Insights from Ben Hughes on building a high performing in-house agency

This week we were thrilled to welcome Ben Hughes VP, Creative at Squarespace from New York to our member’s meeting last week. It was an incredibly insightful session with over 50 attendees and lots of golden nuggets for our IHAC members to takeaway.

Here are some of the key insights from the session…

Squarespace is a website design and marketing agency based in New York City with over 6,500 employees worldwide. They have over 61 people in their in-house agency: Art Directors, Business Affairs Managers, Copywriters, Designers, Directors, Editors, Motion Designers, Operations Managers, Photographers, Producers, Retouchers. They sit across 6 teams: Business Affairs, Campaigns, Content/Editorial, Design, Photo/Studio, Production/Operations.
They don’t have account management as a ‘team’ as they don’t consider themselves an ‘agency’ as such. However, they do assign a producer at the beginning of every job to be the stakeholder contact, but don’t have an account function. Their philosophy is to have a relationship of equals.
Any Squarespace work you see anywhere has been conceptualised by the team and mostly produced by them too.
Ben is a big believer in how the power of creativity should not be underestimated. Creativity can help you grow your business, and create incredible value for the company. But unfortunately for many organisations creative work often goes overlooked or under valued because it's difficult to quantify in terms of financial rewards.

Ben commented,

“My strong belief is that creatives deserve a seat at the c-suite table”.

He also went on to talk about the value of brand initiatives and how important they are if we want workplaces to stay innovative and performance driven, having decision makers who believe in this is key.

“You need people in your organisation who are willing to take chances with creative ideas. This allows you to explore new possibilities and achieve brand fame”.

IHAC Member Q&A:

Adrian Mudrazija (Creative at Sanitarium) asked: “Where was Squarespace at with their in-house team when you joined and how have you evolved it to now and what's the next move?” Ben said:

“Squarespace started off as only having a brand design function, reliant on freelancers for big creative campaigns with not much production muscle in place. It was all about recruitment. Today, we have strong leaders across all 6 functions. We’re very restless as a team. Once we master something we are very excited about moving to the next thing.”

Emil Mathias (Brand and Media Manager, Betfair) asked: “As something of a challenger brand (although now successfully a bit of a leader) what advice do you have to challenge bigger brands creatively?” Ben said:

‘Beat them with ideas”.

Chris Maxwell, Lution asked: “How do you build a creative culture?” Ben said:

“The work is your best recruiting tool. We have a CEO and founder that likes and believes in the work, and the work works! This creates a reinforcing mood and portfolio of work that attracts people”.

We also had Charles Bory - Chief Operations & In-House Agency Strategist from New York join us at the last minute to provide valuable insights to the session.

Thank you to Ben Hughes for providing your incredible insight to our members.

The IHAC Team