The full service media agency dream is over?

I received an email yesterday from a lovely young lady working on a global pitch asking me to delve through any previous campaigns I had been involved with for examples of where a creative message had been magnified by relevant and contextual media placement. An example provided was of a Swedish anti smoking poster placed, poetically, on top of the spluttering exhaust pipes of a decaying bus – the blue, soot ridden smog replicating a smoker’s exhalations. Clever, eh? And it got me thinking, not that this is in anyway revolutionary, that such creative and media synergy must be the default. An effective communications message must be placed in a space both relevant to the brand and audience, as well as such placement being in synch with the particular creative execution. Not one without the other, and certainly not the combination of each being such rare examples that we must rummage through our network drives in fruitless despair.

But again, this is not a revolutionary point. After all this is why all agencies, large and small, are clamouring to fill the full service ideal, as already provided by many niche digital agencies, offering brands a one stop shop for effective communications. The more interesting aspect of this shift, however, is the dynamic between media and creative agencies. A traditionally fraught and politically driven relationship, both are now eyeing up each other’s space as the solution to their ever dwindling revenues.

So, who’s going to win this battle of comms superiority? Personally, I can’t help but think that media agencies may be in for a hiding. Whatever the truth of the matter, media planning, buying and strategy with always been seen as the poor, dirtied kneed brother to the glamorous world of creative. Quite simply, would you trust a traditional media agency with creative execution? Or creative agencies with media planning and buying?

And I don’t think I’m alone. Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP head honcho, said in his address to the IPA lunch on Wednesday that he sees traditional media agencies having to adapt their business models to survive the new economic new reality. No shock there. But, he then went on to state that the future of WPP media agencies lay in consumer data, insights and analyses. Closer to Reuters and Bloomberg than BBH or Mother.

This may put the CHI’s recent partnership with WPP’s media buying arm GroupM in a slightly more interesting perspective. Is this the model Sorrell sees as the future of full service agencies across the WPP network? And if so, what does this mean for those WPP media agencies whose behind the water cooler murmurings are filled with notions of offering clients both media strategy and buying with creative execution management?

Questions, questions.