Playbook: In-house, hire or outsource creative services?

Enterprise marketing teams run always-on creative engines where every concept becomes dozens of variations and hundreds of assets once you factor in platforms, markets and personalization.

Caught in this whirlwind? Then, you might wonder: Should we hire more in-house creatives, grow our freelancer network or outsource creative design services to a top subscription-based company to keep up with demand?

The old answers no longer make sense. It’s hard work to find the right team members. Traditional agencies tend to be expensive, slow and inflexible. Freelancers, sadly, can be unreliable and disconnected from your brand identity and goals.

An AI-powered creative service like Superside can help you overcome your scale, speed and consistency challenges without the extra headcount or the stress associated with expensive agencies or unreliable freelancers.

This playbook outlines five practical steps to help you confidently select the creative solution that supports your enterprise’s growth, creative efficiency and long-term success.

Today’s fast-paced digital marketing world demands infinitely more creative. With more channels and formats, faster ad turnover and lower-than-ever audience attention spans, the need for ever-fresh creative assets has exploded.

It’s no wonder enterprise creatives are stretched to the limit and suffering from creative burnout. According to Superside’s “Overcommitted” report:

• 76% of creative leaders report that they personally felt burned out in the past year.
• Nearly 80% say their teams are as burnt out as they are.
  

Every creative team I’ve overseen from DoorDash to Klaviyo, even here at Superside, is maxed out and battling burnout as a group and as individuals.

Jen RappCMO at Superside

Teams point to three main pressure points again and again:1. Workload outpaces headcount

On the enterprise level, once-optional channels are now essential. Every digital marketing campaign requires a blend of static and motion assets, paid and organic formats, various dimensions, and truly standout ad and landing page creative.

Thanks to AI-powered analytics tools, feedback loops are shorter than ever. This means marketing and design teams can (and should) iterate at the speed of light to keep their brands competitive. Sprints pile up, and as deadlines multiply, senior talent spend all their time simply keeping production on track.

Our “Overcommitted” report also confirms that demand for creative services has surged in the past year. 88% of creative leaders say they lack the necessary resources to maintain the required pace.

The state of in-house creative teams

What 200+ creative leaders had to say

There’s a reason we called it the Overcommitted Report.
But, is there light at the end of the carpal tunnel?

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2. Timelines are tighter

The digital ad landscape has undergone significant changes in the past few years. Brands must now rapidly respond to changing trends, data and audience behaviors with fresh creative content across a wide range of channels.

The rise of short-form video, omnichannel campaigns and AI-powered creative workflows has amplified the need for speed. Every second counts in the race to win customer attention.

The result? Creative production teams are pushed for rapid turnarounds and last-minute changes, and projects that once spanned weeks must now be wrapped up in days.

With 55% of projects labeled as “high priority” (see the “Overcommitted” report), overwhelmed creatives struggle to determine what matters most. In many instances, it isn’t an option to say “no” to tasks or projects. In 35% of cases, the push for speed comes straight from the top.

3. Quality is non-negotiable

Competitive pressure and goldfish-level customer attention spans mean ambitious enterprise brands can no longer afford mediocre creative. Their teams need to consistently produce high-quality, on-brand assets that strengthen brand equity and meet performance goals. One misstep can translate into a massive lost opportunity.

In the past, brands could rely on traditional agencies and freelancers to expand their capacity, but these solutions no longer tick all the boxes.

Freelancers tend to be unreliable, while traditional creative agencies are often slow and costly. Neither can effectively deliver on the scale that’s now required. And while AI can help creatives produce assets relatively fast, the technology only gets you so far. Exceptional creative talent is still required.

The answer to winning in this busy, lightning-fast marketing world isn’t a single solution or step.

It’s a more flexible creative model that can rapidly expand capacity, tap into specialized skills for top-quality creative execution when required, keep in-house leaders focused on strategic business growth, and doesn’t push creatives to the point where they burn out or resign.

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Does your enterprise team need to pick up creative speed and maintain quality, consistency and control?

