The In-House Renovation
The in-housing wave is accelerating. But the companies doing it are solving the wrong problem.
Home Depot just ended its relationship with BBDO.
The retailer has been quietly expanding Studio Orange, its internal creative department, and Orange Apron Media, its in-house media arm. The move is part of a broader trend that’s been building for years: companies bringing creative production inside.
The timing is sharp. BBDO had just repositioned around “client experience” and hired a global chief client experience officer. They invested in the relationship. Their client invested in independence.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s the market.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Global ad spending grew 8.6% last year. Holding company revenues fell 1.2%. The market is growing. The agencies are shrinking inside it.
Forrester forecasts a 15% agency workforce reduction in 2026, on top of an 8% cut in 2025. An unnamed holding company CEO told Forrester: “By 2028, we’ll double profits and halve the people.”
The average agency-client relationship now lasts just 12 to 24 months. Every new engagement starts from zero. Every transition resets institutional knowledge.
Companies are looking at those numbers and making a rational decision: bring it in-house.
They’re right to do it. And they’re solving the wrong problem.
What In-Housing Actually Solves
In-housing solves for speed. It solves for cost on the execution layer. It solves for proximity to the product and the customer.
These are real gains. A good internal team can produce social content, manage ad creative, update landing pages, and maintain brand templates faster and cheaper than routing everything through an agency.
But here’s what the data shows: only 34% of in-house agencies handle brand strategy. The rest are focused on production.
That’s not a criticism. It’s the point. In-house teams are optimized for execution. They’re closer to the business, faster on turnaround, and more cost-efficient on repeatable work.
What they’re not built for is the strategic layer. The positioning. The narrative architecture. The competitive response when the market shifts. The judgment calls that determine whether a campaign is on-brand or just on-time.
We’re Seeing This Firsthand
One of our clients, a mid-market manufacturer, recently hired an internal designer. The goal was straightforward: bring production in-house, reduce turnaround time, lower costs on day-to-day creative.
The new hire started on a Monday. By the end of the week, they’d attempted to replicate the campaign creative we’d built for them.
The results weren’t usable.
Not because the designer lacked skill. They were production-capable. They could execute templates, resize assets, build layouts. But when they tried to match the strategic creative, the campaign language, the visual system, the way the brand story was embedded in every piece, the gap was immediately visible.
The client’s marketing lead called us that same week: “We still need you.”
This isn’t a story about a bad hire. It’s a story about a structural gap. The production layer and the strategic layer require different capabilities. Bringing one in-house doesn’t eliminate the need for the other. It clarifies it.
The Legal Profession Already Figured This Out
Nobody confuses in-house legal with outside counsel. They’re not in competition. They’re complementary.
Companies have in-house legal teams for day-to-day policy, contract review, and operational compliance. They retain outside counsel for the high-stakes moments: the acquisition, the regulatory challenge, the dispute that could reshape the business.
The legal profession went through this exact transition. Wolters Kluwer published a 2026 analysis documenting how corporate legal departments are evolving outside counsel relationships from transactional, billable-hour arrangements into “strategic alliances focused on holistic value.” Thomson Reuters reports law firms at record profitability, but warns “the very forces driving today’s success may be setting the stage for tomorrow’s correction.”
As many lawyers now work in-house as at all top 500 law firms combined. But this hasn’t eliminated outside counsel. It has refined what outside counsel does. The operational work moved inside. The judgment work stayed outside. The relationship evolved from vendor to strategic partner.
Brand is following the same trajectory.
The Strategy Gap
Home Depot can build Studio Orange. They can build a world-class internal production operation. They probably will.
But who builds the brand strategy? Who makes the judgment call on positioning when the competitive landscape shifts? Who ensures the narrative holds together across channels, campaigns, and audiences? Who provides the diagnostic authority when something isn’t working and the internal team is too close to see it?
That’s not a production question. It’s a counsel question.
The companies that are getting this right aren’t choosing between in-house and outside. They’re choosing both. Internal teams for the 80% that requires speed and proximity. Outside counsel for the 20% that requires judgment, pattern recognition, and strategic depth.
The in-housing wave isn’t a threat to the counsel model. It’s the reason the counsel model exists.
The Question for Growing Companies
If you’re building an internal creative team, or thinking about it, ask yourself:
- Who sets the brand strategy that your internal team executes against?
- Who diagnoses the problem when campaigns underperform?
- Who ensures brand coherence as you scale across channels and audiences?
- Who brings the outside perspective that an internal team, by design, cannot have?
You can build Studio Orange. The question is whether you’re also building the strategic counsel that makes Studio Orange worth building.
The production layer is table stakes. The strategy layer is where the value compounds.
Sources: Ad Age, eMarketer, Forrester, Wolters Kluwer, Thomson Reuters Institute, MarTech/CallRail
