In-house and agency, when it works.
Watch the session
The setup
For 15 years, "the client is building an in-house team" has been read as a countdown clock. The scope shrinks, the retainer converts to project work, the relationship ends politely. Most independents have a version of that story.
The problem with the story is that it has stopped predicting anything. Brand-side creative departments now employ people who won the same awards, ran the same accounts, and have the same standards as the agency across the table. The question is no longer whether in-house teams can do the work. It is whether the two sides can do it together without one of them getting written out.
Danielle Hawley, who runs creative on the Uber side of a partnership that produced 20 Cannes shortlists across seven campaigns in a single year, gave the honest answer to that question 40 minutes in, when an audience member asked her whether these partnerships work.
"There have been more failures than there have been successes with our partners."
That is the person with the trophy case saying the model fails more than it lands. The rest of the session is about what separates the exceptions.
Who was on stage, and why they're worth listening to
Part One — Why the good version works
Zanger opened by asking the Uber pair what the moment was when each side realized the other was made of people. Hawley did not reach for a moment. She reached for a demographic fact.
"Everything that we do from now on is gravy. We've kind of all done what we've ever wanted to do. We've won all the awards. We've won the pitches. We've done the things. So there's just there's zero ego, and there's a lot of collaboration across the aisle."
Then she named the condition under which it does not work, which is the more useful half.
"It can be harder when you're sort of working with more mid-level teams who were still trying to prove themselves, who still want their ideas to be theirs."
Read that as an operating constraint rather than a personality observation. The partnership works because both sides are staffed with people who have already collected what they came for. If your senior people are still building a reel, the chemistry described in this session is not available to you yet, and no process document will manufacture it.
Guerrero's account of the Ro relationship arrives at the same place by a different road. Her reason for trusting Young Hero was that she had worked with Panayotopoulos years earlier.
"It's so no ego. It's just like just do the work. It doesn't matter. I mean, the work matters."
For her the tiebreaker is the patient, not the pitch. That is what the ego gets subordinated to.
The Uber side has an internal condition that most brands never build. Hawley described a client note that flipped the relationship permanently.
"It's always jarring when you're on the agency side when a client is like, 'You didn't push hard enough.' I mean, that's just you don't hear that a lot, and I think the second that that was said to staff, it was like okay, game on, and then we never really had to think about that again."
A brand that pushes its agency toward more risk rather than less is rare enough that it functioned as a permission slip for six years. Worth noting what it cost: Hawley says Uber's culture of creativity was "really difficult to build." The permission slip came after the internal work, not before it.
Schreiber's contribution to Part One is the operating temperament. Asked how anyone survives Super Bowl timelines, he gave two lines that are close to a management philosophy.
"I think we all have a bit of a philosophy of you know love the roller coaster. As in, like accept the fact it's going to be a roller coaster and actually enjoy the ride."
And the mechanical version:
"Move forward, make decisions, and then if those decisions are wrong, change decisions. The worst thing you can do is be indecisive. The trick is to actually just keep making decisions and pivot quickly if you make a mistake."
The load-bearing part is the sentence after it: this requires "a relationship where you can basically call it quickly and say, look, that was a mistake. We need to move on." Fast decisions without a relationship that survives reversals produce a different outcome, which is fast decisions nobody will admit were wrong.
Hawley's version of the same idea is a confidence heuristic:
"Every time we come face to face with an impossibility, we just have this confidence that it's like there's too many smart, talented people around this work for it not to be great."
Her examples are unromantic. Talent drops out of every Super Bowl. Talent will not stay on set past two days, so the team makes 17 films in two days. Her point is that when the standard holds, the production companies, directors and social teams rise to it, and the difficulty becomes the reason the thing gets made rather than the reason it does not.
Part Two — Writer's room, not relay race
Zanger asked what changes when an agency works with an in-house creative team instead of a traditional brand team. Panayotopoulos answered by describing the old model with unusual precision, because the whole argument depends on the contrast.
"The traditional model, or at least the way we were brought up as creatives, is the agency sort of gets briefed. We go into our silo, we make it work, we come back sometimes in like nine weeks. It's like here you go, and then there's somebody on the other side who's judging the brief from the brand side, from the business side, and then they give you feedback and it goes back and forth and it takes a long time."
Nine weeks of silo, then judgment. Then the alternative, in concrete tooling:
"Once we have the initial ideas jammed out together, we're able to tweak and fine tune in real time, and literally, you know, in with our processes, being in shared Slack channels, being in Figma jams, working together. It's more of a writer's room where everybody's contributing rather than passing across the line."
Shared Slack channels and Figma jams are not a technology recommendation. They are the visible evidence of a decision to stop protecting the reveal. An agency that still needs the presentation moment cannot work this way, and Panayotopoulos is candid that Young Hero can still build the polished deck when a situation calls for it. The choice is situational, and most shops have never examined it.
What makes him willing to work that way is a judgment about the people on the other side. He describes Guerrero's team as makers who understand craft, have high taste, and have good taste in music, which is why the work uses the music partners it uses. That last detail matters more than it sounds. Music taste is a proxy he uses for whether a brand team can be trusted inside the room at the idea stage.
Schreiber put the structural version of this on the record, and it is the single most quotable idea in the session.
"Twenty years ago, when we talked about in-house agencies, I remember having a conversation as a young creative, going, 'Imagine if your clients were Gold Lion winning creatives.' That would be insane. And then what's happened is the caliber of in-house agencies has transformed, and now they're literally as good creatives as any agency anywhere."
The consequence he draws from it should change how independents pitch:
"Instead of having an adversarial relationship with that, you actually have your greatest creative advocate inside the circle now, and so the work actually is in much safer hands as it's traveling in all the places it has to go."
