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?

The first blog

As a newcomer to this blogging phenomenon I have some similar feelings to when I went blind for 48 hours for charity (no self-harm was involved, just a sturdy and surprisingly itchy blindfold)... that is, I feel very much at sea, I can hear strands of conversations running past me, some loud, some quiet, some interesting, some not but they all seem a little incoherent and diesmbodied as I cannot yet quite make out their source or their intended end point. I am hoping that by entering the blogging space with blind clumsiness I can learn to open my own eyes to this whole new world of communication. Having read a number of blogs and discussed a few times whether or not this was a good idea with one half of http://adlads.wordpress.com/ and two wholes http://wannabeadman.blogspot.com/ and http://charlesfrith.blogspot.com/ I decided to take a deep breath and go for it. My concern was, and still is to a certain extent that, as a recruiter working within the World of Planning, I generally speak to people brighter, more creative and far more interesting than myself day in day out. Hoping to use this medium as a different way of continuing some of those dialogues, and also as a way of starting some new ones with other Planners, I was worried that I would have nothing to say of note and could be seen as simply as an intruder rather than any sort of contributor.

Well, I've been racking my brains to think of how I might create a point of difference, how I might be able to create a blog that could potentially be worth returning to every now and then... and this is my first answer (for I am not ruling out the possibility of there being more!). Candidates have often commented that they thought as a recruiter in the industry I must have a fascinating view - as an outsider within, involved, interacting but yet completely detached from an industry in the midst of a period of immense change. Watching the processes as old orders and assumptions are being torn up or remoulded and new orders arise, finding their feet and direction. And they are right, it is a fascinating seat to be sat in and one from which I hope to pose some questions of my own and hopefully, to gain some interesting responses from the inhabitants of this world I am permanently visiting.