Th ad business is going through a change not seen in 3 decades.
For 3 decades there were three chairs at the marketing table - agencies, brands and the media. All 3 parts technologically evolved in a symbiotic "one:many" model to grow the business. Agencies "produced once and ran many times"; brands (one) had a message to get out to many and each media property created its media content for many people.
But Internet was a fourth chair that came to the table. It started to dominate the other three chairs utterly disrupting the "one:many" efficient, profitable marketing model in favor of a "many:many" model brought on by social media and mobile technologies.
As technology continued to evolve much faster than the other chairs at the table, the result of this disequilibrium was first felt by the media which suffered a near fatal blow. Agencies, now are feeling the full brunt of this dynamic largely because the "complexity" of social media is taking more and more of the traditional ad budgets.
So while the business has gotten more complex, agencies are trapped in an old "one:many" business model and have no clear way to evolve. Clients do not pay often for agency's' technological learning curves (how many agency folks were at TechCrunch Disrupt for instance???). And agencies can not charge $10,000 for a bunch of twitter updates (if you want to sleep peacefully at night).
That's why in this new scenario even agencies that want to embrace complexity - can not because the profitable "one:many" marketing business model does not support the "many:many" business model. Case in point. Digital media buying agencies are paid as a percentage of billings, but since there are few billings in social media - they do not create those types of programs for their clients. There is no incentive for a digital agency to develop a program with no/ low billings and high complexity - now is there?
So before agencies can embrace marketing complexity - we have to figure out how to make money at it. Talk about complex.