This playbook is designed to help you move faster without the usual trade-offs. It offers clear guidance on when to hire creative teams, when to partner with an agency, and how to maintain sky-high standards as you scale your creative output.

Use this guide to:

• Decide when to hire creative team members, when to go the freelance route and when to collaborate with a creative services outsourcing partner like Superside.
• Determine which projects stay in-house and which are best outsourced.
• Establish a straightforward production process and workflow that builds stakeholder confidence.
• Build a scalable design team and protect your creative leaders’ focus on deep, strategic work that drives business results.
• Quickly access and bring in specialist skills without lengthy recruitment delays.
• Ensure consistent brand quality and adherence to brand guidelines across all channels, formats and markets.

Feel free to read the playbook from start to finish or jump straight to the section that fits your current needs. Either way, you’ll walk away with a practical plan ready to implement immediately.

🚀 Steal this framework: Pinpoint creative skill and capacity gaps [Dowloadable template included]

If you’ve ever tried to build a creative team, you’ll know that it can take months to find and onboard the right talent.

U.S. research indicates that recruitment timelines for creative roles have increased by up to 11 weeks, a 57% rise compared to 2021. For entry-level positions, recruitment and onboarding average around five weeks, while it can take up to eight weeks to secure talent for managerial roles.

Before you take this tedious and labor-intensive step, make sure you truly need someone in the position. Remember: The recruitment process doesn’t just involve the search process; you also need to train, develop and retain the individual.

Nail the talent acquisition process with these six steps:

1. Define the role by the business results you hope to achieve: Keen to increase leads with better video content? Want to drive eCommerce sales with standout Instagram content? Pause and focus on the outcomes you want your new team member to deliver rather than just listing tasks. Clear, result-oriented roles attract motivated candidates who understand what success looks like.
2. Map responsibilities to your actual pipeline: Ground the role in real production needs. List the creative assets you’d like this person to deliver, along with the expected volume and review cycles. Specify whether your new recruit will have to collaborate with the brand, product, marketing, growth or design teams.
3. Write the “success after 90 days” section first: Define clear, early goals that show what you’d like the person to achieve in the first three months. This clarifies expectations for both candidates and managers, helps your new professional to settle in and guides the assessment process.
4. Budget for more than a salary: Don’t forget to include recruitment, training expenses, software and induction costs in your budget. Creative roles often require specialized tools, which add to expenses. It helps to plan for these costs over the medium and long term.
5. Be honest about time to productivity: It takes time for new hires to fully ramp up and deliver great work. It’s therefore essential to set realistic productivity timelines, as this will help managers provide the right level of support.
6. Create a retention plan: It can cost anywhere from 50% to 400% of a person’s annual salary to replace them. Plan to keep your top talent engaged and happy. It helps to establish clear career paths and identify key learning opportunities upfront.

If you can confidently check all these boxes, now might be the right time to hire full-time employees who will take the pressure off and help you scale your creative efforts. Double-check by reading our article on 5 questions to ask before hiring an in-house designer.

Speaking of hiring, if we had a classic résumé, here’s how it would look. Would you hire us?

Traditionally, outsourcing creative services was viewed primarily as a way to save costs. Today, however, it gives ambitious enterprise companies a strong competitive edge.

Creative services outsourcing can supercharge your campaign speed to market, provide on-demand access to specialized creative skills, and even out those dreaded workload spikes that can overwhelm your in-house team.

