Whether you’re a traditional ad agency, in-house agency, or a marketer running a marketing department, you of course prefer to use your own people for as much work as possible. You want to avoid the expense of hiring freelance help, there’s no learning curve with your existing staff, and it just plain feels more “pure” to use your own people. But there are times when outsourcing ideas makes better business sense than using internal folks. Here are three.

One, you need fresh thinking.

The fact your team has no learning curve isn’t always a positive. Those intimate connections your staff have to the brand also present a paradigmatic trap when it comes to new ideas. When you really need to think innovatively, sometimes going outside is the only way. The same old problems can’t always be solved with the same old solutions. It’s an inertia thing.

Bringing in a freelance team from the outside means bringing in new perspectives on the problem. They aren’t jaded by “the way things have always been done” because they aren’t aware of them. As a result, they are more likely to see and connect innovative dots than those who’ve been at the company steeped in its culture for years.

Will outside perspective matter for a banner ad? Probably not. But it certainly will when you’re trying to come up with that new promotion, new brand idea, or new way to freshen up an existing campaign for an existing client. And no one needs to know you’re going outside anyway.

Two, resource problems.

Every agency is facing a resource problem right now. The “great resignation” has relentlessly pummeled the ad industry. But it’s not like clients need any fewer ideas. If anything, they need more. And so smart agencies are striking a strategic balance of in-house and outside talent to take on all the work as efficiently and professionally as possible.

Take a pitch as an example. The internal pitch team, by definition, all work on existing business as their day jobs. The pitch is extra, always. Given the resourcing problem mentioned above, these teams are already stretched with the day-to-day. Adding a pitch might just make some of them join that great resignation. Agency leaders have to be careful.

Bringing in freelancers to jump start a pitch is a great way to “parallel path” work streams. It’s one thing for an internal team to start from scratch on a pitch creatively and quite another to have the benefit of multiple ideas from a freelance team first. The internal team can react to the outside work, embrace it, reject it, change it and make it theirs. Point being, bringing in outside freelancers gives the internal team valuable days to continue working on existing client business while ideas are generated for that pitch.

Three, a client might just not want to bother the agency.

Clients know that agencies are going through a tough time and they have (mostly) shown their appreciation for the Herculean efforts during Covid. And it’s with that same empathy that clients may want to bring freelancers in for that naming project or to come up with a retail promotional hook or for new features for the branded app.

Stuff comes up all the time and stuff will continue to come up. But don’t stretch the agency even farther with out-of-scope idea requests, particularly projects your agency doesn’t like doing or isn’t particularly good at. Bring in outside freelance teams for those projects so you can keep your agency focused on their priorities.

And remember, you’re not selling your soul when you outsource ideas.

Some agencies believe so greatly in their own agency and its culture that bringing in freelancers is akin to a bar watering down its booze. It’s not the same. It’s not pure. It’s not us. I can appreciate that level of cultural protectionism, I really can. But remember, nothing that an outside team comes up with goes to the client unless you say it will. You are still the curator of the brand.

Better yet, don’t think of freelancers as outsourcing ideas, but as importing inspiration. Sometimes the freelance work will inspire even better ideas in you and your teams. Or with just the right twist, idea B could be perfect for your existing client. Meaning, outside ideas are still very much inside ideas. It doesn’t matter a lick where the idea originates when you’re standing there presenting the ideas to your client.

Outsourcing on steroids.

I do have an agenda with this post. We have built a business around the ever growing need to outsource ideas. It’s called Ideasicle X. Whether you subscribe and run your own idea projects or have us run them for you with our proXy Service, you will get more ideas in less time for less money than you would hiring a freelance team of two for a week. You’ll get four (not just two) tier-one creative freelancers coming up with ideas as a team (see our Ideasicle Experts). They don’t compete against each other, they truly work as a team on our virtual platform posting ideas and building on each others’. The result is 30-50 ideas in just a few days. It’s not business as usual, and that’s a beautiful thing.

For a demo and to see if there’s a fit, click below. It’s idea time.

Will Burns is the Founder & CEO of Ideasicle X. Email him at willb@ideasiclex.com.