Our is on a mission to help in-house creative agencies do all the things they were created to do in the first place. Things like giving brands greater control over implementing their marketing strategies, realizing cost savings, and achieving greater brand consistency. Think of Inside/Out as a sort of Fulcrum team. Fulcrum teams show up at a situation that needs immediate tending to and use their brains and training to solve the problem at hand. And when they’re done, they leave.
But the situation that needs tending to is your in-house creative agency and the Fulcrum team is composed of client-side veterans, creative directors, account management devotees and an amazing roster of senior creative specialists that can tend to any immediate need you might have. When we’re finished and your in-house agency is humming along marvelously, we leave.
Strategy, design & advertising
Below are a few ways we kick that stuff to the curb.
A brand position is the place a brand occupies in the mind of the consumer relative to the competition. Forget all the rest of the marketing fluff and jargon. If you’re not positioned properly, you’re in for a painful ride. We start here.
Our full-time Creative Directors manage and direct a global network of Creative Director-level freelancers, allowing us to curate the right talent for the job. This deep talent pool means we can do pretty much anything a large creative agency can do but with small agency speed and service.
Everyone says they deliver integrated creative, but almost always they have either an advertising bias or a design bias. We have neither. We believe that a brand is the sum of its parts and that all the parts are important.
We think that our job is to actually help brands succeed. We can’t do that if we’re always trying to sell our clients stuff they don’t need or billing them for layers of unnecessary staff.
We see internal agencies as partners, not competitors. We even started a consulting practice, Fulcrum Inside/Out, to help in-house creative departments become more efficient and effective.
If we produce communication that is safe, it will be ignored. And for marketers, that’s a very unsafe practice. At Fulcrum, it’s a corporate policy to never present ignorable work.
What we do
- Help you determine the right work for in-house agencies and internal creative teams
- Set up an infrastructure that supports great creative work
- Develop a process to move work through creative and marketing teams
- Attract high-level talent to execute the work
- Foster great partnerships with your external agencies
- Build credibility for your company
Capabilities
Internal agency ROI goals
To decide if you even need an in-house team, we’ll dig into your current agency spend with your finance team and find the right opportunities for in-house work. We do this with three things in mind; the overall cost of hiring new talent (including benefits), the cost of hiring an external agency with the same level of talent, and the number of people it will take to execute a specific body of work.
Evaluating a creative team is time consuming, especially if you don’t have direct experience with the roles. We can help assess the skills of your existing team and identify areas that may need some TLC. We will work with your HR team on our skill assessment criteria to ensure we are following your hiring policies and establishing good transitions for your employees and your company.
Depending on the ROI, available talent, and company needs, we’ll help you determine who and what roles you’ll need to reach your goals. Since each business is different, we’ll give you a couple of options to consider so you can approach your new team with confidence.
Bringing in great talent does nothing if there is not an agreed upon system to work between your marketing department and internal creative department. We’ll work with your existing team to find the best process for your creative workflow, considering your brand, channel and product teams so the work gets through as efficiently and effectively as possible.
In our experience, marketing folks often articulate business needs easily, but sometimes struggle when they have to turn them into inspiring creative briefs. We can help you develop and train teams to write compelling creative briefs for seamless execution for your ad campaigns.
After you understand the work that needs to get done and what your dream team will look like, we’ll help you write job descriptions that attract the right talent for your internal team.
Your recruiting team is probably excellent at hiring the right talent for the roles that have made you successful. But It’s a little more difficult to find the right creative talent if your recruiters aren’t familiar with the advertising and branding industry. They may not know exactly what you’re looking for or where to search. We can bring in creative recruiters for high-level positions as well as assist internal recruiters to screen and interview candidates that best fit your goals.
In the past, we’ve had a lot of luck getting internal and outside agencies to not only co-exist but also to help each other in the best interest of the brand. If your current agencies just aren’t working out, we’ll help you find an external agency that can work with your internal teams to deliver integrated campaigns in service of your brand, not theirs.
Depending on your current roster, we can help flesh it out with additional capabilities. Lots of agencies take a collaborative approach in working with brands, and while we won’t run your RFPs for you, we know people that can until you’re ready to take them on yourself.
From the Staples “Easy Button” to Lady Gaga’s David Bowie tribute Grammy performance, our Inside/Out team has done it all. We’ll help coach your team to develop creative ideas that delivers on your KPIs until you are ready to hire that position full time.
So, you go through all this work and you STILL have a team that is unmotivated or underperforming. We believe a strong mission that everyone understands and is behind is absolutely integral to fostering good company culture and creative ideas. We’ll help you develop an actionable and easy to understand mission for your department, making sure it extends beyond a poster in your conference room and is visible in every aspect of the workplace.
We can present what we do to your internal creative agency either in person or virtually. We want to have open conversations that spark inspiration, engage different points of view, and create a better understanding of what a different creative process can do for your company. We’re also willing to speak to your management team to help them understand the benefits and caveats of in-housing.
Giving you org charts and processes will only succeed if they’re actually implemented. If you don’t have a current team that can fill all of those roles to work in-house, we can provide some short term in-house employees with the right skill sets that will help get your model up and running.