What an in-house creative studio really costs

Many leaders ask themselves the same question when their creative needs become regular: should they build a creative team in-house? The idea is appealing. A dedicated team, available, that knows the brand by heart. But the full calculation often holds surprises.

The real scope of an in-house studio

To produce continuously across all your channels, one role is not enough. A minimum credible in-house studio brings together several distinct skills.

• An art director who guarantees coherence and standards.
• A video editor for video, a format that has become central.
• A motion designer for animation and graphics.
• A copywriter for messages and scripts.
• A project manager to steer it all and keep to deadlines.

Each of these areas of expertise is a full profession in its own right. Few profiles genuinely combine several of these roles at a high level.

The real salary calculation

Let's take reasonable market salaries in France, including payroll charges. A senior art director costs around 70,000 to 90,000 euros per year fully loaded. A video editor, a motion designer and a copywriter each sit between 45,000 and 65,000 euros. An experienced project manager runs around 55,000 to 75,000 euros.

Add it up, and you get a payroll between 300,000 and 450,000 euros per year, before even counting equipment, software licenses, workstations and management time.

The invisible cost

Salary is only the visible part. An in-house studio also means recruiting, which takes months and carries a high risk of error on creative profiles that are hard to assess. Then you have to manage these profiles, help them grow, and handle absences and departures.

Above all, an in-house studio is sized for an average workload. Yet creative needs are irregular. So you pay for underused skills during quiet months, and you saturate during intense months, when a launch or an event arrives.

The on-demand capability alternative

This is precisely the rigidity that an on-demand creative capability model solves. You access the equivalent of a complete studio, but you only pay for what you mobilize.

For a monthly budget well below a single senior hire, you get a dedicated production director, a network of certified talent for each area of expertise, and continuous production that scales up and down with your real needs. No recruitment, no risk of bad casting, no skills sitting idle.

The right trade-off

The in-house studio still makes sense for very large organizations whose volume is massive and constant. For a growing small or mid-sized company, the asymmetry is brutal: the need to communicate is as strong as that of a large group, but the means to build a complete team are not there.

So the question is not "do we need high-level creatives?" The answer is obviously yes. The question is "should we put them on payroll or access them another way?" For most growing companies, accessing capability costs far less than building it.

In summary

An in-house creative studio represents 300,000 to 450,000 euros per year, a real recruitment risk and a rigid capacity in the face of irregular needs. On-demand creative capability offers the same level of production, with flexibility and a controlled cost.

MyJiminy gives growing companies the equivalent of a world-class studio, without having to build it. To scope your real needs, let's talk about your project.