Airbnb's In-House Creative Team — The Boundary Case

When a marketing leader argues that in-house creative teams cannot produce brand-defining work at the highest level, the counter-example that almost always gets raised is Airbnb. When the same leader argues that the best brand work requires an agency-of-record relationship, the same counter-example still gets raised. Airbnb has become, by 2024, the reference point for what an in-house creative function can accomplish when the right conditions align. But it is also the reference point for why those conditions almost never align anywhere else — and why Airbnb is best understood not as a model for most companies but as a boundary case that shows what is possible when an unusual set of structural preconditions are all present at once.

The Situation

Airbnb's marketing organisation history has two distinct chapters, and they are usually conflated. The first chapter, from 2008 to 2019, looked conventional. The company had a modest in-house creative function focused primarily on the product and the website, while most brand advertising and major campaign work was handled through agency relationships. Pereira O'Dell in San Francisco was a key creative partner on brand work. TBWA Chiat Day Los Angeles held significant portions of the account at various points. Various regional agencies handled local campaigns. The 2014 "Belong Anywhere" brand platform, which introduced the "Bélo" symbol and repositioned the brand around belonging rather than transactional short-term rentals, was developed through an agency partnership with DesignStudio for identity work and Pereira O'Dell for campaign development. This was a fairly ordinary configuration for a growing technology brand.

The second chapter began in 2020 and continues today. It was driven by a combination of circumstances: the COVID-19 pandemic, which temporarily collapsed Airbnb's travel business; the decision by CEO Brian Chesky to use the crisis as a forcing function to rebuild the marketing function from first principles; and the corresponding decision to build a significantly larger in-house creative capability and reduce the reliance on external agency partners. This second chapter is the one that has become the case study, and it is the one that deserves careful analysis.

The context for the 2020 pivot is essential. Airbnb's revenue had collapsed by roughly 80 per cent in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic shut down travel. The company laid off approximately 1,900 employees in May 2020, representing about 25 per cent of its workforce, and Chesky publicly announced a radical restructuring of priorities. Part of that restructuring was marketing. Airbnb had been spending approximately USD 5.4 billion on sales and marketing in 2019, much of it on performance marketing channels — Google and Facebook ads optimised for conversion and measured against direct return. Chesky's thesis, articulated in subsequent interviews with Decoder, CNBC, The Verge, and other outlets, was that the performance marketing spend had been producing diminishing returns, that it was incrementally measurable but not strategically valuable, and that the brand's direct-traffic share was high enough that much of the performance spend was paying for traffic Airbnb would have captured anyway. The pivot, announced publicly through 2020 and 2021, was to dramatically reduce performance marketing and reinvest in brand marketing — and to do most of that brand marketing in-house.

The F9 case in this series, on Airbnb's brand-over-performance pivot, covers the financial and strategic logic of that shift in detail. This F10 case focuses on the organisational consequences: what it meant to rebuild the marketing function around an in-house creative capability, what kind of team that required, how it was led, and why the model has worked at Airbnb when similar attempts have struggled elsewhere.

The central structural decision was the hiring of Hiroki Asai as Global Head of Marketing in 2020. Asai had previously run Apple's internal creative function for more than twenty years, including the period during which Apple's in-house team produced some of the most-admired product marketing in the industry — the launch campaigns for the iPhone, the iPad, and the various advertising platforms that defined Apple's brand voice during the Steve Jobs and early Tim Cook eras. Asai's hiring at Airbnb was a signal of intent. The company was not building an in-house team as a cost-saving measure. It was building it as a creative strategy, and it was willing to invest in the leadership necessary to make that strategy work at the highest level. Asai brought with him a particular model of how an in-house creative function should operate: centralised rather than distributed across brands, reporting directly to senior executive leadership rather than sitting inside a broader marketing operation, and staffed with senior creative talent who could produce brand-defining work rather than operational teams optimised for execution.

The Decision

By 2022, Airbnb's in-house creative function had grown to approximately 200 staff. The team included designers, writers, strategists, producers, filmmakers, photographers, art directors, and creative directors. It was organised as a centralised Marketing and Creative function, reporting directly to Brian Chesky rather than through a more conventional Chief Marketing Officer structure. The decision to have the creative function report to the CEO was not incidental. It reflected Chesky's own creative background — he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in industrial design and co-founded Airbnb with two other designers from the same school — and it meant that every significant creative decision at Airbnb was being made by someone who considered himself primarily a designer and secondarily a CEO.

