TL;DR — Unless you're a multinational or you bill tens of millions of euros a year, bringing marketing in-house is one of the dumbest decisions you can make. An internal team costs five times an external agency, you never saturate it at 100%, and you almost never spend even the literature-standard 10% of revenue on marketing. You increase fixed costs without capitalising them into variable investments that actually produce results. It's irrational and ego-driven.
We all do many stupid things, but bringing marketing in-house when you're not a multinational or billing many tens of millions a year is perhaps the stupidest one. I say this as someone who has been on both sides — from in-house marketing manager to running an agency — and who has seen hundreds of Italian companies from the inside and the outside.
I'm not defending my profession. I chose this profession because I find it more rational than the previous one. The more different companies I see from the outside, the more I study them, the more I'm certain that in 2026 there's no logical reason to hire more than one or two people in marketing — unless you're truly massive.
The internal champion logic
I understand the need for an internal reference point. More than a need, it's common sense: a company without a "champion" for a function doesn't work well with suppliers. You need someone who understands the business, voices the company toward the agency, filters information, takes quick operational decisions.
But going from that to building a complete internal team — SEO specialists, paid, content, social, brand, performance, designer, video producer, data analyst — is a logical leap that makes sense only for companies doing hundreds of millions. Because modern marketing is so specialised and fragmented that covering everything requires eight-to-ten people. Eight-to-ten full-time people you will never be able to saturate at 100%.
The numbers few people run
Let's reason in concrete numbers. A mid-to-senior marketing specialist in Italy costs today, all-in (gross salary, social security, TFR, welfare, benefits), roughly 55-70,000 euros a year. Multiplied by eight roles needed to cover all modern specialisations: we're talking about 450-550k euros a year in payroll alone.
Add to this:
- The overhead of a head of marketing to coordinate the group (another 80-100k).
- Software, tools, professional licences (easily 30-50k a year).
- The time you spend finding, onboarding and managing these people.
- Natural turnover — and marketing is among the functions with the highest turnover.
You're comfortably exceeding half a million euros in fixed costs per year, before spending a single euro on advertising. Before running a single A/B test. Before launching a single campaign.
With half that figure — which is the budget of a high-end agency like ours — you get access to twenty specialised professionals who work across dozens of similar clients, know the market in real time, and scale up and down for you without your having to fire anyone.
The ego-company paradox
Here the dynamic becomes tragicomic. Two opposite and equally dumb things are often done at the same time.
On one hand, people hire internal staff — because "we want them in-house", "it feels more ours", "we feel in control". On the other hand, they don't even come close to the marketing budget golden standard described in the literature: 10% of revenue. Or where margins don't allow it, at least 10% of EBITDA.
Translated: you're increasing fixed expenses (ARGH!) without capitalising those expenses into variable investments — advertising, testing, creative production — that could actually produce robust results (ARGH!).
It's the worst of both worlds. You pay people who are skilled at sitting on Meta Ads Manager without giving them a budget to manage. You pay an internal copywriter to produce three articles a month (when an agency produces twenty for the same money). You pay a social media manager to keep a feed alive that doesn't move a single euro of revenue.
Why it happens anyway
The answer is one, and it's not rational: ego. Having an internal team gives the feeling of being "big", of being "structured", of being "serious". They're all feelings, none of them is an economic result. Many mature companies end up buying the feeling by spending what they shouldn't spend, while under-funding the levers that actually move the business.
To entrepreneurs I often say: your marketing spending agenda should be decided by ROI, not by the team photo on the "about us" page.
When it makes sense to bring marketing in-house (and when it doesn't)
It makes sense to go in-house if:
- You bill more than 30-50 million euros.
- You have a very specific product/service requiring deep domain knowledge that is hard to transfer to an agency.
- You have constant, predictable marketing volume (large e-commerce, mature SaaS with a structured sales team).
- You've already saturated an external agency and the marginal unit inside costs less than outside.
It doesn't make sense to go in-house if:
- You bill less than 20-30 million.
- Your marketing activity is seasonal or variable.
- You haven't yet tested enough channels to know where to focus.
- You're growing fast and need to scale capacity, not freeze it.
The model that works
The robust model, for the vast majority of Italian companies between 2 and 30 million in revenue, is simple and old: one or two internal people + a good external agency.
Internals are for:
- Being the champion and point of reference.
- Maintaining brand voice.
- Coordinating with sales, product, customer care.
- Analysing data with a business lens.
The agency is for:
- Covering specialities it doesn't make sense to have in-house.
- Bringing updated market know-how.
- Scaling up and down with demand.
- Executing — doing things well and fast.
Two people + a serious agency costs less than half an internal team. And it produces triple the output. Whoever has the numbers in hand knows this.
Too irrational and ego-based, what happens in most companies. Too much.
Continue reading
- What working in marketing is really like: the truth nobody tells you
- The 10 most common online business myths, debunked one by one
- Why 80% of e-commerce businesses fail: the hidden costs nobody tells you
