There is a particular kind of career move that happens when someone who has spent three decades inside the machine decides to stop feeding it.

Colleen DeCourcy, who ran the creative department at Wieden & Kennedy for years and helped produce some of Nike's most celebrated advertising, has resurfaced as chief marketing officer at Sonos, the audio equipment company that spent much of last year apologizing for a software update that frustrated its customers. Her plan for rehabilitating the brand does not include hiring an advertising agency.

This is not entirely surprising, given that Ms. DeCourcy spent most of her career training clients to do precisely that. But it is notable nonetheless. "I literally have spent 30 years of my career training to hire and outfit agencies," she told The Drum. "So in this moment, when every marketer is being asked to do more with less, for me specifically, hiring an external agency just didn't seem like a smart use of my money."

(One imagines the holding companies reading that sentence with a certain tightness around the eyes.)

Instead, Ms. DeCourcy is building an in-house creative department staffed by what she calls "player-coaches" — people who can both make work and direct it — and opening a physical space in New York designed to bring musicians and filmmakers into direct collaboration with the brand. The first campaign, which began running last month under the line "Feel the System," is meant to move Sonos away from the language of specifications and back toward the emotional territory it once occupied.

She was frank about rejecting the standard playbook for reputation repair. Celebrity endorsements were ruled out immediately. "You don't show up with a musician dancing across the screen with her headphones on," she said.

The danger of taking creativity in-house, Ms. DeCourcy acknowledged, is that marketing organizations can produce work that is "perfectly rational, coherent and entirely ignorable." The agency traditionally provided the necessary friction. She believes she can manufacture that tension herself — though she concedes it is not an easy road.

Whether she is right will become apparent soon enough. In the meantime, the agency world has one fewer client to pursue, and one more example of a senior executive who knows exactly what agencies do, and has decided she would rather do it herself.

Original story published in The Drum: "Colleen DeCourcy spent 30 years running agencies. As CMO at Sonos, she doesn’t want one | The Drum"