This is a rare configuration, and it matters for understanding why the Airbnb model has worked. Most CEOs of technology companies are not designers. Most marketing functions report to a Chief Marketing Officer, who reports to a Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Operating Officer, who reports to the CEO. The distance between the CEO and the creative work is typically considerable, and the CEO's attention on marketing is episodic. Chesky's model at Airbnb compressed that distance to zero. He was personally involved in creative decisions, and the creative team had direct access to him. The implications for the kind of work the team could produce — and for the speed at which it could move from concept to execution — were substantial.

The agency relationships did not disappear entirely. Airbnb continued to work with specialist production partners, localisation vendors, and some project-specific creative collaborators. But the agency-of-record model, in which a single creative partner holds the strategic relationship and drives the major brand work, was effectively retired. The company's major creative outputs after 2020 came through the in-house team.

Two projects stand out as the most visible demonstrations of what the in-house model could produce. The first was the "Made Possible by Hosts" campaign, launched in 2021. The campaign was built around the idea that the Airbnb experience is not an abstract technology product but a direct relationship between hosts and guests — that what makes a stay memorable is the specific person who made it possible. The creative execution was understated by conventional advertising standards: documentary-style photography and film showing real hosts in real spaces, with minimal voice-over and almost no product messaging. The campaign ran across television, outdoor, digital, and editorial channels. It won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix in the Outdoor category in 2022 and was widely praised within the industry as an example of brand work that felt neither like traditional advertising nor like typical technology marketing.

The second major project was the "Icons" launch in May 2024. Airbnb announced a new category of stays — extraordinary experiences hosted by cultural figures, including stays at Prince's purple house from the 1984 "Purple Rain" film, an event at Ferrari's Maranello headquarters, a night at Pixar's Up House, and several others. The launch was unusual for a technology product: it was built as a cultural event rather than a product announcement, with coordinated media activations, celebrity host reveals, and a campaign that treated the new feature as a creative proposition rather than a functional upgrade. Industry coverage at the time noted that the launch felt more like a film studio event than a technology product launch — a tonal distinction that the in-house creative team, working directly with Chesky, had been able to maintain without the filtering that typically occurs when multiple agency partners are involved.

The structural requirements for producing work at this level in-house are considerable, and Airbnb has been open about them. Asai, in various industry interviews, has described the team's operating model as built around senior talent density: the goal is to hire fewer but better creative staff, paid at levels that compete with the top agencies and technology companies, with the understanding that senior talent in-house produces better work than a larger team of more junior staff. The compensation levels at Airbnb's creative function are reportedly competitive with senior roles at Apple, Google, Meta, and the top tier of creative agencies. Campaign's 2022 profile of Asai's team reported base salaries for senior creative directors in excess of USD 400,000, with significant equity components. This is not a cost-saving configuration. It is a capability-purchase configuration, and it only works at companies that can sustain the compensation levels required to attract and retain top creative talent.

The other structural requirement is founder-level commitment. Chesky has made his personal involvement in creative work explicit and public. In multiple interviews he has described creative review meetings that he runs personally, his habit of writing copy himself on major launches, and his belief that the CEO's role at a design-led company includes active stewardship of the creative output. This is a distinctive pattern. Very few technology company CEOs — or indeed CEOs in any industry — commit the time, attention, and personal taste to creative work at this level. When they do, the model becomes vulnerable to leadership transition: what happens to the in-house creative function when the founder-CEO who led it personally leaves? Airbnb has not yet had to answer that question, and the honest answer is that the current organisational structure depends on Chesky's continuing involvement in a way that no institutionalised process can fully replace.

The Data

Metric	2019 (pre-pivot)	2022 (post-pivot)	2024 (current)
Revenue (USD bn)	4.81	8.40	10.22 (est.)
Sales and marketing spend (USD bn)	5.41	2.11	~2.0 (est.)
S&M as share of revenue	~25%	~25% (different mix)	~20-25%
Direct traffic share	~90%	~90%	~90%
In-house creative headcount	~50	~200	~200+
Major agency-of-record relationships	multiple	effectively none	effectively none

The S&M line deserves careful interpretation. Airbnb's 2019 sales and marketing spend of USD 5.41 billion was heavily weighted toward performance marketing channels. By 2022, the absolute spend was lower — approximately USD 2.1 billion — but the composition had shifted dramatically toward brand marketing, in-house creative production, and public relations. The company claimed, in its 2022 and 2023 shareholder communications, that this shift had produced improved return on marketing investment, with brand metrics holding or improving while performance-driven growth continued.

