In House Agencies Find Themselves

This year, Catch+Release attended the IHAF Conference in Boston. We were honored to meet some amazing talent, and we learned new things that surprised us. Here's what we took away.

When you spend your days curating and licensing content from anywhere and everywhere on the internet, you aren’t surprised by things very often. Searching the never-ending, always-changing flow of content out there teaches you to keep an open mind and expect the unexpected. But when the Catch+Release team attended the In-House Agency Forum (IHAF) annual conference in Boston last week, somehow we weren’t ready for what we found.

One thing that wasn’t a surprise was the work. But if you haven’t checked out in-house work lately, it might be a surprise to you. IHAF's In-House Creativity Awards recognize creative excellence across 38 print and digital categories including advertising, annual reports, corporate identity, email, events, out-of-home, packaging, publications, sales collateral, social media, videos and more. Among the winners this year were the in-house agencies of Coca-Cola, Wework, Highmark Health and Indeed, which won the Best Of Show prize with their beautiful video entitled “New Beginning”.

Check out the Best of Show, Gold Winner, Silver Winner, and Honorable Mention Winner spots below.

For us, the real surprises came after the awards were handed out. Cliff Stevens, Managing Director at Liberty Mutual, took us through the business plan of Copper Giants, Liberty’s in-house agency that has spun off to become its own LLC. Not only do they create a lot of the Liberty Mutual spots you see on TV in-house, they have started taking on projects for outside clients, including these delightful ads for Harpoon brewing company.

We learned about how CVS Health brought three separate creative organizations together to create a new agency called Heart Haus. Their first integrated campaign drove 3.7 million incremental COVID vaccinations. And they also won an Emmy for their video entitled “Delivering Hope”. Yes, in-house agencies are winning Emmys now. Surprised?

Then there was Comcast’s in-house agency. They call themselves Good Kid. They’ve got “kids” in fifty cities and a dozen states. And their mission is to “think big, drive the business and make work that mom wants to put on the fridge.” And boy, must their moms be proud. Their “Definitely Not Watching Basketball” campaign is top notch.

The 2022 In-House Agency of the Year (and our biggest surprise of the conference) went to WINDOWSEAT, Delta’s in-house creative studio. In 2021, they helped the company achieve its mission to connect the world and get people traveling safely again. They imagined touch-free ways to navigate an airport. They got Delta up on TikTok. And they generated over 5,000 deliverables, elevating employee stories and saving Delta millions. Our favorite was their Someone, Somewhere program that found rural artisans from Delta’s destinations to make and sell sustainable travel products. Found Content can save the world!

Delta Air Lines Wins In-House Agency of the Year

So what is the secret sauce that makes all these in-house agencies great? Each one had a different way of doing things, but all agreed on these basic truths: you have to have a purpose. It must be true. And your employees have to feel it first. One of the presenters quoted Denise Lee Yohn, author of What Great Brands Do: “You can’t expect your employees to deliver the benefits to customers that they don’t experience or embrace themselves.”

Telling brand stories is hard, but with creative people being led by a guiding brand mission, great things are possible. Thanks for having us, IHAF. See you next year.