re able to build a long-term vision for the brand because of all the different things you work on. Whether it’s a one-off user email or a large, international communications platform, you get many chances to figure out how the brand will flex for different contexts. You gain a very intimate knowledge of the brand and its different audiences, which makes concepting and creating that much more intuitive and enjoyable with each new project type that comes along. But more importantly, it enables you to connect all kinds of projects through consistency and a unified point-of-view of how the brand should turn up in the world.Another benefit is that you don’t always need to wait for someone else’s briefs. You get to create your own. In agencies, you’re usually working on a short-term, pre-defined issue for a client. But when you ARE the client, you have a much greater ability to see, affect, and even originate larger strategic work. You’re much more empowered to identify new opportunities and propose new projects.Finally, being in-house gives you the ability to influence and change important or high-profile parts of the brand (like our product experience) that agency partners often don’t have access to.

Challenges

One challenge working on an in-house team is that it’s easy to become so entrenched in a ‘brand bubble’ that you start to lose the perspective of how everyday users actually experience the product and brand. It can be hard to get that outsider’s perspective. If you’re not careful, you end up creating work that only speaks to a small group of power users and insiders.Another challenge is ensuring that the team is viewed internally as a creative partner, rather than a creative service. Especially for small in-house creative teams like ours, being seen too much as an executional resource can quickly bury us ‘in-the-weeds’ on quick-turn projects – which diminishes our ability to be effective and impactful on a wider scale.