An in-house creative director is the only person who can defend your idea in the meetings you will never be invited to. Zanger turned that into the practical instruction of the session on the spot, which is to ask directly who your champion is and how the work will travel through the organization. It is a reasonable question to ask in a first meeting, and almost nobody asks it.
The Ro case is where this stops being theory. Guerrero works inside a category built to defeat creative ambition. Her description of what most creatives think about healthcare work is blunt.
"You've seen the formats. Normally, as a creative, I would say that's where your career goes to die. I never thought I would end up in healthcare."
Her way out was to notice that the constraint was being overstated by everyone in the category.
"Knowing that there's an opportunity to reimagine that category, I always wonder, why are they not doing it? Why are they not taking more risks?"
The answer she and Young Hero built runs on three words she uses as pillars: simple, gutsy, mass premium. Simple means the ad explains what the thing is without decoration. Gutsy can live in the visuals, the voice, or the way a line is delivered. Mass premium is the aesthetic register, and it is why the reference points are Apple and other technology brands rather than pharma.
The legal reality does not go away. Guerrero credits a thorough legal team, works around ISI requirements — the Important Safety Information every drug ad is required to carry — and keeps most spots at 30 seconds. That is the constraint being worked rather than complained about. Panayotopoulos's explanation of how the creative survives it is the useful part.
"Starting from a real serious place is really good because it allows us to open up whether it's fun or vibrancy or getting really deep into the design. We know that we have empathy behind all the choices we make, and that makes it really clear to make the right choice on the design side of things too."
The empathy is the brief, and the fun is downstream of it. That order is what keeps the work from reading as a technology company that wandered into medicine.
The uncomfortable truth
Two things happened in the last third of this session that undercut the optimism of the first two-thirds, and both should be read carefully by anyone about to restructure a client relationship around this model.
The first is Zanger's own story, told to set up a question about credit. A few years earlier at Cannes he watched a brand and its agency present together, then congratulated the CMO on the partnership.
"He was saying partner partner on the stage. He goes, 'Oh yeah, they're just more like a vendor to us.'"
His reaction was unprintable and correct. The point is not the CMO's rudeness. The point is that the word "partner" is free, and it gets used on stage by people who do not mean it. A brand that says "partner" in public and "vendor" in private is not a partnership at risk. It is a vendor relationship with better lighting.
Hawley placed that behavior generationally rather than personally.
"There's a division of old school thinking and new school thinking. We have older people in this business now. We never had that before. Some of that comes with really old school traditional thinking about what ads look like, how they're built, what relationships are like."
She sees it from both sides. Clients who fail to celebrate the agency, and industry people who compliment her team's work and then ask who the agency was, as though she had not been in the room.
"It's not a painful experience, but it is one of those moments where you're like, man, you guys really don't get it."
The second is the failure rate. An audience member named Katie asked the question the panel had been circling: it is not a given that in-house partnerships work, and in fact they have failed more often than they have succeeded. What is the difference?
Hawley agreed with the premise without hedging, then diagnosed it.
"Everybody has the best intentions, like sure, sure, sure, we'll collaborate. But getting into the ways of working, some agencies are just not malleable and not flexible about their ways of working, and you just butt heads all the time. That idea of being in the kitchen together doesn't always really sink in or resonate."
Read the direction of that sentence. The client is naming agency inflexibility as the primary cause of failure. Not budget, not scope, not fit. Ways of working.
Then she named the test that most agency people will find harder than any of the process changes above.
"You need to find the people who don't mind sharing credit, who understand that ideas really do come from both sides, who aren't afraid to say, 'God, that was Danielle's idea, wasn't mine.' It's like if you don't want to take my idea, that's okay. But then beat it, and if you beat it, I'm going to support you, no matter what."
Beat it or take it. There is no third option in that sentence, and the third option is what most agencies choose, which is to quietly not use the client's idea and never say why.
Hawley is explicit that this is enforced rather than hoped for. "A lot of creatives get moved out the business if they can't sort of get on board." And the mindset she screens for is not craft.
"The best talent is not just the best talent that's coming from a special group. It's the mindset of people who can work in crazy, very fast environments where the speed insists on being very fluid and collaborative across the aisle."
The uncomfortable part for an independent is that this is a hiring standard being applied to your people by your client, and you are being evaluated against it whether or not anyone tells you.
On credit, the panel closed the loop. Schreiber traced the whole problem to a system that no longer matches how work gets made.
"We're sort of children of COVID, as in we sort of started working together right in the middle of the Zoom era. Who did what was very indistinct. And suddenly we're all merging and doing our thing together. This whole system is built on the idea that you're one agency from one country, and you did this, and suddenly you've got three different groups of people in three different countries all working on the same idea and sharing their thoughts and pivoting and changing, and then later on someone asks you to sort of cut up the pie and work out the credit."
His answer is the least complicated position anyone took all week:
"The safest thing is just to say everyone. Everyone was involved, everyone did it. There's no shame in sharing credit. In my opinion, it's much much worse to leave someone off. You're only helping someone's career."
Guerrero's version is more aggressive, because she is the client and she is the one giving credit away.
"If I could write every name, I would. Everything we do, it is a team effort. I could not do the work without you guys. There's just no reason to hide anything. If I could have the entire list, I would, because I think people should be recognized. Other people should use that talent."
Panayotopoulos supplied the business case, which is the argument to make to a brand that finds all of this sentimental.
"That just is a really genuine, generous thing that the brand does, but it also helps build trust, and that trust is also what then builds that momentum, so that you can make faster decisions. We're responsible for our business by being responsible for their business."
Credit is not a courtesy in this account. It is the input that buys speed later.
What you can use
Every session from Indies @ Cannes 2026 — plus every other Blueprint, the tools, and the surveys — opens up with one sign-in.
