We’re all creative people, and we all want to ensure that we deliver the best work that we can. The innovative ideas clients will love us for, campaigns and events that people enjoy engaging with, and most importantly, campaigns we enjoy creating, the ones that make a difference.

The work an agency did used to be easy to define. It was marketing in various formats propelled into people’s daily lives. The process of making these campaigns also used to be easy to define. We all knew the rules, and we all knew what our job titles actually meant. As departments in an agency, we knew what our roles were, and as agencies we knew how to work together. But along the way, clients' needs started to change.

As a result, more and more agencies started to compete for an entire brand’s marketing budget, which in turn meant teams had to become more ‘integrated’. This resulted in agencies becoming more innovative as people got immersed in their new and different roles. Generating constant, captivating and exclusive content became the main priority. Sounds great, right?

Well, I’m not so sure. We’ve all heard the saying ‘Jack of all trades…’

Budget competition, focus on ROI, and many other factors ushered in the dawn of the hybrid agency. The lines between disciplines became increasingly blurry. At the same time, opportunistic non-agency players started inching their way into the marketing services arena. As clients demanded newly bundled support across commerce, digital content and media distribution, agencies started to change in order to meet this challenge (or make the most of an unexpected opportunity). Suddenly, agencies that were experts in a certain field, put themselves, or were thrust into new areas by others. Ideas got confused and compromised by the limits and knowledge of a particular agency.

Rather than continuing to play nice and collaborate with each other, barriers were raised and everyone became a lot more guarded.

There are many reasons why we don’t collaborate effectively, but there is one major issue that I believe restricts us more than any other. It can be found at any level, from the agency attitude down to the individual creative and it’s not money.

It’s the perceived ownership of an idea. If an individual guards all of their ideas, and works on them in isolation, they lose the opportunity for it to grow into something bigger, something you never would have expected when you first set out. This unwillingness and reluctance to allow other people into the idea process runs the risk of hampering our ability to produce work that people and clients care about. This is bad for clients, bad for agencies, and bad all round. Given the enormous potential for creative output in agencies, the importance needs to be refocused around delivering it to audiences in the best way, rather than squabbling over budget like dogs with a bone.

At the nexus of this continually evolving mashup of business operations and marketing, our clients need partner agencies to help them get out the correct messages rather than ones that are compromised by the limitations of a particular agency.

We need to get back to collaborating and building ideas, allowing them to grow and flourish.