For generations of Indian marketers, the agency was where advertising truly came alive. As the campaign brief moved from the client office to the agency, planners decoded consumer behaviour, account managers managed expectations, and the creative team vanished into brainstorming sessions, chasing ‘the big idea’. Scripts, storyboards, copies and designs travelled up and down approval ladders. Then weeks later came the outcome—a television commercial unveiled during cricket season, a glossy print campaign splashed across Sunday newspapers or a tagline destined for popular memory.
For decades, that was the rhythm of Indian advertising. Agencies were the custodians of creativity. They shaped brand identities, owned consumer insights and interpreted culture, sitting firmly at the centre of the whole process.
That world is now changing.
Today, brands no longer operate in campaign cycles alone. The modern marketer has to build and oversee a continuous stream of communication that demands speed, adaptability and relentless output. Creativity has to travel across formats, languages and audiences, often simultaneously. And that scale is forcing brands to rethink where creativity sits, driving a structural shift in India’s marketing ecosystem.
Brands are increasingly building in-house creative capabilities to manage speed, scale and cost effectively. Russell Barrett, Chief Creative Experience Officer, TBWA\ Lintas elaborates, “The volume and velocity of brand work is dictating a movement towards in-house teams. Speed is certainly a factor, but it is also about being embedded in the business. In-house teams have immediate access to data, product teams, legal, sales and leadership, which allows them to make decisions quickly.”
The launch of Lightbox Creative Lab (or Godrej Creative Lab)—Godrej Consumer Products Limited’s in-house creative agency—in April 2023 became a clear signal of this broader industry shift in India. But it is hardly alone. Brands such as Swiggy, Zomato, Zepto, boAt, Razorpray, Airtel and Spotify have built internal teams dedicated to content, social media, design and creative strategy.
A few months back, Jayanti Khan Chauhan, Vice Chairperson, Bisleri International Pvt Ltd revealed on LinkedIn that the brand’s ad campaigns and digital content are now being managed by an in-house team. “(It) saves on costs and attitudes (from past experiences). And my team understands the brand ethos a lot better than an outsider,” she wrote.
As brands build their own agencies, hire creative talent and integrate content more tightly with business functions, the traditional dynamics between client and agency are beginning to change.
From outsourcing to ownership
The brands’ pivot towards in-housing is being driven by a convergence of multiple factors. Cost emerges as one of the most important advantages.
Rebel Foods shifted to a mostly in-house creative model about three years ago, and cost-efficiency has been a key outcome for the brand. Nishant Kedia, Chief Marketing Officer, Rebel Foods reveals, “We used to outsource 40 per cent of our creative work, which has now become 5 per cent. That is money saved, because we have not increased headcount.”
Further highlighting that internal teams make it easier to work on a larger set of brands without incurring huge costs, he says, “Even as we add more brands to our portfolio, my marketing and content production spend is not increasing because it is fixed. If I was on variable outsourced costs, I would have needed more money to create content for each brand. So, the in-house creative set-up is an operating leverage.”
The cost is the obvious part. But for Gaurav Kumar, Chief Creative Officer, Godrej Creative Lab, there is something far more important that in-housing brings to the table. “The savings every year are huge. But cost is the least interesting advantage. The real win is proximity. When brief writers and creatives share a cafeteria, the brief stops being a document and becomes a conversation. You stop waiting to be told what the brand needs. You already know. And when you get it wrong, you fix it without losing three weeks over email chains and Chinese whispers.”
Further highlighting how proximity is a creative advantage, Shalini Avadhani, Chief Creative Officer, Godrej Creative Lab adds, “We know which brand manager is under pressure. We know which category the board is watching. We know the politics and the history—not because someone put it in a brief, but because we’ve lived it. That context quietly improves everything.”
The most obvious result of this proximity is greater creative control and understanding; but another outcome is swiftness, which is often non-negotiable in today’s world of always-on content. In a previous interview with IMPACT, Mayur Hola, VP – Brand, Swiggy shared, “The pace at which things evolve within consumer tech, food delivery, e-commerce, and quick-commerce in particular, is on another level. Agencies are great places for ideas, but being embedded within a system helps you understand and keep pace with the business a lot more.”
Further highlighting that speed is an edge that in-house teams bring, Karan Rao, Vice President – Content and Influencer Marketing, Madison Loop elaborates, “Marketing today operates at the pace of culture, and brands want to have the ability to respond in real time with content that is contextual, personalised and platform-native. In-housing gives them proximity to business decisions and faster execution cycles.”
But beyond these operational factors, this shift is also being accelerated by technology. Access to artificial intelligence (AI), automation and data integration tools is enabling brands to scale their in-house creative processes. “Brands now have tools that allow them to generate, adapt, test and optimise content much faster than before. Naturally, they want some of those capabilities closer to the core business,” Rao notes.
