Over in the 'real' marketing industry, where everything has lots of 0000's, there is debate about online video. Should ad agencies with internal film departments create it or specialist companies who only focus on film/video? Jack of all trades or efficiency gains?
But where does it apply in the world of recruitment?
We have in the blue corner the TMP/Barkers tag team; the big boys with more people and services than you can twitter about in one day. And in the red corner, making up the numbers, we have the small independent agencies still Lost in print. (Did anyone actually understand the last episode of Lost?)
So, not surprising the audience (customer) supports the blue corner. They're bigger, scarier, safer and well, seem to know a lot and look very impressive. But, some of us in the orange corner (there are four corners remember) know something else and are happy to trip them all up when we can.
We see some fantastic creativity and design led work coming from the agencies, and even very efficient media buying services yet I am continually amazed (still) at how some of the conversations and examples around online are so sub-standard. The problem is, the customer doesn't always have the budget to do the full job and the agency monster needs to feed its worker bees so any honey is good honey. Maybe with fewer bees they would be able to do more for their honey?! But, and there is of course always a but, why does an organisation choose a generalist over a specialist? I'm appearing to be one sided in my view but am not really that stupid.
But as the supplier gets bigger, there will be transactions that are just not profitable so they get ignored and client service suffers. Not the agencies fault per se, just one of the costs of being big; management costs become so high that transactions have to give a return. But maybe, if they really are leading the charge into social media, they should look at how groups can make some of the lower value transactions possible. Or do they 'employ' people who do not need managing? Or do they just accept being Jack (who is also dull).
I'd suggest they look at the team in the green (fourth) corner. They not look like a tag team of any significance but you'd be better of with them than against them. And the more educated the audience become, the more they will appreciate speed and agility rather than brute force and ignorance. The flavour of the honey is changing by the day!