ANALYSIS: Advertising - Can full-service agencies retake lost turf? - Ad agencies look at ways to fight back and retain revenues

That the business sphere is in the midst of an unrelenting, technology-driven change is accepted fact. But that is of little comfort to advertising agencies as they grapple with their position in the new world order. For decades, their place at the centre of the strategic communications planning process was undisputed. Then came the internet and media explosion which eroded their role, while media and other specialist agencies, once relegated to the last minutes of a pitch presentation, have found their star rising. A case in point is the recent appointment of direct agency 141 instead of parent Bates to handle the core brand strategy work of Allied Domecq. Agencies apparently aren't taking the changes lying down. At the AdAsia conference in Taipei late last month, ad agency chiefs spelled out plans for a fight-back. They started by defining what they thought the future would look like. In Keith Reinhard's vision of the future, personal digital assistants talked to their owners - advising them on what to buy and where to go based on their personal lifestyle interests and brand profile - and in which FMCG companies produced dramas and sitcoms that run on their websites. DDB's worldwide chairman and chief executive says interactivity of this level is important because consumers are being empowered by technology to block advertising."In order to be chosen, advertisers must have three things in their message: timely information, interactive entertainment and brand-embedded content." Reinhard adds that advertisers must, therefore, create a total brand experience to get consumers to "buy-in". Underlining the sea change to come, he predicts "creative director of the future may be called experience directors". But too much change leads to disorientation, even among the tech-literate people, says Leo Burnett regional managing director Richard Pinder. "Now more than ever before, the brands you feel comfortable with are becoming increasingly important," he says. Advertisers, he adds, shouldn't lose sight of the fact that brands are made up of three components: core drivers, which are the essence of a brand's existence in people's lives, lifestyle trends and transient cultural cues. "Brands must satisfy all three if they are to survive in the long-term. Most dotcoms turned into dotbombs because they missed out the core driver components of the equation," says Pinder. However, because of the increasingly complex marketplace and a more 'me-centric' consumer, traditional advertising agencies are finding themselves pushed off centre stage and into the role of supplier, while media agencies and a bewildering array of consultancies - branding, marketing, even management - take on plum assignments such as strategy. Gautam Rakshit, the managing director of Mumbai-based Advertising Avenues and the vice-chairman of the Asian Federation of Advertising Associations, says that full service agencies are facing a bleak future. Blaming specialists for the decline, he says: "One by one, revenue-earning parts of the full service agency are being plucked away and, very soon, it will be left with crumbs while the specialists take the cream." The only way out, he says, is for the traditional agency to reposition itself as a provider of strategic solutions and knowledge, in terms of consumers, markets, and new business and product opportunities. The idea is to put the agency back onto centre stage, with specialists becoming the suppliers. "Right now, when we go and see the client, we are only welcome at the brand manager's table. What we should aim to achieve is to be welcome at the chairman's table." However, Bates Asia president and Hong Kong 4As chairman Jeffrey Yu describes such a repositioning as radical. "We cannot up our roots and become business consultants. Our core competency is communications and this is where we should be focusing on." Rakshit also questioned the rationale behind clients chopping budgets in a recession. "The reason is that we are not addressing the key issues - the future health of the business category the company is in, and new markets and products. What is worse, we don't want to accept responsibility for the success or failure of a brand campaign."

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