There’s a desperate need for a new form of marketing services agency which shares some characteristics with traditional advertising agencies - particularly relatively long-term and close day-to-day client association - but which succeeds in building marketing partnerships with it’s clients without the need to produce important advertising.

Various attempts are being made at ‘integration’ or ‘unbundling’ and the like but they mostly seem to me to be repackaged approaches to the production of creative advertising as opposed to recognizing from the beginning, that advertising might not be the critical element for some clients in their continuous process of marketing reappraisal.

What is needed is a return to the ‘lead agency’ concept in which the agency’s management account direction and planning functions are qualified to consult with the client at the level of marketing strategy and are then equally able to propose and manage all forms of resultant marketing expenditure. The ‘lead agency’ would maintain two key distinctions - the ability to think deeply and dispassionately about the management of consumer demand and the ability to coordinate all the resulting expenditures to best effect on the client’s behalf.

Until such a new ‘lead agency’ concept emerges which can operate as the true ‘agency of record’ for the clients, they will continue to be forced to rely on their internal resources and intermittent corrective visits to expensive management consultancies. For those clients at least, the current model advertising agencies do nothing to relieve the pressures strategic  adaption has created. All too often they simply add to it.

An agency can only be judged by how well it serves its customers, how well it shoulders the pressures on them. Too many of today’s agencies are still chasing all forms of income and stretching their credibility by trying to be all things to all people. My concern is that by failing to adapt to the changing client market, agencies are losing market share most rapidly in the highest value added areas - the level at which clients describe their agency relationship as a marketing partnership. We need more initiatives to reverse that trend if we’re to have happier, less pressurized clients.