For a long time, like most agencies, we treated photography and video as something to brief out. A production house would get a creative brief, disappear for a few weeks, and come back with assets that were technically excellent and, more often than we'd like to admit, slightly off-brand. Eventually we stopped outsourcing it. Here's what changed.
The real cost of outsourcing wasn't the invoice
The obvious cost of outsourced production is the fee. The less obvious cost is everything around it: the brief that has to explain brand context a production house doesn't already have, the turnaround time waiting for a crew's availability, and the revision cycles when the result looks great but doesn't quite sound like the brand it's for.
What changed when production moved in-house
- Turnaround dropped from weeks to days, because there's no external scheduling dependency
- Brand consistency improved, because the same team producing the content already knows the brand — nothing needs re-explaining
- Content and campaign strategy could inform the shoot directly, rather than the shoot happening in isolation from the strategy it was meant to support
- Smaller, more frequent content became viable, instead of only large, expensive productions a handful of times a year
Why this matters more now than it used to
Content volume expectations have grown substantially — across social, campaigns, and website content — while budgets for any single piece of content have generally not grown at the same rate. Producing more, faster, without a proportional increase in cost, is only realistically possible when production sits close to the team planning the content, not separated from it by a briefing document.
What this doesn't mean
This isn't an argument that outsourced production is always the wrong call — for large, occasional hero campaigns, a specialist external crew can still make sense. The point is narrower: for the ongoing, regular content most businesses actually need, in-house production removes friction that outsourcing structurally can't.
Where to start
Our Photography & Video Production service is delivered entirely in-house, connected directly to the same team handling content strategy and campaign delivery — not a separate briefing exercise handed to someone outside the room.
