In-House Teams Should Embrace Specialist Indies

Let’s face it, advertising lore is riddled with tales of agency-client standoffs. It’s a dusty us versus them narrative that should have gone the way of the dinosaurs years ago. As we say in Scotland, “There’s more than one way to cook a haggis”.

Today, the most successful brands (and the smartest internal teams) treat indie creative specialists not as interlopers, but as indispensable partners. If you work in an internal creative or production team, partnering with specialist indie agencies isn’t a threat, it’s leverage; a cheat code for speed, craft, and category-busting ideas that make your team look smarter, not smaller.

Much of the market is already hybrid: In the US, 82% of marketers now have in-house agencies or creative teams, a rise from 78% in 2018, 58% in 2013, and just 42% in 2008. That growth hasn’t killed external partners but reframed them as force multipliers.

In the UK, brand leaders say the quiet part out loud: In-housing often improves collaboration with external agencies because roles become clearer and standards are pushed higher. PepsiCo’s Nancy Croix put it plainly, “There’s “plenty of work to go around,” and great external work gives the in-house team a supersolid foundation to build on.

As for Australia, many teams already run some version of a hybrid model. Brands keep a large chunk of execution in-house while still outsourcing a meaningful share of work to specialist external partners: 87% of brands reported partnering with external agencies even as their in-house headcounts grew.

A great example of this symbiotic model working is Qantas’ 2024 ‘Fly Away’ brand spot featuring Tones And I. Creative leadership and direction came from independent shop Brand+Story while Qantas’ in-house content studio handled production integration, reformatting for owned and social channels and using internal assets/people to add authenticity. The outcome? Rapid public cut-through, trending on YouTube, and passing 1 million views within the first week. It’s worth noting these results were delivered for a brand under pretty severe public scrutiny at the time, too.

Independent agency specialists aren’t a threat to internal teams, they’re a force multiplier. They bring sharp expertise clients can tap when needed, inject fresh outside perspective that guards against groupthink (or falling too deeply into the well-worn conventions of the category), and provide elastic capacity so clients can scale up or down without burning their teams out.

‘Borrowing brilliance’ means raising the bar for in-house teams with high-craft output while freeing internal talent to focus on core business priorities, adding impact where it’s most needed, and strategically empowering in-house leaders to more tightly control the brand ecosystem. Smart collaboration, not siloed ownership, is the real superpower here; ensuring budget is allocated only where it maximises ROI.

Internal teams aren’t being replaced, they’re being augmented. In-housing gives you proximity and pace. Independent agency specialists give you range and edge. Put them together and you don’t dilute your value, you supercharge it.

With Australia’s independent agency market going from strength to strength, now is the time for savvy marketers to tap into this well of fresh creative thinking and rapid delivery. Partnering with the right indie specialists doesn’t just elevate output, it creates a win for brands, in-house teams, and agencies alike. Pretty brilliant, really.

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Robbie Wood is new business director at Supersolid