Tick the boxes below, and outsourcing creative services becomes a no-brainer:

• You need rapid turnaround on repeatable assets. New corporate branding, fresh social media graphics, standout ad variations, highly targeted email campaigns, new product page updates and constant landing page tweaks demand serious production power. Help in the form of a creative services outsourcing partner can remove any bottlenecks, speed up production and give your in-house team room to breathe.
• You need specialized skills fast: Skilled professionals with superb graphic design, video production, motion design and 3D/AR design skills take time to hire. When deadlines loom and time to market matters, it makes sense to outsource creative design services, as it can quickly connect you to a network of specialized talent.
• You run multi-market launches and campaigns: Version control and on-brand creative execution across markets, regions and languages can quickly stretch your internal creatives’ bandwidth. Scaling design becomes manageable when you outsource execution but retain complete control over the brand narrative and quality.
• You require predictable delivery for critical stakeholders: When performance teams and C-suite execs rely on high-volume creative distribution at key moments, a reliable external partner can be a much-needed buffer. Any overflow work can be easily shifted to a team that’s set up for scale.
• The backlog of strategic projects keeps you up at night: Better design systems, brand refreshes and content audits often take a backseat to urgent campaign-related requests. A good outsourced partner can help you clear your production to-do list so your core team can focus on other strategic priorities.

Ultimately, you’re the ring master of your own balancing act.

Many factors shape the choice to hire, tap into freelance talent or outsource creative design services, and every enterprise team has its own unique requirements.

But outsourcing creative services is far from a compromise.

The best outsourced creative services streamline production with established processes, global teams, specialized talent and AI-powered workflows. They also offer cost predictability and efficiency. Think fixed monthly subscriptions and well-defined, transparent project costs to help you remain competitive.

If you have a network of trusted freelancers, these professionals can work well on smaller or short-term projects. But for enterprise-grade, scalable creative output, an AI-powered creative model like Superside’s is simply unmatched.

Don’t believe us? Let’s take a closer look.

Why Superside is the stronger model

• Capacity you can count on. Good freelancers tend to be busy, which means their calendars can quickly become a frustrating bottleneck. Superside, in turn, delivers a dedicated team of creatives that scale up for your big projects and down when things are quieter. No ifs, buts or “I can only get to it next week.” Just the creative firepower you need when you need it.
• Speed with brand consistency. External designers who don’t work with your brand guidelines on a daily basis might struggle to deliver on-brand creative content. With Superside, however, you can expect a smooth, repeatable brief-to-delivery rhythm with brand standards baked into every creative project. Quality checks form part of the process, and different tasks happen at the same time, so projects can move forward quickly without delays.
• Less management fatigue. If you’ve ever scrambled to track down a freelancer who disappeared right before a deadline, you know firsthand how much effort goes into the management of a network of independents. With Superside, creative direction and project management are built in, so your team doesn’t have to juggle timelines, stitch together feedback or track down independents who have gone AWOL.
• Specialist depth on demand. Tired of scrambling for talent when an urgent brief drops? Whether you need graphic design, motion graphics and 3D design or illustration, social assets and landing pages, if you work with Superside, these specialized skills are easily accessible when you need them.
• AI-accelerated workflows. Your freelancers may use AI, but few have mastered the technology on the level we have. As the world’s top AI-powered creative service, our creatives know how to dramatically speed up versioning, asset tagging and creative variations with the latest technology while your creative leads stay fully in control.
• Coverage and reliability. Freelancers often have limited availability. If they’re offline or tied up with another customer, your project can stall unexpectedly. In contrast, Superside’s multi-time-zone teams are available at all hours, so progress never depends on a single person’s schedule or availability. This means no pauses and no missed handoffs.
• Security and compliance. Freelancers can make it hard to guarantee that your data and creative work are protected to the highest standards. Superside, in turn, meets strict enterprise-level security and compliance requirements, which include SOC 2 certification. This means our systems and processes are independently audited to ensure your information is safe, secure and handled properly.
• Predictable costs and throughput. Freelancers often work on an hourly basis, which can lead to unpredictable costs. On the other hand, Superside’s flexible subscription model provides clear visibility into your projects, monthly usage, and budget. Any unused budget can roll over for up to three months, ensuring consistent creative throughput without any surprises.

Our advice? Lean on trusted freelancers for simple tasks and short-term projects with low brand risk, where your team has the bandwidth to manage direction, review the creative and handle the workflow.

But if you want to power multi-format, multi-market campaigns with fast iteration cycles and creative excellence, just Superside it.

