Somebody asked me last month what I actually do all week, and I gave the tidy answer first, the one about direction and standards and creative leadership, and then I heard myself and thought, okay, that told her nothing.
So here’s the untidy version. This is what embedding with a brand actually looks like from the inside, including the parts that aren’t very glamorous, because if you’re thinking about bringing someone in this way you should know what you’re signing up for before anybody sends a proposal.
The Quick Version: Embedding means I’m inside your business rather than presenting to it. I’m in the Slack, I’m on the calendar, I see the messy version of things before they’re cleaned up for a meeting. That access is the whole product. It’s what lets me make calls the way you would on the days you’re not in the room, and it’s also the thing you have to actually give me, or none of it works.
The first thing that happens is boring and it matters
I get added to things.
That sounds like nothing. It’s honestly the most important week of the engagement. Slack, the shared drive, the project tool, the email thread with the retailer, the group chat where three people are arguing about a photo. Not a kickoff deck. Access.
Because here’s what I’ve noticed: the brand doesn’t live in the brand guidelines. It lives in about forty small decisions a week that nobody writes down. Which product goes in the hero shot. Whether we say “clean” or stop saying it. What we do when a retailer asks for a format we’ve never made. If I’m only seeing the polished version in a monthly review, I’m reacting to decisions that already happened, and by then the interesting part is over.
So the first pass is just me reading everything and asking a lot of slightly annoying questions. Why does this product have two different names. Who approved this. What happened the last time you tried this. People are always a little surprised by how much of the beginning is me listening, but I’d rather be slow for two weeks than confidently wrong for six months.
Closeness is the part that’s hard to buy
I want to be careful here, because there’s an easy version of this argument that isn’t true. The easy version says agencies come and go and an embedded person stays, so stay longer and you’ll do better work.
That’s not really what the data says. The ANA and the 4As looked at agency of record relationships in 2025 and found the average tenure has more than doubled since 2016, up to around seven years. Experiential relationships run about ten. So longevity isn’t the differentiator, and anyone telling you agencies are all short-term is selling you something.
What separates an embedded arrangement is how close you get to sit to the work. I’m not being briefed on your business, I’m in it, which means I know that the launch slipped because of a supplier and not because the team dropped it, and I know your ops lead is the person who actually understands the customer best even though she’s not in any of the marketing meetings. You can’t brief someone into that. It accumulates.
A real week, honestly
People imagine this job as mostly big thinking. It’s maybe fifteen percent big thinking. Here’s what a normal week actually holds.
- Reviewing work and giving direction on it. Usually the biggest block. Not making things, deciding about things. Someone sends three options, I pick one and say why, and the why is the part that matters because it’s how the team learns to pick for themselves.
- Unblocking people fast. If a designer is sitting on a question for two days waiting for me, I’ve made the business slower, not faster. I try to answer inside a few hours even if the answer is “give me until tomorrow.”
- One or two real conversations. With a founder, a marketing lead, an ops person. This is where the actual strategy happens, and almost none of it looks like strategy while it’s happening.
- Writing something down. A guardrail, a decision, a short doc about what we settled and why. Small, constant, and it’s the thing that keeps working after I’m gone.
- Steering the people making the work. Briefing freelancers, keeping a photographer pointed the right way, sometimes hiring.
That’s it. There’s no deck week. Some months I make one, but if I’m making a lot of them something has gone wrong, because a deck usually means I’m presenting to the business instead of being in it.
The work that doesn’t look like creative work
This is the part I didn’t expect when I started doing it this way.
Some of the most valuable calls I’ve made inside a brand had nothing to do with design. I spent a long stretch embedded with a wellness company that had three brands under it, and one of the more useful things I did was recommend they stop investing in one of them. Not rebrand it, not refresh it. Wind it down and put the attention into the two that were working.
Nobody hires a creative director for that. But when you’re inside, you can see that the third brand was quietly eating the team’s time and diluting how the other two got read, and you’re close enough to the business to know whether it can survive the decision. From the outside that’s an overstep. From the inside it’s just the honest answer to what should we do next, and if I’d kept quiet and made nicer assets for all three I’d have been useless in a very presentable way.
That’s the trade with embedding. You get someone who’ll tell you the thing that isn’t in the scope.
What you have to give up
I’d rather say this plainly than have it come up in month three.
You have to actually let go of some decisions. Not all of them, and not the big ones. But if every call still routes through you for approval, then you’ve hired an expensive extra step and the whole point evaporates. The founders who get the most out of this are the ones who can say “you own that now” and then genuinely not look at it for a while.
That’s harder than it sounds, and honestly it’s the reason some of these arrangements don’t take. It’s not a skills problem. It’s that handing over creative judgment on something you built feels like handing over a kid. Which I get. It’s just worth knowing about yourself before you start.
The other thing you give up is the fantasy of a clean handoff. This isn’t a project with a delivery date. It’s ongoing, it’s a bit messy, and the good version has us disagreeing sometimes.
When it’s not the right shape
If what you need is more hands, this isn’t it, and I’ll say so on the first call. Hire a designer or a studio. I’ve written about what to look for when you’re bringing in new design help if that’s actually where you are.
If there’s nobody to carry out the direction once it’s set, it also doesn’t work. Direction with no execution behind it is just opinions in a document.
And if the business hasn’t settled what it’s for, that’s upstream of me. I can help you find it, but it’s a different engagement than embedding, and it’s cheaper to do it first.
What surprises people most is how much quieter the brand gets once one person is holding the through-line. Fewer options, fewer opinions in the room, fewer things that need a meeting. Founders usually expect the relief to come from the workload leaving, and it mostly comes from the deciding leaving.
If you read all of that and thought yes, that’s the part I’m stuck on, I’d love to talk it through. The easiest starting point is a Brand Jump, where we work out whether an embedded setup actually fits where you are right now or whether something simpler would serve you better. It credits in full if you go on to work with me, and there’s genuinely no pressure to.
