Brands Are Building Their Own Studios, Fast
The in-house creative shift isn’t a fringe trend anymore. Mailchimp, Sephora, Nike, Red Bull, and Home Depot have all built internal creative studios to keep pace with the volume of content modern marketing requires, and Dick’s Sporting Goods went further, launching an in-house studio division, Cookie Jar & a Dream Studios, to produce its own films and branded content. The logic is straightforward: an internal team with direct access to brand guidelines and real-time performance data can turn around social and campaign content in hours instead of the weeks a traditional agency cycle takes.
What Stays In-House, and What Doesn’t
The more useful pattern for producers and content leads to understand is what brands are keeping internal versus what they’re still outsourcing. Early-stage, high-volume content, social cuts, product features, day-to-day brand content, is exactly what’s moving in-house. Heavier, more specialized production is still going to outside partners. HelloFresh is a clear example: it built an in-house team for day-to-day content consistency, but still turns to agency partners for its television commercials. The pattern holds across the industry: brand-defining creative and specialized production stay with outside experts, while fast-turnaround, high-volume content lives in-house.
Where Aerial Production Sits in That Split
Aerial cinematography is squarely on the specialized side of that line, and for good reason. Flying a drone professionally requires FAA Part 107 certification, aviation-specific liability coverage, and airspace authorization that varies by location, none of which an in-house creative team typically builds internally even when everything else about their production is self-run. That’s the same specialized-skill gap that shows up in drone cinematography for car commercials, where even brands with strong in-house production still bring in a certified aerial team for the vehicle work. It makes aerial one of the few pieces of the production stack that continues to make sense to bring in from outside, even for a brand that has otherwise moved most of its content production in-house.
What This Means for Content Creators, Not Just Brands
The same logic applies below the brand-studio level. Individual creators and small in-house teams building out a YouTube channel, a product launch video, or a founder-led content strategy face the identical gap: they can shoot, edit, and publish everything else themselves, but a legally flown, broadcast-quality aerial shot requires equipment, certification, and insurance that doesn’t make sense to build in-house for occasional use. That’s true whether the deliverable is a national TV spot or a single hero shot for a product launch video, and it’s the same reason brand teams leaning into aerial brand storytelling still call in a specialized crew rather than training an in-house shooter to fly.
How to Work With an Aerial Vendor as a Plug-In, Not a Full Production Company
Should an in-house team just buy a drone and fly it themselves? For occasional use, the certification, insurance, and airspace-authorization overhead rarely pencils out against booking a specialized crew per project. What should an in-house team hand an aerial vendor to keep the shoot efficient? A shot list, brand guidelines, and the existing edit pipeline’s delivery specs, so the aerial unit can drop into the shoot day rather than run it.
The practical takeaway for both in-house brand studios and independent creators is to treat an aerial unit as a specialized add-on to a production stack that’s otherwise self-sufficient, not a full-service vendor replacing the rest of the team. That means booking a crew that can drop into an existing shoot day, work from a shot list the internal team has already built, and hand off footage in whatever format the in-house edit pipeline already runs on, rather than expecting the aerial vendor to run the whole production. As more brands and creators build their own studios, that kind of flexible, single-department aerial partnership is becoming the standard way the two models actually work together — and it’s exactly the role CineDrones plays for the in-house teams and content creators we work with. If your studio needs a certified aerial partner for your next shoot, that’s the conversation worth having with CineDrones now.
