The argument of whether an agency should be a specialist or a generalist has raged a long time now. Typically, this has come down to Traditional agency vs Digital agency. There are valid arguments on both sides of this question of course. From a generalist perspective, they usually centre around the need and ability to tie all communications channels together (“custodians of the brand” etc). From the perspective of a specialist, no generalist has the depth of expertise required to execute in the more complex digital space.

What is interesting to see now however is that as digital evolves and becomes even more complex, the debate is now just as relevant to the digital space itself. The diversity of digital channels from search to mobile, content creation to social media is again, specialist.

At a technical level, even the concept of building a basic website often requires an agency make a choice whether they will use .net, or PHP, whether they will build all their solutions around sharepoint, develop their own inhouse CMS or become integrators of other systems. Do they need dedicated IA’s do their creatives have the muscle in action script etc.

The challenges here are the same, to have expertise, you need experts. Experts = headcount and you can’t carry headcount unless you have enough revenue coming from a particular channel (or area of focus) to justify the investment. I would take my hat off to any agency that can truly claim to have genuine experts in every field of digital both strategic and executional who are fully utilised but not overworked.

So this session on the ad:tech program should be interesting. Cora kicked off the Voice of the industry some time ago with a post about this topic and last week I was able to catch up with Jules from the Hallway to get his take on what the real questions are. To get another perspective we talked to Mike Zeederberg from Profero who takes the position of being both specialist and generalist which is another tactic…

Jules and Mike

I’d be really interested in your thoughts or questions for the panel and if you have any points to discuss here on the brain.
You can see the whole ad:tech program here and you can still book tickets.