Brand tracking data from independent providers shows mixed but directionally positive results. Airbnb's unaided brand awareness in key markets remained high throughout the pivot and has improved marginally. Brand consideration metrics, where independent tracking is available, have held steady. The "Made Possible by Hosts" campaign was directly credited by Airbnb's leadership with contributing to consideration improvements, though the attribution is difficult to verify externally.

Revenue performance in the years after the pivot has been strong. From USD 4.81 billion in 2019, the company grew through the pandemic disruption of 2020 (revenue of USD 3.38 billion) and reached USD 8.40 billion in 2022 and USD 9.92 billion in 2023. The growth has been narrated by Chesky and his team as evidence that the marketing pivot is working — that the shift to in-house creative and brand-led marketing is delivering commercial results in parallel with the creative awards and industry recognition. The financial commentary is, to be fair, circular in some respects: the company's growth from 2021 to 2024 was driven by many factors, of which marketing is only one. But the combination of revenue growth and reduced sales and marketing spend as a share of revenue is at least consistent with the leadership's thesis.

The creative industry awards data is also worth noting. Airbnb's in-house team has won significant recognition since 2020, including the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in 2022, multiple D&AD awards, One Show awards, and Clio awards. The volume and quality of industry recognition for an in-house creative team is highly unusual. Most in-house teams, for structural reasons around internal focus and lack of agency-style submission processes, do not win this kind of recognition even when their work is strong. Airbnb's team has consistently chosen to submit work to creative competitions and has consistently performed at the level of the top agencies. This is a data point about the creative quality of the work.

One further data point concerns talent acquisition and retention. The decision to pay creative staff at levels competitive with the top agencies has implications for the economics of the in-house model that are not always acknowledged. A senior creative director at a top agency earns compensation in the low-to-mid six figures; the equivalent role at Apple or at Airbnb's in-house function reportedly pays considerably more once equity is included. The premium is necessary to attract the talent, but it means that the in-house model's cost advantage over an equivalent agency relationship is narrower than it first appears. The value proposition of the in-house team is not primarily that it is cheaper than an agency. It is that it produces different kinds of work — work that is more tightly connected to the product, more responsive to the CEO's personal direction, and more continuous over time — than an agency structure could deliver, at a cost that is comparable rather than dramatically lower. This is important because it reframes the in-housing question from "how much can we save?" to "what kinds of creative outcomes are we trying to produce, and which structure delivers them best?"

The Marketing Organisation Lesson

F10-02's argument that in-house versus agency is a false dichotomy applies differently at Airbnb than at Unilever. The Unilever U-Studio case showed that in-housing works for volume and execution but struggles for origination. The Airbnb case shows that in-housing can work for origination as well — but only when a specific set of preconditions are met. The preconditions are the lesson, not the outcome.

The first precondition is founder-creative leadership. Chesky is not simply a CEO who cares about marketing. He is a designer by training and by inclination, and he personally leads creative direction at Airbnb. The in-house team reports directly to him and has his continuing attention. Most companies do not have a founder-CEO with this background. In companies where the CEO is a finance specialist, an operator, or a salesperson, the in-house creative team will struggle to get the level of senior attention that produces brand-defining work, because senior attention at most companies is structurally scarce and tends to flow to the areas the CEO personally understands. The Airbnb model is, in this sense, partially personality-dependent.

The second precondition is talent-attraction capacity. Airbnb competes with Apple, Google, Meta, and the top tier of creative agencies for senior creative talent. The company has the brand prestige, compensation structure, and equity programme to win those competitions. Most companies do not. A consumer goods company, a retail bank, a B2B technology firm, or an insurance carrier cannot easily attract creative directors at the compensation levels Airbnb offers, and the ones they can attract will often be second-tier talent compared to what Apple or Airbnb can hire. This is not a criticism of those companies. It is a recognition that the in-house model at Airbnb is structurally dependent on the company's ability to buy talent at the top of the market.

