An Interview with The Agency at Wolverine Worldwide

This year’s conference will feature the award-winning in-house agency from Wolverine Worldwide, The Agency. This in-house collective was established by Kelly Warkentien, vice president and creative director, and Abbey Scott, director of production. Together, they have established a full-service in-house studio that blends high-level strategy and quality content with accelerated delivery. The ANA’s Peter Kenigsberg spoke with Kelly and Abbey about their views of the industry, outlooks for the future, expectations for the conference, and more.

Peter Kenigsberg, ANA: The Agency is a centralized studio model that supports nine global brands. How does your team balance the interests and priorities of each brand to ensure they all are poised for growth?

Kelly Warkentien, Wolverine Worldwide: We balance this through a combination of clarity, discipline, and transparency. First, every brand has a clearly defined scope tied to business priorities. We align early on what matters most. Second, we operate with a structured resourcing model that gives visibility into how work is prioritized across the portfolio. This allows us to make informed decisions, not reactive ones, and ensures each brand understands how and why resources are allocated. Finally, we stay deeply embedded with our brand partners. This is not a centralized team that services the brands, but a Center of Excellence within Wolverine Worldwide that is invested in the success and growth of each brand. We are integrated into their planning, and that balance of structure and partnership allows us to scale across nine brands while still delivering brand specific creative impact.

Kenigsberg: What were some of those “quick wins” that showed executive leadership the potential of The Agency to become what it is today?

Warkentien: We were able to take work that would have traditionally gone external and delivered it faster, with tighter collaboration, and at a significantly lower cost. That combination got attention quickly. Another key win was the volume. Once we stood up The Den, our in-house production capability, we scaled output in a meaningful way. That included thousands of assets across still and motion. It demonstrated we were not just a creative team; we were an engine. Just as important, we showed what cross-functional collaboration looks like when it is working well. Creative, production, marketing, and insights moving together created better work and a better process. That built trust with leadership early on and created momentum.

Kenigsberg: For those companies that are just beginning their in-housing journey, what is your most important piece of advice? Looking back on the start of your own in-housing journey, what advice would have been most helpful to you?

Warkentien: Start with focus, not scale. It is tempting to try to build a full-service agency overnight, but the most successful in-house teams are built around a few clear, high-impact use cases. Prove value there first, then expand. The second piece is to build your operating model early. Clear scopes, defined processes, and a transparent resourcing approach are not optional. They are foundational. Without them, teams become reactive very quickly. Finally, and most importantly, invest in the right talent from the beginning. You need people who can operate with both creative excellence and business accountability. That combination allows an in-house team to earn trust and grow.

Kenigsberg: Building a studio space for an in-house agency is a good sign that leadership is investing in the growth and future of that team. To make sure your studio space was truly “state-of-the-art,” what are your studio essentials in terms of equipment and staff?

Abbey Scott, Wolverine Worldwide: To build a truly state-of-the-art studio, we approached the space as a living ecosystem designed to evolve with our creative ambition. The studio can seamlessly transform from multiple modular sets into a single largescale environment, enabling us to support everything from high impact campaigns to concurrent, smaller scale productions. A collaborative postproduction bay anchors the workflow, allowing teams to ideate, refine, and scale post support in real time, including voiceover and finishing. We pair this with a disciplined, future focused approach to equipment, regularly upgrading tools while continuously evaluating rent-versus-buy decisions and leveraging resale to maximize reinvestment. Equally important is investing in people: establishing fulltime creative and production leads across key disciplines creates strong ownership and consistency, while flexible working dollars allow us to scale supporting crew based on the creative execution. Together with robust equipment tracking—critical given our significant on location work—this model ensures the studio is not just state of the art today but built to grow with the team and the work tomorrow.

Kenigsberg:In what ways is your in-house agency currently leveraging AI? Where has it shown the greatest benefit to your ways of working?

Warkentien: We’re very intentional about how we use AI in our creative and production work. For us, it’s an accelerator for thinking and making, not a replacement for human creativity, judgment, or craft. AI helps our teams explore ideas faster and visualize possibilities earlier, but every output is guided, shaped, and ultimately approved by people. That human layer is non-negotiable.

Kenigsberg: What are you most looking forward to at the 2026 ANA In-House Agency Conference?

Scott: For us, the biggest draw of the ANA conference is the candor and the craft. Hearing directly from other inhouse leaders about what they’ve cracked, where they’re still struggling, and how they’re planning for the future is invaluable. We’re equally excited to see and celebrate the great work coming out of in-house teams right now. The level of creativity and impact in this community continues to raise the bar, and not just great work for “in-house teams” but great work for our industry. We’re looking forward to connecting, learning, and being inspired by ideas we haven’t thought about yet, and to sharing what we’re building not because it’s finished, but because we believe the future of in-house agencies is something we shape together.

For more information about this year’s conference and to register, please click here.

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