Finding your advantage:The trade-offs of in-house, agency & fractional roles
2025 has brought a lot of change to businesses. Marketing departments have seen cutbacks, restructuring, and now have to deliver brand growth with less. But the demand for high-quality, stand-out marketing and creative work is still strong. So how do brands continue to scale during turbulent times? How do they continue to cut through to consumers and make an impact when one of the key tools brands are using to accomplish this is AI—which inherently can create copycat, forgettable, and derivative work?
Many quickly point to going fully in-house, theoretically “saving money”, but we’ve previously covered how in-house teams can be limited when it comes to bandwidth and creative thinking – as smaller teams are forced to wear many hats, quality and creativity can suffer as burnout builds. Usually an over burdened team is doing all of the block and tackling design and on-premise events to email campaigns, web design, and video creation, there’s a lot to juggle! You don’t want your specialists to be downgraded to generalists.
AdAge has covered the rise of “fractional” roles to help with CMO transitions and marketing team shifts. Fractional Roles seem like a new solution, enabling access to very experienced staffing that brands could not typically afford enabling them to really level up their strategy.
We believe that brands can have some of the same benefits on the creative side as well. Through an integrated agency partnership, or a project-based, ongoing relationship with an experienced creative team, you can expand your team and resources by gaining access to a team of strategists, designers, and producers who know how to collaborate and deliver. You might even call them a “fractional agency team”. Instead of bloated AORs or the overhead costs of building out an entire design department in-house, the right agency can work as an extension of your core team. They aren’t “just another vendor” when they are intimately familiar with your business goals and work with you to offer scalable solutions and deliver niche expertise on demand.
For brands, the benefits are clear:
- Protect internal teams from burnout by taking on heavy lifts while they focus on the block and tackling
- Access to specialized expertise without permanent overhead
- Stay cost-efficient with predictable investments, no hidden retention or benefits costs
- Keep creativity sharp with a cross-industry perspective
- Scale with agility as business cycles shift (flexibility is everything!)
The strongest solution isn’t about choosing in-house or fractional support but about building partnerships with integrated teams that will bring out the best on both sides.