The third precondition is product-brand fusion. Airbnb's brand is tightly tied to its product. The photography, film, written copy, and visual identity of Airbnb's marketing is essentially an extension of the product experience itself. When the creative team produces a campaign, it is not translating a product proposition into a creative idea — it is documenting and amplifying an experience that already exists. This makes in-house creative work easier because the distance between product knowledge and creative work is short. In categories where the brand is more abstract — FMCG, retail banking, insurance, many B2B markets — the distance is longer, and the value of external creative perspective is correspondingly higher.

F10-07's argument about the marketing team as system applies very directly to Airbnb. The in-house creative function is not simply a cost centre that replaces agency spend. It is a system that includes specific leadership, specific talent, specific reporting lines, specific operating principles, and a specific relationship with the CEO. Changing any one of those elements could degrade the whole. If Chesky left the company, or if Asai left, or if compensation levels fell, or if reporting lines changed, the system could unravel quickly. This is the fragility of the Airbnb model — it depends on a particular configuration of preconditions that are not easy to sustain over long periods.

F10-08's capstone argument about a marketing organisation is that the structural decision — in-house, agency, hybrid, in what proportions — is not a matter of principle but of deliberate design. Airbnb designed its marketing organisation for its specific circumstances, not as an ideological commitment to in-housing. The outcome looks extreme from the outside, but the process was not about winning the in-house versus agency argument. It was about asking which work Airbnb could do better in-house given its particular advantages, which work required external perspective it could not replicate internally, and how to organise around the answers. The Airbnb in-house team is large and central because Airbnb's conditions make it possible for that team to produce excellent work. A different company with different conditions should arrive at a different design.

The synthesis

The Airbnb case is evidence-based in a way that is easy to miss because the outcome looks so clearly one-sided. A company that runs almost no agency-of-record relationships and produces almost all of its major creative work in-house might appear to have chosen in-house over agency — to have settled the dichotomy rather than synthesised it.

But the The synthesis is different. Airbnb's model is not a rejection of agency capability in principle. It is a recognition that, for Airbnb specifically, the capabilities that agencies typically provide — outside perspective, specialist creative talent, strategic distance from the client's operational concerns — are available internally because of a particular combination of circumstances. The founder is a designer. The senior creative leader came from Apple's world-class in-house function. The brand is fused with the product. The company can hire at the top of the market. Under these conditions, the value an external agency would add is reduced relative to the value an internal team can deliver. The in-housing decision is not an ideological victory; it is a capability-map response to specific circumstances.

The deeper evidence-based point is that the in-house and agency models are not in competition as abstract approaches. They are different ways of securing a set of capabilities that every marketing organisation needs: creative origination, strategic challenge, executional craft, brand knowledge, and the ability to produce work under commercial pressure. Any marketing organisation has to solve for these capabilities somehow. Airbnb solves for them through an unusually capable in-house team. Nike solves for them through an unusually long-tenured agency partnership. Unilever solves for them through a layered combination of in-house production and external creative origination. Each of these is a legitimate synthesis, and each responds to the specific circumstances of the company.

The error would be to read Airbnb as proof that in-housing is the right answer, just as it would be an error to read Nike as proof that long-term agency relationships are the right answer. The right answer depends on the circumstances, and the evidence-based question is always: which capabilities does this organisation need, and which configuration will deliver them best? Airbnb is a boundary case that shows what is possible when the circumstances support an unusually complete in-house model. It is not a template.

Sources

• Airbnb, Inc. Form 10-K Annual Reports, 2020-2023
• Brian Chesky, interviews with Decoder (The Verge), CNBC, Bloomberg, and industry conferences, 2020-2024
• Campaign, profiles of Hiroki Asai and the Airbnb in-house creative team, 2021-2023
• Ad Age, coverage of Airbnb's marketing restructuring and in-house expansion, 2020-2024
• "Made Possible by Hosts" campaign coverage in Cannes Lions, Adweek, Campaign, 2021-2022
• "Icons" launch coverage in The New York Times, Ad Age, Fast Company, May 2024
• Mark Ritson, Marketing Week columns on Airbnb's marketing pivot and in-house model, 2021-2023
• Airbnb Q3 2022 shareholder letter and subsequent investor communications on marketing efficiency
• Cannes Lions 2022 award citations, Outdoor Grand Prix for "Made Possible by Hosts"
• Various industry analyses of in-housing trends and the Airbnb model by WARC, World Federation of Advertisers, and Bain and Company, 2021-2023