We’ve been hearing about the in-housing trend for years and it’s not slowing down any time soon, particularly when it comes to programmatic ad buying. 

Given the specialized skills required, it’s ranked as the most difficult function to bring in-house. But that’s not stopping brands from trying, as the benefits are undeniable. Bayer saved a reported $10 million in the first six weeks of stripping its agency, but becoming completely self-sufficient is going to be a three-year journey for the German pharmaceutical company. The good news is that with the right approach, the transition can be a lot easier and more sustainable than you think.

Find agile partners that empower your in-house team

A lengthy process like in-housing makes it easy for brands to miscalculate the amount of effort and resources needed to make a full transition. The key to success is finding agile partners that can support your brands’ unique needs, through a healthy mix of coaching and self-serve media buying.

Empowering in-house teams leads to better engagement—which leads to better results

Empowering in-house teams to take more control of their digital media buys doesn’t just simplify campaign processes, it also elevates these teams’ understanding of the programmatic space. Once they see what innovations like scalable interactive creative, machine learning, and dynamic creative optimization (DCO) can achieve, they become more engaged in every stage of the process.

That’s exactly what happened for a large retailer who integrated our platform into their tech stack when they decided to bring programmatic in-house. The results?

  • An empowered in-house team: It enabled them to traffic their own creative, without adding any new staff
  • Faster production times: The team worked from campaign creative structures, so they could execute campaigns end-to-end in less than a week
  • Doubled ROAS: The brand doubled their ROAS from the previous year

Not surprisingly, the results created a lot of buzz within their organization. In fact, they’ve shared that their digital campaigns are starting to rival the attention of their weekly flyer, which is the Holy Grail of retail.

Early wins can help build a culture that makes in-housing easier to sustain

It’s going to make it that much easier to not only justify investment in the programmatic space, but recruit and retain new programmatic talent. We’ve witnessed this shift first-hand with our clients. As their campaign output and ROAS increase, members of their leadership team start to show real interest in their digital advertising strategy, which allows key figures—who aren’t typically involved in the day-to-day—to truly understand the significance of bringing more services in-house.

Petar is the co-founder and President of Crucial Interactive, parent company of Contobox, which provides advertisers with a single platform to create, launch, serve, and analyze interactive digital campaigns.