Big advertisers have rejected what they call "hysteria" around the scale of reported moves by brands to bring their advertising operations in-house.
The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) launched its State of Advertising report at the Cannes Lions showing major multinational advertisers are increasingly satisfied with their activity designed to drive consumers to take action or purchase but give much more mixed reviews on the effectiveness of their awareness messages.
The study is based on an online survey of more than 100 WFA members from 70 companies across 15 categories, including consumer packaged goods, automotive, food, alcohol, tech and finance. Collectively, respondent companies spend roughly $115 billion on media and marketing.
Half those surveyed said data was an area that would increase significantly, with programmatic in second scoring 27% on the same measure and influencer marketing attracting support from 11%.
"Conversely, big advertisers seem to reject the current hysteria around the scale of the move to in-housing," the report says.
"They cited only one area where they would in-house more than outsource, low-cost, fast creative executions. Other areas likely to be affected by in-housing included short-form content marketing and influencer marketing."
Agencies are likely to benefit from increased spending in areas such as traditional media buying where 45% expect to outlay significantly more, and 30% to spend somewhat more in the next 12 months.
Other areas likely to be less impacted by in-housing include big ticket creativity, traditional media planning, creative strategy and programmatic search, all of which had more than 50% of predicting they would spend more externally.
Stephan Loerke, CEO of WFA, says the industry is often prone to overstating sweeping new trends.
"This (study) is a useful bellwether of what a lot of the world’s top brands really think," he says.
"There is great optimism in terms of the perceived effectiveness of some direct response inventory but brands increasingly face the problems of clutter, ad blocking, declining reach and trust in advertising.
"There is also a stark reminder that, for all the talk of in-housing, our agency partners will remain critical partners in achieving brands’ goals."
The survey found that clutter and ad blocking seen to be the main obstacles to advertising effectiveness, as this chart shows:
Other factors cited included a general dislike of advertising, short-term profit optimisation, a dramatic increase in short-term efficiency metrics, over reliance on efficiency-based practices versus focusing on effectiveness, the assumption that scale equals effectiveness and the extreme fragmentation of consumer’s free time.
The trend of in-housing has ramped up in recent months, with Sportsbet becoming the most recent major brand to manage its creative capabilities internally.
Australian department store David Jones has also taking a large sum of its creative in-house, with AdNews revealing earlier this year that the brand intented to do the same with its media account.
Carlton United Breweries has also developed a bespoke unit to service its digital advertising strategy, while Woolworths created its own in-house team led by former Adshel boss Mike Tyquin, Cartology. The team would service all owned media sales for the supermarket chain.
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