Generative AI tools can now help in producing visuals and copy variations, among other things, in minutes, allowing internal teams to generate output at a pace that once required large agency departments. This advancement in technology plays a key role in the functioning of Razorpay’s in-house studio. Apuarv Sethi, Chief Marketing Officer, Razorpay says, “AI has rapidly expanded its universe into creative production. Earlier, if you had to work on a world-class production, it would be a struggle. You would need to lean on a creative agency to find the production house, source the right actors, etc. It was a complex ecosystem. Today, all of that can be fast-tracked with in-house teams because AI allows you to go live without a studio, and without an artist.”
But at the end of the day, by setting up in-house creative teams, brands are not just chasing speed or cutting costs. Manika Juneja, Chief Operating Officer, Dentsu Creative Isobar, believes that they are responding to fatigue. “They are fatigued with processes, the distance, and the feeling that they are briefing someone rather than building with someone. That is a legitimate feeling, and one our industry must own. Like any relationship, responsibility lies with both sides.”
Aalap Desai, Chief Creative Officer and Co-founder, tgthr, echoes the sentiment, highlighting that a gap emerged in the agency model that prompted brands to find out another way. “There have always been dedicated teams in our business. In the pursuit of efficiency and better revenue, the agency side diluted that and created a vacuum that the client side had to fill by forming teams in-house.”
However, he maintains that agencies still have an edge over internal teams due to several reasons. “Working on the same brand and its ecosystems has a fatigue that often affects the work. Agencies handling multiple brands will never have to solve for that problem.”
That is perhaps why most brands with in-house teams still outsource some of their creative work, especially larger campaigns.
What stays in, what goes out
The decision on what work stays within the company and what goes out to agencies is usually driven by creative requirements, cost and scaling capacities, and expected level of expertise. While day-to-day content is usually handled in-house, larger campaigns that require technical expertise are executed in collaboration with external partners. Rao explains, “In-house teams are increasingly managing always-on content, rapid adaptations, social publishing and high-frequency execution work. Agencies are being brought in for larger strategic mandates such as brand positioning, campaign architecture, culture-led storytelling, design systems and transformation projects.”
Marketers solidify this observation. Anupam Bansal, Executive Director, Liberty Shoes, a brand that has a creative team since the past 8-10 years, reveals that their internal vs agency split is 50-50. “Our in-house team focuses on adaptations and recurring creative requirements. They handle day-to-day social media content, website banners, content creatives for marketplaces and general advertising assets. External agencies, on the other hand, usually come in for master campaigns, original conceptualisation, 3D animation and large-scale mass media advertising.”
The latter requires certain specialised skill sets, like high-end cinematography, advanced 3D work or large-format brand films that, according to Bansal, do not need to be maintained in-house on a constant basis.
Pee Safe, which has a fully functional in-house creative team and studio, also collaborates with agencies on larger campaigns. Vikas Bagaria, Founder, Pee Safe reveals, “For larger brand campaigns, high-budget films or projects requiring specialised creative or production capabilities, we collaborate with external agencies or production houses on a need-basis. These partnerships bring in fresh perspectives, niche expertise and additional scale that complement our internal strengths. While our in-house team leads the majority of everyday creative work, engaging external partners ensures that major campaigns benefit from broader creative diversity, technical excellence and industry-level production value.”
Even new-age brands that have relied on internal teams since their conception remain open to partnering with agencies when the need arises. Take boAt for example—about 90 per cent of the brand’s creative processes are handled in-house. “Our in-house team manages BAU social content, product films, vertical videos, long-form campaigns, celebrity-led films and several large-scale brand moments throughout the year. Many of our biggest star campaigns have come entirely from our internal team,” says Vedansh Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, boAt Lifestyle.
But the brand collaborates with agencies on special projects. “For certain large-scale or specialised campaigns, we collaborate with external agencies and production houses because they bring deep expertise, strong production muscle and category-specific experience. Sometimes, it is also about bandwidth. When two or three major campaigns overlap, external partners help us deliver at the quality and scale we expect,” he reveals.
The brands that have in-house creative agencies operate differently. While they may not collaborate with external partners, they still rely on outside perspectives to keep their ideas fresh and informed.
Kumar shares, “Complacency is the slow killer. You know the brand. You know what works. You know what they’ll approve. And quietly, without noticing, you stop making the brave choice and start making the familiar one.” What Godrej Creative Lab does to combat this, he says, is seek mentorship from external creative consultants who have a counter point of view on what a brand needs.
