The smartest in-house teams we work with share one thing. They know how and when to use external partners.
There are lots of reasons an in-house model is considered by brands. The success of brands like Airbnb doing the same is an enticing thought for a savvy CFO. Sometimes the costs of external partners don’t stack up. Just as often it’s a marketing director’s desire to do something different.
In-housing can work well for a lot of things. Day-to-day platform execution. Anywhere a brand speaks directly to a customer and creates or manages a community. Customer data ownership. The economics can be favourable and the control closer to hand. The team that owns the brand should arguably own the work that touches it most.
It’s often not as easy as that though. The brands that get this right don’t try to do everything themselves. They build excellent in-house teams and keep a small number of external partners on the bits that get worse, not better, when you do them in isolation.
These are the five we keep getting brought back for.
Strategy
Sometimes it is difficult to take a step back and get perspective when you’re in the thick of it.
The brand and how to market it becomes the world and this can be quite insular. An outside strategic voice once or twice a year, working from the same numbers but without the blinkers, is one of the most useful external voices.
Measurement
You cannot mark your own homework.
External measurement, especially MMM and incrementality work is invaluable to force long term thinking and clear decision making. When COmpass tells a brand that 90% of their paid brand search would have happened anyway it removes opinion from the next steps, particularly important when there are siloed channel owners in brand teams.
Audit
Same principle.
The performance world is changing at an extraordinary rate. Bidding strategies that worked in 2023 are a problem in 2026. The team adjusts to platform changes, but with the rate of change no one remembers why the bidding strategy is set the way it is a few months down the line. It’s very hard for the team in the day to day to spot these issues.
A proper external audit, once a year, pays for itself. We’ve yet to do one that didn’t.
Inspiration and industry pace
You can hire the best performance marketer in the country, but after time working only on one brand their context narrows.
The pattern recognition that comes from watching the same platform behave differently across CPG, beauty, fashion, fintech and DTC is not something you can easily learn from reading in a newsletter (even one as good as this!).
Add to that the pace of platform change. Meta, Google, TikTok are shipping meaningful updates almost every week. Keeping up is a full-time job, so an external partner whose role is to see across the industry and share that knowledge is beneficial for most brands.
Cross-category learnings
The patterns that win in one category can be transferred to a totally unrelated category.
We see it constantly, across creative formats, retention mechanics, measurement frameworks. A pattern proves itself in one category, then resurfaces in another. Inside one brand, you see the trends slowly. Outside, working across twenty, you see it fast and you can hand it over.
What to keep inside, what to keep outside
Inside: the work that’s daily, brand-specific, and benefits from speed and ownership. Execution, day-to-day platform management, brand-led creative direction and community.
Outside: the work that needs distance, breadth, or pace. Strategic refresh. Measurement and incrementality. Audit. Cross-category pattern recognition. The platform learning curve no single team can keep up with.
If you’re considering bringing elements of marketing in-house in 2026, do it. Done right the benefits and the control can be worth having.
If you’re bringing elements of marketing in-house in 2026, do it. The benefits are real. Just make sure you’ve decided what isn’t coming with you.
