So curious about “In House ECDs,” esp when there’s also an agency. Do you approve the agencys idea? Have your own competing idea someone else chooses? Go to sets and...what? Anyone have stories?

likesmart
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I’m in-house. Their main job is repping the creative peeps that works here, and helps guide the brand together with our CMOs etc. They are also responsible for the agency relationships and acts as a client from time to time. If you’re a VP as well, you’re most likely the single person in charge of the creative vision for a brand. You decide what gets made in-house and what is outsourced. In our case we do most ourselves, and just bring in agencies to do whatever we don’t have capacity for or don’t want to do, with the exception of the occasional mega brief where we might bring in a shop to pitch ideas alongside us. Your goal as an in-house ECD however, is most likely to attract great talent, and push the internal teams work, so you can make as much in-house a possible.

It’s a bigger job than agency side in my eyes. You have more responsibility, and more impact on how the brand moves forward. It’s still a highly creative role, but it requires some pretty solid politics chops as well.

Hope this makes sense.

likehelpful

A client’s in-house creative director was an insufferable, unappreciated, and unappreciative person who—having done leaflets all their life—suddenly found themselves at the helm of a global campaign. Their MO for getting respect out of people was the remind them how long they had been ‘in the game’, to catastrophize everything and subseeuently position themselves as the only savior, and offer deliberately confusing input to agency partners. Needless to say, they ‘won’ many times despite being obviously wrong on just about everything.

likefunny

“Catastrophize.” Nice.

likefunny

I had a really good experience. In-house CD pushed great creative and fought internally for our work on our behalf. Having them on your side is the move. Both for the business and the work IMO. Treat them like a partner, not a client. Make them an advocate, not an enemy. We invited him/them to brainstorms and they always gave us watch outs and helped us prepare the prezo because they new what made the CMO tick. It was like having a man in the inside or a freelancer who never invoiced.

likehelpful

Worked with several. Their involvement ranged from ones who simply enforced brand standards/provided agencies with tools they needed to do great work, to those who reworked every layout in Photoshop to show us their vision. Can you guess which ones we did the best work for?

like

I’m curious too! Working on putting together an “in house conference” to help answer questions exactly like this.

like

The agency doesn’t necessarily do all the creative work the client company needs. I’ve worked in house a lot of times, we’d have an agency doing the ads and larger brand updates for us, and we worked on the day to day website graphics or in-store printed graphics and social stuff.

It’ll entirely depend on the relationship the agency and the client have, each one will differ. But generally it won’t be the ECD on the client side directing the creative teams on the agency side - otherwise they may as well hire their own internal creative teams for much less. If there’s a client side ECD, they have enough internal creative work to justify that role and they’ll be too busy to bother the agency - agencies are brought in to do work the client itself can’t do, after all. The person reviewing agency work will likely be CD level, or sometimes it’s not the creative team at all. I’ve worked with the marketing or PR teams more and the client design team sticks to doing their own work and doesn’t see mine. The internal creative may know the brand but don’t know the stats behind what the agency’s ad needs to achieve but the internal marketing people will, and they’ll actually commission the ad.

Internal design teams have saved me more often than not - sometimes they get agency work and nitpick it just to be jerks cause you’re in their territory, but when I have non-creative clients fighting me on a design element that I’ve made sure is on brand, the internal design team usually backs me up.

TDLR: you likely won’t hear from the client ECD.

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