Should You Build In-House or Hire an Agency?

The Take: In-house wins on average, but the gap is not the whole story. Businesses running marketing in-house score 14.4 points higher on New Rebellion's Marketing Score than agency-led businesses in our scored dataset. That is a real gap, not a rounding error. But averages hide the businesses doing it badly on both sides, so the model you pick matters less than whether you run it properly.

In New Rebellion's scored dataset of Australian businesses, in-house teams average a Marketing Score of 64.8 against 50.4 for agency-led businesses, a 14-point gap. The sample is directional rather than a controlled study, and it should shift how you weigh the decision.

Most marketing waste starts with the wrong delivery model, not bad ideas. In-house gives you control, consistency and deep context. Agencies sell scalability, speed and specialist skill. Most businesses want both and properly commit to neither.

We scored 155 Australian businesses across our benchmark dataset with a clear marketing team model tagged: in-house, agency-led or hybrid. The pattern held across industries, not just in one vertical.

The hybrid figure is a curiosity, not a conclusion. Five businesses is too small a sample to lean on, so treat it as a footnote worth watching rather than a strategy. The in-house versus agency comparison is the one with enough weight to act on, and even that carries a wide agency-led sample gap (16 businesses), so read it as a strong signal, not gospel.

Methodology note: Marketing Score is New Rebellion's composite score, a weighted average across six dimensions (Digital, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention, Brand, Data) benchmarked against Australian businesses. These figures come from Done-status Australian businesses in our scored dataset with a marketing team model recorded, n=155 total. This is a directional read from real scored data, not a randomised controlled study. See how the scoring works at How We Score.

Australia's advertising market grew 5.2% to $28.9 billion in 2025, according to WPP Media's This Year Next Year report. That is a lot of spend chasing a decision most business owners make once and never revisit. The businesses in our dataset scoring highest treated the model as a live decision, reviewed annually, not a one-off structural choice made in year one and left alone.

In-house works when marketing sits close to the core of how you make money. It suits businesses where brand, product and sales need to move as one, where you are investing in capability for the long run and where leadership can drive strategy and execution at the same time.

This is not a hypothetical benefit. Procter & Gamble's media planning and buying in-housing in its fabric care category saved the company more than US$65 million in a single year in the US market, while increasing reach, according to WARC. That is proof the model compounds at scale. Most Australian businesses are not P&G, but the mechanism, control over planning and buying decisions without an agency margin sitting between you and the media, is the same one that drives our dataset's 14-point gap.

Explore the Atlas breaks that gap down by industry if you want to see where your sector sits before deciding.

Agencies earn their fee when you need capability you do not have and cannot justify hiring for permanently. That means testing a new channel, bridging a skills gap while you build internally or getting an outside read from people who are not inside your org chart's politics.

The tradeoff is turnover. According to industry data reported by the ANA, advertising has the second-highest staff turnover rate of any industry at roughly 30% a year, behind only tourism. Every handover on your account resets context. The strategist who understood your business six months ago is gone, and the next one is starting from your onboarding deck.

In-house fails when the team is under-resourced and gets buried. 88% of in-house teams report increased workload after bringing marketing in-house, according to Superside's 2025 report on in-house creative teams, and internal bias can quietly slow down anything that challenges how things have always been done.

Agencies fail for a different reason. This is not an execution problem. It is an ownership problem. No one internally owns the outcome, briefs shift mid-project, and turnover breaks continuity right when a campaign needs consistency most.

Most of Australia has already stopped picking one lane. 78% of Australian marketers now run a hybrid model, combining in-house and agency talent, according to the In-House Agency Council's 2023 study with Kantar, the most detailed research on the local market to date. Neither pure in-house nor pure agency is the default anymore.

The decision usually reduces to three variables: control, speed and budget. Pick the two that matter most to your business right now, then accept the tradeoff on the third.

Control + Budget = In-house. You want ownership and efficiency and can accept slower movement. Works best when product, sales and brand are already aligned. The risk is an under-resourced team that cannot move fast when the market does.

Speed + Budget = Agency. You need fast execution without time to hire and onboard. Works best for testing new channels or entering new markets. The risk is strategic drift if no one internally is steering the relationship.

Control + Speed = Hybrid. You want pace with active ownership of the work. Works best during growth phases or high-stakes periods. The risk is budget pressure and internal teams stretched thin covering both.

The choice is not about doing everything internally or handing everything off. It is about matching the model to the problem you actually have. In-house builds long-term capability. Agencies deliver speed and specialist execution when you need it. Our data says in-house wins on average, by 14.4 points, but the businesses at the top of every model share one thing: someone senior owns the outcome and reviews whether the model is still right, not just whether the invoices are getting paid.

Not sure where your business sits against the Australian benchmark on this or any of the six scoring dimensions? Run your business through Hub and see your Marketing Score against businesses like yours.

Is in-house marketing better than an agency?

On average yes. In New Rebellion's scored dataset, in-house businesses score 14.4 points higher on Marketing Score than agency-led ones. The sample is directional rather than a controlled study and execution quality matters more than the model itself.

At what size should a business bring marketing in-house?

There is no single Australian dollar threshold that fits every business. The right test is capability, not budget alone. If marketing is core to how you make money and leadership can drive both strategy and execution, in-house tends to compound. If you need speed or a skill you cannot yet justify hiring for, an agency or hybrid model is usually the better fit.

Why do agencies have such high staff turnover?

Advertising has the second-highest turnover rate of any industry, around 30% a year according to ANA-reported figures, driven by burnout, heavy workloads and limited progression at junior and mid-level roles. For clients, that means every handover resets context on your account.

What is a hybrid marketing model?

A hybrid model combines an in-house team with external agency support, typically using the in-house team for strategy, brand and always-on execution while agencies cover specialist skills or overflow capacity. It is now the most common setup in Australia, with 78% of marketers reporting some form of hybrid arrangement.