Bupa Optimises In-House Agency Model with -lution
Fixing an agency model isn't just about trimming vendor lists, it requires clear operational swim lanes, empowering internal agencies, and embedding AI to unlock sustainable, long-term efficiency.
The Challenge
For healthcare leader Bupa, navigating a complex matrix of business divisions required an agile, cost-effective creative and marketing ecosystem.
The existing setup generated significant operational friction across Bupa:
Siloed and Overlapping Remits: Agency swim lanes were poorly defined, leading to overlapping skillsets, duplicated efforts, and growing frustration among internal stakeholders.
Underutilised In-House Capabilities: Bupa possessed an established in-house agency, Blue Agency, but recognised it was severely underutilised and lacked a structured strategic mandate.
Operational Inefficiencies: Misaligned processes and a lack of unified ways of working created friction, making it difficult to achieve the speed, agility, and cost efficiencies required by the business.
Bupa engaged -lution to overhaul its agency model, redefine operational swim lanes, elevate Blue Agency’s strategic role, and establish an AI and automation roadmap to accelerate creative delivery.
The Solution
Applying the proprietary Evolution framework, -lution conducted an end-to-end diagnostic and designed a transformed hybrid agency model tailored to Bupa’s multi-division structure.
Ecosystem Discovery & Benchmarking: Conducted a comprehensive discovery, and evaluated Bupa’s ecosystem against industry maturity benchmarks across six core dimensions: Culture, Strategy, Structure, People, Process, and Tools.
Financial & Commercial Audit: Performed a detailed analysis of all external agency spend, active contracts, commercial charging practices, and governance compliance.
Hybrid Agency Model Redesign: Designed a simplified Hybrid In-House Agency model pairing an expanded Blue Agency with a single external partner. Created a two-phase rollout and transition plan to migrate work away from the remaining secondary agency partners.
Operational Governance: Developed a mandated operational framework establishing clear swim lanes, standardised workflows, and collaboration protocols for marketers, internal teams, and external partners.
AI & Automation Roadmap: Designed a clear AI adoption roadmap with quantified implementation milestones to transform creative and production capabilities, accelerating speed to market.
The Results
We respect our client’s commercial sensitivities so don’t publicly share our results. We can share that we saved Bupa a significant amount of time and money, and improved their in-house capability. If you’d like to know more, contact us.
