I thought I would add my own experiences to the commentary on specialist agencies in digital, especially after the news about Agency.com. I started a small design agency way back in 1990 and was well established by the time the web appeared. Always being one to look at new technology, I embraced this new area of design. I hated the technical restrictions that the early HTML offered, so was delighted be the creative freedoms Flash offered, even if it had its own drawbacks. Even in those days I would rather give a few people a good experience than everyone a bad one. In those early days, only the brave clients, spent decent money on web sites, but they are the ones who generally do very well in the digital space today.
However, within a few years of the web being noticed, specialist web agencies appeared, more often than not they were technically based rather than creative, and they started to win business (not bitter really:-)) Clients believed that they needed specialist's to provide a service that the larger agencies didn't have.
Bring us right up to 2010, and digital is no longer specialised, it's just part of the whole campaign, and I think in some cases, my beloved print has become more niche than digital!
So here I am in Mobile, and I'm getting real deja vue. However this time I believe the big agencies (some of them) have learnt their lesson, and are bringing in specialisms much earlier, hence why I'm at Ogilvy and Mather. If we can prove early on, that we have the people and resources in house to create remarkable work in house, then our clients wont need to go to smaller "specialist" agencies.
It's very exciting times!
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