Alberto Ferrer from The Vidal Partnership and AdAge’s Big Tent posted an interesting piece yesterday on the threats general market agency “partners” pose to multicultural agencies, particularly in these tough economic times.

The conundrum Alberto discusses can be more broadly applied to all specialist agencies. At the end of the day, most clients want to directly deal with as few agencies as possible (whether they say so or not). It’s primarily a bandwidth issue. So whether you are a PR firm, an interactive agency, or an event marketing firm, you fight this battle all the time.

This issues seems to fly in the face of the recommendations made by Tim Williams in his agency manifesto “Take a Stand for Your Brand: Building a Great Agency Brand from the Inside Out.” Mr. Williams posits that agencies need to specialize and not be all things to all people – but how does that vision reconcile with the realities of clients wanting fewer agency relationships and going for the “one stop shop” Alberto described in his post.

At our agency, we think about this issue incessantly. It’s interesting because, depending on the client, we are in some instances the lead agency, in others an equal partner with a traditional agency, and many times what I like to call the “sub-partner” (aka the sub-contractor.) Most times, the farther you are away from the client, the more bureaucratic the process, the less fulfilling the work, the less opportunity you have to bring groundbreaking ideas, and the less you are able to impact the client’s business.

The one bright spot I see in all this mess for specialty shops (at least digitally-focused ones) is the emergence and continued evolution of digital. I see more and more clients turning away from their full-service, “we can do everything for you including digital” traditional agencies and looking for the insights and deep discipline knowledge of interactive agencies. Things move too fast with digital, and everyone accepts that, including clients.

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