Last week I had two contrasting meetings - a client meeting with a Creative Digital Agency and a candidate meeting with an Integrated/DM Planner. Their take on the future of the industry was vastly different (which isn't anything new) but it raised a question that I find intriguing - where is the role for specialists in the integrated space?

The Agency I met aim simply to be a purist Digital agency, creating great Digital work/ideas. From their point of view, integration had two negative outcomes. Firstly, it would put them in direct competition with the experts of other disciplines with far more experience and expertise and secondly, it would dilute their own work by distracting their focus from the Digital space.

On the other hand, the candidate I met from a DM/Integrated background, was of the contrasting belief that that the convergance of Digital/TV/Radio etc into each others space meant that anyone without knowledge of all the different elements could never grasp the 'big idea' or the larger picture.

Can a specialist have the breadth of experience to make work relevant across different channels? And can a generalist have the depth of expertise required to produce the best work?