When organisations set out to improve their in-house creative capability, the conversation usually begins with resources: more designers, more outsourced production, faster tools. All of those are operational questions — and Nicky Russell believes the real issue sits much higher.

As founder of the In-House Agency Leaders Club (IHALC), Russell works with some of the world’s most progressive in-house organisations, helping creative leaders navigate the changing relationship between brands, agencies, technology and production. Her conclusion is uncomfortable for any business that manages creativity from a dashboard: creative stagnation rarely begins inside the creative department. It begins with what the organisation chooses to measure.

You Get the Creativity You Measure

BBS’s recent article The In-House Agency Paradox asked whether increasing content demands inevitably reduce creative quality. Russell believes the framing misses the cause.

“What can drive creative work going stale,” she says, “is when organisations stop looking at creativity as a system and start treating it purely as volume and output.”

For decades, in-house teams have been evaluated against operational metrics: how quickly the work was delivered, how much money was saved, how many assets were produced. Those are legitimate measures — of operations. They are not measures of creativity.

“If that’s all you measure, that’s all you’ll get.”

The organisations producing the strongest work, she argues, recognise that in-house teams create value in many ways: effectiveness, creativity, innovation, talent development and the quality of the work itself. Teams that plateau are usually focused on output over outcomes — and, in her experience, that is how they have been set up and measured.

The Warning Signs Are Cultural Before They Are Creative

Russell’s most practical observation is that stagnation is visible long before anyone notices repetitive design.

“You start hearing fewer challenges to the brief, or there simply isn’t the time and space to properly interrogate it. People stop asking ‘what if?’ and start asking ‘what did we do last time?’. The focus shifts from discovery to delivery, and that’s when template thinking starts to creep in.”

The repeated formats and familiar approaches that eventually show up in the work are, in her view, a symptom rather than the root cause. The real issue is that the right questions aren’t being asked at the start.

What pulls teams back is structural rather than motivational: bringing creative thinking in earlier to help shape the questions rather than just answer them, exposing teams to outside perspectives, investing in learning, and giving people genuine permission to experiment. Sometimes, she adds, it is about reminding the business that not every minute needs to be optimised for output.

The stakes of that reminder are rising. “As AI makes it easier to generate content at scale, the risk isn’t that we run out of content, the risk is that we run out of originality.”

Where the Bottlenecks Actually Appear

For a production audience, one of Russell’s most useful distinctions concerns how mature in-house teams handle the jump from concept to finished assets at scale.

The strongest operations separate the work into two streams: high-craft, high-stakes moments — hero shoots, brand campaigns, major production events — and always-on content, optimisation, localisation and asset deployment. “The bottlenecks usually appear where those two worlds meet.”

On hero work, the constraint is rarely creative capability. It is capacity, decision-making speed, and clarity of roles between internal teams and external partners — when governance is unclear, or too many stakeholders arrive too late, craft suffers. On scaled production, the challenge is system design: how well the idea has been built to travel. A campaign that isn’t designed with modularity in mind from the start leaves teams reverse-engineering assets under pressure.

The best in-house models, she says, treat this as one connected system — the hero idea is designed with adaptation in mind from day one, with a clear operating rhythm between internal teams and external specialists. When that works, an in-house team can carry an idea all the way from concept to execution without losing intent.

Proximity Versus Perspective

So when should an in-house team bring in an outside partner? Russell’s answer reframes the question. “It’s not so much about capacity or capability, it’s about the intent.” Capacity, she notes, is the least interesting reason — a purely operational fix.

The real value of external partners is creative tension: “people who aren’t inside the system, who see the category differently, and who can challenge assumptions that have become invisible internally.” The strongest in-house teams know what they own, and when outside thinking will make the work sharper rather than just bigger.

Her summary of the whole debate is the sharpest line of the interview: “It’s less about in-house versus external — it’s proximity versus perspective.”

The AI Conversation Is Happening in the Wrong Room

On artificial intelligence, Russell is less interested in what the tools can do than in who is deciding how they are used.

“A lot of the conversation and decision-making around AI isn’t actually happening inside creative teams, it’s happening in procurement, finance, technology and transformation functions.” That is understandable — AI is being driven largely as a productivity and efficiency agenda. The risk is that creative work then gets viewed through the same lens.

AI is a powerful accelerator in parts of the system — production, adaptation, versioning and scale — but creativity does not operate like a commodity process. It relies on judgement, taste, context and human craft.

“If everything is treated as if it sits on the same production curve,” she warns, “there’s a risk we compress originality out of the system.”

The question, as she puts it, isn’t just how organisations use AI — it is who is shaping how it’s used, and with what understanding of creativity as a discipline. It is an observation that closely mirrors what BBS has been documenting in its AI in Production series: the value of AI sits in removing production friction, not in substituting for creative judgement.

A Rebalancing, Not a Battle

Asked how the split between internal and external resources plays out over the next few years, Russell resists the framing of a contest.

In-house teams, she believes, are becoming more important — not just in production but in orchestrating how ideas move through the business, increasingly serving as the connective tissue between brand, channels and AI-enabled production systems. External partners aren’t disappearing, but their role is shifting toward bursts of value: big-idea thinking, specialist craft, and external perspective when the work risks becoming too internally consistent. Meanwhile, AI is accelerating the middle layer — adaptation, versioning and localisation — where much of traditional external spend sits.

“It’s not a shift in split per se, rather a shift in roles across the ecosystem.”

Different Markets, One System

Russell also sees a meaningful difference in how in-housing has evolved regionally. In the US, the model is more mature in its integration with marketing operations, with a strong focus on efficiency, scale and transformation. In Europe — particularly the UK — the in-house role has evolved into something more creative and strategic: less production efficiency alone, more genuine creative partnership with the business.

“It’s not that one market is ahead of the other, it’s that they’ve optimised different parts of the same system.”

Measuring What Really Matters

Every organisation measures something. The question Russell leaves us with is whether those measurements reinforce the behaviour the organisation actually wants. If success is defined purely by speed, cost reduction and output, creativity gradually becomes another production metric. If success also includes curiosity, experimentation, learning, effectiveness and creative quality, the conditions change entirely.

Ultimately, organisations get the creativity they choose to value. And the clearest indication of what they truly value can always be found in what they measure.

Editor’s note: In the previous article, Singapore creative director Shawnn Lai argued that creative stagnation is fundamentally a leadership issue — hiring, team design and the intelligent allocation of talent. Nicky Russell reaches the same destination from a different starting point: the organisational systems that surround creative teams. In the final article, BBS brings the two perspectives together.