In-House Agency Planning & Setup Services

Setting up an in-house agency can be a daunting and sometimes frightening task to take on for a business.  There are thousands of questions to ask and answer before proceeding down the road of bringing your advertising and promotional services in-house.  Among them, where do you start?  How much will it cost?  What will we gain or lose by bringing the services normally performed by a marketing (advertising) agency in-house?  The list goes on.  

Fortunately, all is not insurmountable as we at DWS Associates have been down this road many times setting up and managing in-house agencies for a variety of businesses from retail to manufacturing companies.

That experience has helped DWS Associates develop a methodology and group of practices to assist your organization in bringing your promotional/agency services in-house at substantially reduced risks, for faster implementation and for avoidance of pitfalls as well as reducing implementation costs and saving operational dollars so you can spend them on media, etc. where you need them.

What Are The Advantages Of Bringing Your Agency In-House?

You've heard all of the disadvantages of bringing your agency in-house, usually from agencies already providing you with services, so I won't repeat them here.  But, here are some of the advantages of bringing your agency in-house and I can honestly say that we've experienced all of them.  The list includes:

• Lower cost than an advertising agency
• Total control over marketing and promotional materials
• In-house teams understand the company's products and services
• In-house teams appreciate company values and mandatory requirements
• Lower risk of confidentiality breaches or conflicts of interest
• Can turn on a dime faster than an outside agency because there is only one client
• Can work to tighter timetables from concept to execution
• Can recruit people with exactly the right expertise and credentials
• In-house teams are dedicated to the success of all programs/activities
• And, you have faster communications between marketing/product marketing teams, other involved teams and the in-house agency/creative department

What we do to make bringing your agency in-house a success!

Keep in mind that these are the steps you would need to follow even if you decided to go down this road on your own without outside help.  The steps in the process remain the same regardless of who executes them.

Steps in the process:

1. We review your current and future promotional and advertising plans and activities to determine where you are spending your marketing dollars and how effectively those dollars are being spent.
2. Then looking at your future plans, we look at those same activities to determine if you have the right economies of scale to warrant bringing in some or all of those activities: creation, execution and management support functions in-house.
3. We then look at your current promotional capabilities to determine what functions, activities your current team have experience in and can support.
4. We determine where the short gaps are and what will be required to eliminate them and if they can be brought in-house.
5. We then develop a pro forma budget and perform breakeven analyses to determine whether to build, buy or outsource various functions.  Is it all in-house or a hybrid mix?
6. We then develop your organizational structural plan, processes, and procedures.
7. After that, we develop personnel plans and layout functional responsibilities and duties of personnel and the organizational reporting structure.
8. Once the organizational and personnel plan is approved, we develop the actual personnel and operating budgets along with the implementation plan and schedules.  The operational plan will also include equipment and office space requirements.
9. We assist your management and marketing team in recruiting the necessary personnel with the required skill and experiences sets.
10. Then we assist your management and marketing team in implementing the plan. 
11. We help you onboard your new team.  Why?  Because many of the positions are creative, not management or financial.  The creative part of the team needs to be trained, managed and supervised differently than your other operational teams.  For example, they tend to work different hours.  In one organization, we had to setup 24/7 access to the advertising/sales promotion department, while the rest of the organization functioned as a traditional manufacturing company with normal working hours and practices.  Site security practices had to be altered.
12. Finally, we periodically evaluate personnel, operations and functions to make sure they are adhering to the implementation plans, budgets, etc.

Additional Services We Provide.

1. Build/customize marketing advertising agency/ management/operations application to manage all marketing activities and programs.
2. Train or cross-train some of your current staff to assume some of the various in-house agency functions and duties.

Starting At: (Call for quote or complete the information request form in the contact us section for additional information and pricing.)