We’ll help you create the assets you need in a heartbeat, protect quality and brand integrity, and help you keep your core creative team focused on the strategic work that truly moves your brand forward.

How 500+ brands get more work done, without doing more

They Superside it. Fast, high-quality creative from the
AI-powered creative service that handles it all.

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The best traditional creative agencies bring deep specialization and impressive track records. For many businesses, they continue to be essential partners for high-stakes brand projects or whenever they find themselves in a design pickle.

But when it comes to flexibility? That’s where the friction sets in.

Rigid retainers, locked-in scopes and cumbersome processes can slow everything down, especially when creative briefs shift mid-project or when you need a wide range of assets instead of a deep dive into just one creative discipline.

Superside tackles these challenges in an entirely different way. For many enterprise-level companies, the choice is no longer between in-house and agency, but between traditional models and the scalable, on-demand creative partnerships that top outsourced creative services like Superside offer.

Why Superside is the stronger model

• Speed without compromise. Tight deadlines? Our infrastructure is designed for rapid project kick-off and immediate action. Instead of lengthy pitch processes and discussions, projects can start immediately thanks to a finely tuned production and design process. You get a dedicated team and expert creative execution right away without the drag of traditional agency ramp-up cycles.
• Breadth and depth in one place. With Superside, you can tap into brand design, graphic design, motion, illustration, paid creative and a long list of other creative design services under one roof. Our seasoned project managers and creative leads will ensure the work is orchestrated seamlessly. Wave goodbye to the vendor shuffle that often derails campaign timelines.
• AI-enhanced creative power. We harness AI where it makes the most significant impact. We use the tech to streamline versioning, asset tagging and idea generation, but keep human creatives firmly in the driver’s seat. We don’t just offer a set of AI tools; we provide a full-stack creative partnership that accelerates creative iteration, boosts brand consistency and gives your internal team a chance to focus on other priorities.
• Total control and undeniable transparency. Traditional agencies often lack transparency when project hours or scopes change unexpectedly. With Superside, you benefit from transparent design packages, crystal-clear checkpoints, shared project boards and a steady cadence that keeps progress visible and accountability front and center.

Many enterprises combine traditional agencies and subscription-based creative services like Superside. The secret is to match the work to the right creative model. If you need an always-on creative engine that scales effortlessly and adds speed and depth to your creative output, Superside is the obvious choice.

Should you hire full-time designers in-house, work with a traditional agency on specific projects or partner with a subscription-based creative service like Superside?

By now, you’ll have realized it isn’t always a simple either-or choice.

It all depends on your strategic goals, timelines, budget and the specific type of creative work you want to get to market. You know your context best. Sometimes it makes sense to bolster your in-house team or work with that incredibly talented freelancer. Other times, you’ll need the flexibility, speed, capacity and specialist skills only a good outsourced creative service can give you.

If, however, you’re an enterprise that needs immediate scale, consistent throughput and comprehensive coverage across formats and global markets, you simply can’t go wrong with Superside.

Our top global talent, AI-enhanced production capabilities and smooth, repeatable brief-to-delivery rhythm mean you stay fully in control. At the same time, your on-brand creative projects are executed at lightning speed.

This playbook was designed to help you weigh your options clearly and confidently. Use the framework above to match each project with the creative model best suited to deliver on time, on brand and on budget. Then, move forward with certainty.

Superside: Best for enterprise-scale creative

Stop the freelancer-agency juggle. Plug into Superside to get the scale, speed and creative power your brand deserves.

Superside isn’t just another agency or vendor. Partner with us and we’ll become your creative team’s creative team to help you deliver scalable, high-quality creative faster and more cost-effectively than traditional agencies or external designers can hope to do.

Get a Superside subscription and you’ll immediately gain access to a global network of vetted creatives, AI-powered workflows and an intuitive project management platform that simplifies briefing and centralizes collaboration and feedback.

Our approach is straightforward: You bring your goals and brand standards. We deliver the people, processes and capacity to match your pace.

