• by Jack Feuer , June 3, 2009

Ask anyone who was dumb enough to fall for that "parenting is wonderful" crap and had kids. Parenting is not rewarding. It is not a sacred obligation. Parenting is a gigantic, never-ending pain in the ass.

In fact, the only thing worse than dealing with the young is actually being young.

Youth is always fighting with someone or something, always struggling to find its place in the world. Youth almost always loses that battle because it thinks with its heart and its dick instead of its head.

Youth is always in flux, constantly changing how it looks and how it thinks. So it's always confused, and its parents are always broke and dizzy.

Come to think of it, youth has a lot in common with General Motors.

And companies are just like people. Witness the media agency business, which is so young that if you graduated college and immediately went to work for Zenith Media the day it launched in the U.S., you're still not old enough to have hair in your ears.

Barely 15, many of these media shops have changed their names, their logos, their corporate colors and their competitive positions as they struggled to control their own destinies. Most were spat on by their creative siblings almost from the moment they left their holding-company wombs.

They still get spat on.

They still fight to control their own destinies.

And an ill wind is blowing that threatens even worse.

There are many examples I could point to, but the one that put me over the top in the worry department was a lunch I recently had with a major marketer. He kept talking -- vehemently -- about how all his communications vendors need to come back together. I bet it was a similar, client-fed urge to undo unbundling, in deed if not in word, that led the 4As to merge their management and media conferences.

No doubt leadership at Deutsch and FCB and all the other enemies of media service liberty are salivating at the prospect of regaining control of their errant children. For sure, the uber-egos at Omnicom's creative agencies would kill to get strategic media planning back. Even the Publicis and WPP media shops would be sacrificed in an instant if giant accounts warned Levy and Sorrell to rebundle or else.

Maybe clients would be happier with creatives back in control. It's probably more fun being well-played by Peter Arnell or Saint Alex than well-served by Bill Tucker or whoever is running Carat this week.

I had hoped that digital, which truly erases the line between medium and message, would prove the worth of independent media and end the argument once and for all. Instead, it's fed the rebundling faction.

The leaders of America's media services shops better start seriously pondering the possibility that their freedom could be facing an existential threat. Otherwise, they might die before they get old.