In-house production is growing up. Are producer skills keeping pace?

By Izzy Watts and Sara Pethybridge, Co-founders, MettleLab

Over the past few years, in-housing has moved from an ambitious experiment to a permanent part of the Australian advertising landscape.

The appeal is easy to understand. Brands want to move faster, reduce external costs, build deeper institutional knowledge and respond to an increasingly relentless demand for content. According to recent IHAC reporting, 86% of brands believe their in-house models offer equal or better value than traditional agency rates, while a significant proportion of Australian teams expect to take on greater production and media scope. For high-volume social, content and quick-turnaround work, that model can make a lot of sense.

The more interesting question is what happens when an internal team's ambition outgrows its production capability? As budgets tighten and traditional role boundaries blur, we are seeing marketers, PR leads, account managers, and project managers take on responsibilities that once sat with an experienced producer. More often than not, the organisation has underestimated just how specialised commercial production has become.

Different skills, different risks

A highly organised project manager can run a timeline beautifully. A marketer can understand the brand better than almost anyone. A creative may know exactly what the work needs to communicate. None of those skills automatically prepare someone to manage talent contracts, usage, location permissions, crew, insurance, post-production, child employment requirements, changing scopes or safety on set.

And understanding that distinction matters, because it is the difference between a successful production and one which opens the organisation up to a huge amount of risk.

The invisible work

One of the peculiarities of producing is that when it is done well, much of the work is almost invisible Long before anyone set foot on set or the campaign went live, the foundational work was already done. Permits were cleared, talent rights were locked down, and the budget reflected reality (rather than wishful thinking.) When the rain kicked in, so did the contingency plan, and the clients' expectations matched the budget. None of this happens by luck or by accident.

Good production can look deceptively straightforward because someone has already asked the right questions, which can make people underestimate the craft of producing.

When the brief gets bigger

But what happens when the brief gets more ambitious?

An inexperienced producer can easily underestimate scope changes and their impact on a production. Perhaps the social content becomes a paid campaign, or a multi-market rollout instead of a local asset. Perhaps a new deliverable with multiple ratios has been added late to the mix, after the timeline and budget have been locked. And what if an AI element enters the workflow? Suddenly there are questions around approvals, likeness, rights and provenance that did not exist in quite the same way just twelve months ago. None of these changes is inherently problematic; the problem is making them without understanding the production consequences.

What a producer keeps an eye on

So, what does a producer need to keep their eye on to ensure a successful production?

Budget, for one. An experienced producer doesn't simply record costs. They understand what sits behind line items, where quotes contain assumptions, which costs are likely to move, what happens when schedules shift, and the need to always, always have a contingency.

The same is true of talent. Booking a performer is only the beginning of the conversation. Media, territory, campaign term, deliverables, stills, rollovers and the nature of the performance can all affect the deal. Usage that sounds innocuous in a meeting can become considerably more complicated once a campaign moves across TV, BVOD, social, out-of-home and multiple territories. A good producer locks all of this usage in before briefing a casting agent or speaking to an actor.

Then there is compliance. Commercial production intersects with state and local regulation, workplace safety, insurance requirements and industry-specific obligations. Children on set, public locations, specialist equipment, vehicles and working hours can all introduce requirements that sit well outside the experience of someone whose primary role is marketing or communications.

The AI question

And increasingly, there is AI. The producer does not necessarily need to be the person operating every emerging tool. They do need to understand enough to ask how that tool changes the workflow. What material is entering the system? Who has approved its use? What specialist partners are involved? What rights attach to the source material and final output? What needs to be documented? Where does AI genuinely create efficiency, and where has it simply moved time and cost somewhere less obvious?

These are production questions that good producers need to ask.

Knowing where capability ends

This is not an argument against in-housing, nor is it an argument that every brand needs to build a miniature agency or production company inside its marketing department. Quite the opposite. The most mature internal teams are often very clear about where their own capability ends and where specialist expertise should begin. That makes them better collaborators with the wider production ecosystem, not replacements for it.

The real opportunity for brands isn't owning the entire production pipeline, but becoming more informed, strategic managers of it. That's why investing in producer capability is the natural next step.

Investing in producer capability

If in-housing continues on its current trajectory, brands will need to invest in production capability with the same seriousness they have invested in creative, media, content and technology. That means experienced production leadership, clearer workflows, better escalation points, ongoing technical education and enough production literacy across internal teams to recognise when specialist advice is required.

Specialised training platforms are stepping in to upskill both agency and in-house teams, stripping away theoretical fluff in favour of real-world execution frameworks, from scoping line-item budgets to mastering pre-pro risk, talent contracts, and post-production delivery.

Experience will always be part of becoming a good producer. No course can replicate a difficult shoot day or teach every judgment call the job requires, but experience shouldn't be the only teacher.

As internal production teams take on larger and more complex work, the brands that succeed will not necessarily be the ones with the newest studio, the biggest internal creative department or the longest list of AI tools. They will be the ones that understand that creative ambition and production capability have to grow together.

In-housing is not the problem. Underestimating production is.