• Ad Age, Wednesday, February 8, 2006 11 AM

Ad Age's editor, Scott Donaton, returns to a topic that has long bedeviled large numbers of ad-industry professionals--the divide between media planners and media creatives. There was a time when the two worked shoulder to shoulder, but that gave way long ago to a model that largely keeps each group in its own too-isolated pod, to the detriment of each. Not good, says Donaton. "Media can be linked again to creative, but as an equal rather than a secondary discipline." How so? He proposes several models. "One is to take planners from the media agencies and physically situate them at creative agencies.... The media person remains an employee of the media shop but sits alongside creatives and account execs at the creative agency." Another notion: Create "more formal alliances between creative and media agencies, and market them jointly to clients."

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