The In-House Talent & Salary Survey report

With our partners, specialist creative recruiter The Industry Club, IHALC has created the first In-House Talent & Salary Survey specifically for UK in-house agencies.

Part of our mission at IHALC is to provide our community with useful, valuable data and insights which help inform decision-making (as we have previously done with our Benchmarking and AI surveys). While there is considerable data on UK ad agency pay and benefits in general, very little was available for the in-house sector specifically. Over the summer, we invited senior leaders at UK in-house agencies to complete our Talent & Salary Survey in order to provide that benchmarking data, along with insights on their hiring and talent strategies and challenges.

We’ve pulled together the results of the survey, along with expert analysis from The Industry Club, in a downloadable report.

We are very aware at IHALC that no two in-house agencies are the same in terms of their remit and make-up. Therefore, it was vitally important for this report to provide some context into the 48 organisations who responded and what kind of in-house team they have.

How do you hire and manage talent?
We then looked at how IHAs responding to the survey hire their talent and manage freelancers and what specific challenges that operating in a corporate environment brings when it comes to creative talent.

Pay and day rates
On pay, we have calculated ‘typical salary ranges’ and freelance day rates for a range of titles across Creative/Design, Content/Editorial, Studio, Operation and Production, Client Services and Strategy roles in-house based on the responses we received. Because of the varied nature of in-house teams, we have provided further context by comparing a range of roles across the three most common IHA types of Creative Studio, Creative Agency and Lead Agency. The Industry Club has provided further analysis of how these ranges compare to external agency pay and day rates.

Benefits and Renumeration
We’ve also looked at what benefits IHAs provide – and how they compare to external agencies – as well as how staff are graded, incentivised and renumerated.

DE&I Strategies and Professional Development
We asked whether IHAs have DE&I strategies in place, if they use external partners to help deliver them and also how IHA leaders train and develop their teams.

The In-House Advantage
Finally, we asked IHA leaders to reflect on why talent is attracted to in-house, and in particular why so many are leaving external agencies to go client-side. And with so many IHAs looking to evolve and expand their remit, The Industry Club discuss how talent is a vital component in achieving those ambitions and what IHAs can do in order to compete for the best.

Respondents come from 48 businesses and organisations within the UK only. We believe that our respondents constitute a representative sample of IHAs according to size and remit, with sectors including Charities, Media, FMCG, Financial Services and Retail. Research was carried out in summer 2024.

In partnership with:

Download the full report via the link below