The benefits of outsourcing for brands looking to insource their campaigns

While it may seem like a contradiction of terms, brands that are keen to insource their campaigns might want to consider outsourcing as well. Huh, you wonder?

Large brands have been evolving their commercial relationships with the big media holding companies for quite some time. As far back as 2018, the IAB reported that 45% of brands were actively looking to in-house programmatic buying.

More recently, a survey by the World Federation of Advertisers found that 57% of brands have established an in-house agency of some shape or form, and that most of those internal agencies include in-house creative services. Fifty percent have a centralized creative services studio for the corporation.

To be sure, there’s a lot to be gained by in-housing this critical strategic work. Overall costs are lower when you don’t need to pay an agency for every single creative or message you need. More strategically, experimenting with new models, owning the strategy and media buying will make your brand stronger. All of that insight and knowledge is kept within your walls, informing every aspect of your company, from better campaigns and marketing, to product development and customer care initiatives.

And, it’s worth pointing out, your employees who studied communications in school and earned MBAs in marketing are motivated by this type of work, and that means that you, as a brand, benefit from the continuity of a stable team and a deeper level of institutional knowledge.

But what about the ad operations (ad ops) portion of the business? Who among your staff are you going to assign to setting up campaigns, chasing down creatives, managing tags, troubleshooting pixels, creating reports and optimizing performance? It’s not likely the type of work the people you recruited and trained had in mind when they joined your company. You can assign and train your team to do these tasks, but you may find that your recruitment and training costs go up (and campaigns slow down as you try to replace adops personnel who got bored with the position).

Then there is the added challenge of finding people with these skill sets in your area. If you’re a DTC brand in Cincinnati or an established brand in Pittsburgh, you can benefit from a pool of employees who cut their teeth working with or leading the marketing teams of other brands. But finding candidates with tactical adops skills are likely to be few and far between.

Outsourcing ad ops to Paragon Digital Services

For many, the key to in-housing marketing and advertising is finding a reliable company, like Paragon Digital Services, to whom you can outsource the detailed-oriented but critical, business of ad ops.

We all know that for a campaign to truly succeed, ad ops needs to get a thousand different details perfect: site tagging and set-up, testing and optimization, real-time reporting and analytics.

Our teams are detailed oriented, and our internal processes are designed to monitor campaigns 24/7. It’s what we do, day in and day out, and we’re set up to ensure continuity in your technical operations, even in the event that we experience staff turnover. We take on the responsibility of managing your campaign details, ensuring that every team member is up-to-speed on your campaign goals, and managing it to your KPI’s – so your team won’t need to.

By freeing your team from the burden of trafficking and reporting on campaigns, you’ll have a lot more staff to do the work that directly affects your bottom line: interacting with customers, finding ways to grow the business, and thinking about the next big opportunity for your company.

And that’s why I say that the best way to succeed with in-housing is to make outsourcing part of the solution.

Get in touch to discuss how this may work for you.