With a leading marketing design partner like Superside, you benefit from:

• Consistency at scale across a wide range of creative design services, with expert creative direction that ensures all creative output perfectly aligns with your brand identity.
• Speed without chaos, thanks to AI-powered workflows, standardized handoffs and a predictable operating rhythm.
• On-demand specialist depth in hard-to-hire areas like motion design, 3D/AR, and multilingual versioning.
• Transparent visibility into work-in-progress, status updates and next steps to give all stakeholders peace of mind.

Skyrocket your creative performance using the best AI-powered teams

Get the world’s top creatives working with you,
empowered by AI design tools to deliver
high-quality, on-brand assets 30-60% faster.

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Superside isn’t just another agency or vendor. Partner with us and we’ll become your creative team’s creative team to help you deliver scalable, high-quality creative faster and more cost-effectively than traditional agencies or external designers can hope to do.

Get a Superside subscription and you’ll immediately gain access to a global network of vetted creatives, AI-powered workflows and an intuitive project management platform that simplifies briefing and centralizes collaboration and feedback.

Our approach is straightforward: You bring your goals and brand standards. We deliver the people, processes and capacity to match your pace.

With a leading marketing design partner like Superside, you benefit from:

• Consistency at scale across a wide range of creative design services, with expert creative direction that ensures all creative output perfectly aligns with your brand identity.
• Speed without chaos, thanks to AI-powered workflows, standardized handoffs and a predictable operating rhythm.
• On-demand specialist depth in hard-to-hire areas like motion design, 3D/AR, and multilingual versioning.
• Transparent visibility into work-in-progress, status updates and next steps to give all stakeholders peace of mind.

Our work speaks through our customers

Independent research and proven customer outcomes speak volumes. These data points and examples clearly demonstrate how Superside consistently delivers standout results:

Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ study: Dynamic enterprise customers love us because we cut costs. This independent evaluation revealed a 94% ROI and over $4 million in business benefits for Superside customers over three years. Overall, the companies that partnered with us saved $1.9 million in avoided agency costs.

The data speaks for itself

According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, Superside delivers a 94% ROI and pays for itself in six months.

See the studySee the study

Amazon wins with Superside. Many top enterprise customers choose Superside instead of traditional agencies to power their creative production. Amazon, for one, used Superside to streamline production and free up the Amazon Home team at a time when production and design work meant they couldn’t focus on the photoshoots they needed to prioritize.

Faster creative execution for Forter. This enterprise company also chose to partner with Superside instead of a traditional agency to scale its creative impact. For example, we played a key role in the success of Forter’s annual user conference and helped them transform an empty space into a vibrant New York City setting. Think custom murals, Broadway-themed cardboard cutouts and immersive environments, all executed with speed and precision.

Many more examples show how we’ve helped top enterprise brands scale their creative execution and make an impact. See our articles on how Booking.com scales creativity and 5 scalable design examples for more proof of the calibre of work our creatives deliver.

Future-proof your creative team with Superside

Superside’s AI-powered model delivers fast, scalable and consistent creative to keep your enterprise team ahead of the pack.

There’s no question about it. To future-proof your enterprise, you need to find a way to deliver high-quality creative fast and at scale.

Your HR team will eventually struggle to keep up with the demand for top talent. Your finance team will keep asking questions about overhead costs. Your trusty freelancers will fall short when you need to scale things up. And while traditional agencies can bring depth and prestige, they’ll lack the flexibility and fast turnaround time you’ll ultimately need.

Superside fills these gaps. As the world’s top AI-powered creative service for enterprises, we offer an efficient way to bring high-performing ads, videos and experiences to market.

Brand identity guidelines, sky-high quality standards and QA are built into our creative processes, work happens across time zones, and security and procurement are taken care of upfront. Plus, you get complete visibility into what ships next, while your in-house team finally gets the chance to focus on other strategic priorities.

Ready to outsource creative services and move from backlog to launch? Share your brief, and we’ll Superside it.

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