“The question they are asking is: how do we influence everything, but not DO everything.”
Emma Sexton, Founder & Partnerships Lead at the Inside Out® Community, brings years of experience supporting and scaling in-house creative teams. In this exclusive interview from the 2025 Global Benchmark Report for Content Production, she shares her perspective on the biggest challenges, budget shifts, AI adoption, and how in-house models are evolving.
A Conversation with Emma Sexton, Founder & Partnerships, Inside Out® Community
Q. What do you see as the three biggest challenges for in-house teams in 2025?
Emma Sexton: Firstly, dealing with the ever-increasing opportunities for brand encounters and creating the assets needed to support those interactions.
Secondly, evolving a brand fit for the future where it is impossible to be static and police all the materials being created. Add to that all the other opportunities that now exist for a brand, such as responding to cultural moments, or influencer partnerships for example, where there is no existing brand playbook.
And lastly, being able to move yourself into a position where you can take full advantage of all that technology can bring. In-house creative teams are always in demand by the rest of the business so making space and time to implement new technology or ways of working is going to be difficult. Being able to be proactive instead of reactive will remain an ongoing challenge.
Q. Do you see budgets increasing, decreasing or staying about the same going into 2025?
Emma Sexton: Last year our Inside Out® community was really suffering the effects of redundancies and budget cuts, but this year has started with much more optimism and budgets unlocked for hiring and building up those teams again.
With all the recent business stories debating the longer-term impact of businesses who focus too heavily on brand performance rather than brand building. For example, the recent struggle with Nike focusing too much on performance marketing, versus the success McCain’s Oven Chips have had with brand building that helped them keep market share while allowing them to increase their prices, has been well documented in the business press. It is proof that lack of investment in brand building has consequences.
Investment in brand building versus performance marketing needs to be an equal balance and budgets will need to be adjusted accordingly, so I am hopeful that this year the C-Suite will start to understand the value of brand to their business in a way they haven’t before.
Q. If in-house teams had extra budget, where would they spend it?
Emma Sexton: It has to be these top three priorities.
The first being on resources, as I don’t know a single in-house creative team who is expected to deliver less this year.
The next would be training. Soft skills are in as much demand as technical expertise, and we have a real industry gap right now in understanding the craft of the execution. Just because you have great talent in your creative team, they will not always have all the right skills and experience for the ever-changing needs of the brand.
Lastly, it would be creative testing. There are so many accessible tools out there, so we no longer need to guess if the creative work is going to land with your audience or cause a catastrophic fall out. The added benefit is that it really helps to manage complex stakeholder feedback too.
Q. To what extent are you seeing teams incorporating automation and AI into their content production and any lessons learned?
Emma Sexton: A lot of this technology is baked into the tools they are already using rather than being something separate that they are implementing. AI and automation are big topics in their own right so it is difficult to generalize. Whilst AI and automation brings a huge opportunity to the table, it is not always the right thing to do, nor does it always make something better or more efficient.
The hype is over; now it is time to be smart with the tech. When it comes to creative craft the technology is not really there yet. The question that is emerging for me is will the technology ever replace the craft? In-house creative teams are restricted by the existing technology and decisions happening within the business, so they do not have the flexibility that an agency may have to implement fast changes to systems and processes. But with this comes time to really experiment and play with these new tools outside of the day-to-day by forming their own ‘tiger’ teams. Sometimes, not being an early adopter can be an advantage. The rate of change for all of these technologies is moving phenomenally quickly. It is not always a bad thing to be a ‘laggard’ in the adoption, as you get to learn from others’ mistakes.
Q. How are in-house production models changing and evolving as we enter 2025?
Emma Sexton: There has been a growing theme for a while for in-house creative teams to move as much of their ‘business as usual’ assets away from the team. Many of our Inside Out® community members have a focus this year on finding ways to enable the rest of the business with creative support.
The question they are asking is ‘how do we influence everything, but not DO everything’. Technology, AI, Automation and Offshoring all play a role here, and it really is dependent on the assets and the markets you need to reach. I am always reluctant to generalize as the makeup of in-house creative teams varies so widely.
But what is a common focus for all of them is the need to keep creative strategy and thinking in-house, which is a complete 180-degree turn from where in-house teams started decades ago, which was to serve the creative production needs of the business.
Q. Which services do you think are best to offshore and why?
Emma Sexton: It is fair to assume that an in-house creative team would outsource the low value work such as resizing and versioning, but offshoring is becoming far more sophisticated. Offshoring is now another option for teams who are not able to increase head count and need support with the ebbs and flows in the demands of their team across the year. Offshoring can really power your creative capabilities up at times of need.
Q. How important is sustainability/DEI when selecting an external partner?
Emma Sexton: We have to remember that in-house creative teams are part of bigger businesses and with that comes the rules and regulations that corporations have to follow including being ESG compliant. As these organizations start to integrate ESG reporting, they will be demanding vendors and suppliers are compliant too.
Want more insights like this?
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