The ‘fresh perspective’ is also precisely the reason agencies and external partners remain important for a lot of brands, besides operational and technical factors. It prevents internal teams from operating in an echo chamber. Bansal agrees. “Over time, any in-house team can develop a degree of fatigue or over-familiarity with the brand. External partners help challenge our thinking and push the work further,” he says.
This outside-in perspective or the scope for creative pressure-testing that agencies bring is difficult to replicate in-house. Mitchelle Rozario Jansen, Senior Vice President - Business Strategy and Growth, White Rivers Media states, “Internal teams are strong on consistency and speed. But agencies bring the distance needed to challenge assumptions and produce work designed to break through, rather than simply maintaining the existing brand system. Additionally, agencies work across categories and geographies, which means they spot cultural shifts, audience patterns and creative approaches that a single brand team, focused on its own category, is less likely to see.”
Juneja backs this opinion, adding, “When you live inside a brand every single day, familiarity quietly becomes the ceiling. You stop questioning things, not because you don’t care, but because you are too close to see them. We walk in without that ceiling.”
While brands are employing various strategies, such as experimentation, competition-tracking, fresh talent and interactions with industry professionals, to avoid creative stagnation within their internal teams, there is another reason that Juneja believes makes agencies irreplaceable.
“Beyond capability, another very important factor is a relationship—one where someone knows your business deeply enough to protect it, but cares enough to challenge it. That doesn’t come with a joining date. It compounds over time. And that compounding is what makes a great agency partnership one of the most undervalued assets a brand can have,” she says.
The shift away from fully outsourced agency models is becoming more pronounced, but not absolute, given the creative advantages that agencies bring. But what will really determine how this equation shapes up is how agencies redefine their value proposition in response to this trend.
The changing agency-client dynamic
With the change in business and marketing environments, brands don’t just expect standout creative output. They want to partner with someone who understands their business, consumer and competitive landscape—parameters that in-house teams inherently fulfil.
In tandem, Juneja says, an agency’s greatest value today does not lie in what it produces but in how it thinks. Agencies cannot just be executors, they have to be thinking partners. This shift in positioning is already underway.
“Agencies across the Indian market are moving away from positioning themselves as the default owner of every deliverable towards a role centred on strategy, creative disruption, specialist execution and burst capacity. Most mid-to-large brands already have internal teams handling day-to-day content. What they still go to agencies for are ideas they would not arrive at on their own and cross-category strategic judgement,” Jansen notes.
Additionally, as AI makes it easier for internal creative teams to scale their production without incurring significant costs, Rao believes that the value of agencies today lies in what AI alone cannot solve for. “This includes cultural intelligence, strategic thinking, design thinking and the ability to connect disparate signals into meaningful brand narratives.”
According to Indraneel Gawde, Chief Business Officer, Schbang, agencies are becoming leaner and putting more dedicated resources behind clients. Furthermore, he says, “They are increasingly offering secondment, where agency people actually sit inside the client’s office. It gives brands the in-house feel, without the tradeoff of losing agency support altogether.”
Even as in-housing continues to take over the advertising and marketing world, most brands recognise the value agencies bring. They maintain that while most creative processes are, or may go in-house, they would want to continue collaborating with external partners on certain projects. Bagaria states, “The balanced model will continue to deliver the best long-term value. Internal teams drive consistency, accelerate workflows and show high alignment with strategic objectives. But on major brand moments, external partners bring fresh thinking, specialised skills and distinct creativity. Selective outsourcing also ensures adaptability and competitiveness without excess overhead.”
The way forward, in this case, is a hybrid model that fosters collaboration between the two teams. It works when both sides come in with the same intent—to make the brand win. But is it even sustainable in the long run?
Desai is positive. “I have seen some collaborative work where the teams joined forces and mounted massive projects that would have been very difficult to pull off individually. The combined efficiency needs to be led from the top, because it doesn’t exist naturally,” he shares.
According to Jansen, a hybrid model works when it operates as an embedded partnership. “The strongest setups are those where the internal team and the agency share briefs, calendars, consumer insights and feedback loops from the start, instead of working in sequence with layered approval stages.”
The next phase
Industry leaders are positive that the in-housing trend is here to stay. With rapid technological advancement and the growing digital ecosystem, brands will continue to take greater control of their creative processes. But as agencies adapt and the hybrid creative model finds firm footing in the industry, this conversation may eventually stop mattering, believes Juneja. “The brands and agencies that are truly winning aren’t spending time debating the model. They are too busy doing great work together.”
As audiences demand faster, more authentic and platform-native content, organisations are rethinking the traditional creative process and building models that bring brands, agencies and production partners closer together than ever before. But the rise of in-house or hybrid models is not a rejection of agencies. In many ways, it is a redefinition of collaboration. The result is a more dynamic creative ecosystem built for the realities of modern media.
