Paul,
am from an MNC – agency. Thanks for the wake up call – Thought provoking i must say. Tryied relating this mindset before to the principles before for thoughts but heck.. what i get back is that it is normal to have dis-integration because it is about P&L and bottom line. Its ‘OK’ to sometimes divide and rule.

My humble opinion ! “We”, agencies have no one to blame but ourselves.

What is ironic is that client is seeking for integration and agencies are moving backwards to own specialization of a specific medium. Your thoughts are excellent and it seems that maybe it should be a time to own a neutral team that is able to bring ideas to “life” without looking at what form of medium specifically. Basically an idea generation team that bridges the “agencies” together.

With the advertising industry harping over integrated marketing communications / 360 campaigns but talents within the agencies (especially multinationals) are not groomed to handle and to think beyond of their specialty. Be it just digital, TV, activation, or even PR for that instance. Maybe this is just evident from where i come from.

Organically grown brands / accounts are seeking for joint forces and hoping their main agency will feed / guide them on ways to move beyond their traditional above the line or below the line but talents (creative or brand) are not able to advice them on how to “move forward” or options to go with. Media neutralization is kicking and coming in hard. Big media budgets from big boys like ciggies account will not be here to stay for long because evidently in some extreme cases, rules and regulations of industry and even local markets will kill the media money that we rely too much on.

Agencies will be here to stay. But unless we can utilize the resources we own NOW and merge mindset and thoughts together. The BBH’s, Widen’s and Fallon’s will charge on forward eating into main chunk of money making area – the ” idea generation portion ” of our rigid MNC agency structures and leave us with adaptation works. I wonder how the P&L will look like then.

Looks like the we do have a purpose for being the biggest global networks. * for easy local market execution work*.

Cheers
Terence