Brands are taking creative control back. What happens to agencies’ seat at the table?

New Delhi: When Tata Motors unveiled the Sierra, one of the season’s biggest auto launches, it did not follow the usual agency-led playbook. The company created the campaign internally, working with a production house, without appointing an external creative agency.

The move signals a larger shift brewing beneath the surface of Indian advertising, as brands pull creative leadership and always-on execution closer to the business. 

What this means for agencies, and whether it is good or bad for creativity, is now being debated across boardrooms and agency floors. 

Industry leaders told BestMediaInfo that in-housing is here to stay for speed-led work, but it is also forcing agencies to either sharpen their strategic role or risk being reduced to execution partners.

When BestMediaInfo.com spoke to Tata Motors Chief Commercial Officer Vivek Srivatsa about the advertising and marketing plans for the Sierra, he explained why the company chose to develop the campaign in-house. “Sometimes creative agencies don’t have the pulse of the market or of the business issue. Rather than spending time wrestling with them to arrive at a creative solution, it’s better that we do it ourselves. It has nothing to do with cost. It’s only about the creative route and the purity of execution,” he said.

The main film was shot partly in South Africa for scale and logistics, and partly in South Mumbai. The music was by composer Kalmi, a long-time Tata collaborator. Srivatsa said the internal team is now confident enough to take on the role more often. “Our creative team is as good as any agency team now,” he said.

Tata Motors is not alone. Over the past year and a half, India’s biggest brands have been rewriting their relationship with agencies. A growing number of marketers are pulling core creative work in-house. The shift is changing how creativity is built, controlled and deployed.

A decade ago, agencies were expected to do everything under one roof. Strategy, films, print, digital and extensions sat together. That model is under strain today. Platforms have multiplied and formats have fragmented.

“It honestly depends, but one of the main reasons this shift is happening is that it is no longer possible for a single agency to service all of a client’s needs the way it could about a decade ago. At that time, there were fewer platforms, fewer formats, and far less specialisation,” said Devaiah Bopanna, Co-founder, Moonshot.

Marketing is now spread across influencer ecosystems, daily social content, platform-native videos, and community-led engagement. That has pushed brands to build internal capabilities for work that is constant and always-on. Many now have in-house social, video and content teams running their own channels.

Still, this is not a clean break from agencies. The relationship is becoming more selective.

“Brands typically turn to external agencies when they need specialist expertise that does not exist internally,” Bopanna said. He added, “A significant amount of ideation and execution still happens externally, particularly when subject-matter expertise is required, such as large-scale films, complex production or high-budget campaigns.”

The shift is also being driven by speed, scale and business alignment. Few companies capture this logic better than Swiggy.

“We don’t really have agency partners in the traditional sense. We work with agencies primarily for social. Beyond social, almost all our work is done in-house,” said Mayur Hola, Vice President - Brand, Swiggy, in a podcast with BestMediaInfo.com

Hola said Swiggy steps out to agencies only a couple of times a year, including collaborations with Moonshot, when something “special” is required. “Partly because they’re genuinely very good at what they do and partly because they’re even crazier than we are,” he said.

For a consumer tech business that evolves fast, external management can become difficult to coordinate across multiple businesses. “This is a consumer tech business that changes almost every quarter. Trying to manage all of that through one or several agency partners would be extremely expensive,” Hola said.

From the agency side, there is a growing view that in-housing is not a sudden shock. It is a correction the industry helped create.

“I’ve been in this business for nearly three decades, and I’ve watched agencies slowly turn into glorified production houses,” said Sanjeev Jasani, former Chief Operating Officer, Cheil (India & South West). “We became order-takers instead of strategic partners. We stopped challenging clients and started just saying, ‘yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir,” he added.

Simi Sabhaney, Chief Growth Officer, dentsu International India, echoed the same direction, with a sharper framing of what is changing. “It’s less of a threat and more of a correction. For years, many agencies allowed themselves to become execution factories. In-housing really is brands reclaiming operational control, not rejecting agencies altogether,” she said.

Sabhaney said the work moving in-house is speed-led and platform-specific. The bigger question is what agencies do next. “In-housing is exposing weak agency models more than it is disrupting strong ones,” she said.

Even as brands build internal capabilities, few believe they can, or should, do everything themselves. Jasani put it plainly, “Running creative internally sounds great until you realise you need fresh thinking,” adding that internal teams can start thinking alike inside the same brand bubble.

That is where external partners still matter. “Agencies can bring that brutal honesty. ‘This campaign is crap and here’s why.’ Also, agencies have cross-category experience. They’ve seen what works in FMCG and can apply those insights to fintech,” he noted.

Sabhaney said agencies still have an edge in the kind of thinking that needs distance and tension. “The best ideas often emerge from disagreement. Agencies are structurally positioned to challenge brand comfort, internal hierarchies and consensus thinking,” she said.

If execution keeps moving inside brands, agencies face a clear choice. Compete on speed and volume, or move up the value chain. Sabhaney framed the shift as moving “from doing to directing.”

Jasani put it even more bluntly. “Stop trying to be everything to everyone. Focus on the big, meaty problems that keep CMOs awake at night. Let someone else worry about the daily Instagram posts,” he said.

For brands, in-housing is becoming the default for proximity, speed and iteration. For agencies, the opportunity is to protect what internal teams struggle to replicate: perspective, provocation and independent judgement.