Two former ad agency executives have launched Citizen Inside, a shop that helps brands build and update in-house agencies. The Minneapolis agency is led by co-founders Jeffrey Gorder, its CEO, and EJ McNulty, its chief creative officer.

The startup comes as marketers invest in in-house agencies. A recent study found that 30% of marketers said they moved more creative work in-house in the last 12 months, while 31% of those surveyed said they plan to move work in-house in the next year. In 2023, ANA reported that 82% of its members had an in-house agency compared to 78% in 2018.

Also read: Why more marketers are in-housing creative

Citizen Inside will look to revamp internal agencies through creative, media and tech expertise.

“Most in-house agencies were built well over a decade ago … they’re ready to be modernized,” Gorder said.

Citizen Inside is backed by private equity firm Keystone Capital and is part of the Dawn Network, which has an agency roster that also includes Active International, BarkleyOKRP, Co:Collective, Crossmedia and Rethink. Citizen Inside’s founders declined to disclose specifics of its deal with Keystone and Dawn.

Gorder spent more than three years as the North America chief growth officer at Oliver, a Brandtech Group-owned shop that also helps brands create in-house agencies. While there, he helped launch Oliver’s in-house consulting practice for the North American market and helped create in-house agencies for brands such as General Mills, CompTIA, Tractor Supply Co., and Central Garden & Pet. He previously spent more than 12 years at Mono, where he also held a chief growth officer role.

Gorder said he has a temporary non-solicitation deal with Oliver but declined to share specifics of that agreement.

McNulty previously spent 12 years at Wunderman Thompson, including time as its North American executive creative director; he held the same title at VMLY&R following the merger of the two agencies. While at the WPP shop, he led creative efforts for Best Buy, Sherwin-Williams, Chevron-Texaco, and IT infrastructure company Kyndryl. He also led and developed Wunderman Thompson’s in-house agency team for Best Buy.

The new agency will have two ways of working with clients. One will be to consult and evaluate a brand’s existing internal and external agency relationships to identify what can be updated or needs to change. This could include a brand’s workflow and even the type of technology it uses. The second option is building and staffing in-house agency teams based on a brand’s needs.

“In-house agencies can become their own island,” McNulty said. “They sit inside of a culture of corporate America. They are living [in] this world that slowly, over time, becomes corporatized and that becomes the overriding culture, and not a culture of creativity, innovation, and inspiration.”

Citizen Inside’s work will include creating new career paths and mentoring employees, McNulty added.

Offering media options

Along with its creative expertise, the agency will offer in-house agencies the services of Dawn’s media agency network, which collectively has $4.5 billion in media buying power. The Citizen Inside Media Alliance will include agencies Active International, Crossmedia, Adlucent (which was just acquired by BarkleyOKRP), along with BarkleyOKRP’s existing media capabilities.

“We are making a bet on the need to modernize and bring media and makers together,” Gorder said. “When you have a traditional external agency and a media agency not working together, there are inefficiencies left and right. So when we create efficiencies by bringing them together that creates more room for creativity. It creates more room for better work that works better and that we can evaluate. We see it as the next big wave of growth for in-house ecosystems.”

McNulty said in-house agencies are “ill-prepared” to take advantage of the current tech revolution that’s been accelerated by the growth of AI technology. Along with being able to consult on technology, Citizen Inside will offer brands the use of its tech platform, which is currently being built, that will help companies manage and track their internal team workflows.

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“These modules that we created are going to be the things that give us the ability to have a full line of sight into what people are doing, and where the project is at any one point in time,” McNulty said. “Where we’re a main differentiator from the outside is that we give that dashboard and that transparency directly to our clients too, because we’re one team.”

While more marketers are opting to go in-house, both founders said they don’t believe there will ever be a time when brands will completely get rid of their agency partners.

“If we don’t have our traditional external partners, if we don’t have agency rosters working on our big brands, we lose the ability of curiosity,” McNulty said. “I would hope that we never get to a point where everything is one or the other.”