“So much has changed, but I think the economy just brings into stark relief trends that already were under way,” said June Blocklin, a partner with Gilbert & Co., a marketing management, merger and recruiting company.

“New technologies have been massively disruptive to the media marketplace, and the rise of search marketing is a good example,” she said. “But the agency world is nowhere near where they should be here. Search is often the first thing the agencies outsource.”

Blocklin said the big advertising holding companies dominate in every functional marketing discipline except digital, “where the money is going to the independents at the rate of two to one.”

She estimated there are currently about 1,000 purely digital specialty agencies in the U.S., vying for outsourced work from clients frustrated with the digital capabilities of their primary creative services shops. “And it's impacting fees and where the business is going,” she said. “If the big agencies don't respond, clients will go elsewhere.”

“Clients are saying, "Do we stay with the idea people that we trust or do we need a search agency, a banner agency, a Web agency, a digital strategy agency?' ” Miller said. “We just need to use our brains and think through situations creatively, which is what we do best. Digital isn't that different. It's driven best with good ideas.”

The plethora of specialty agencies has clients probing for the right mix of capabilities, according to Tom Finneran, exec VP-agency management services at the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

“A lot of clients are just going to school through the review process, trying to learn where their current agency resources may fit with other things they're seeing out there,” Finneran said. “There are a lot of technology reviews, particularly in social media, mobile and analytics.”

A result, he said, is a fragmentation of marketing resources that is producing severe pressure on coordination and strategizing.

“It used to be that the classic relationship was the client at one end of the table and an agency at the other end,” Finneran said. “Now, it's an enormous table with a host of clients representing all sorts of disciplines within a company—branding, procurement, promotions, design, PR, etc.—and on the other side a litany of agencies ranging from media planning to buying and all the technologies.”

Finneran said clients are taking two divergent paths in making sense of this new landscape: One is to manage in-house the large array of agencies and their activities; the other is to rely on a brand-agency leader to do all the strategizing and coordination, if not handle all tasks.

One company that has largely settled on the one central agency approach is Pitney Bowes.

“We do work with boutique specialists for various reasons, but there are a number of advantages that come from relative consolidation,” said Dan Kohn, Pitney Bowes VP-corporate marketing. “One advantage is in a single agency's ability to see the different parts of an overall campaign together.

“Let's face it, b-to-b companies are complex,” he said. “We've invested a lot in our agencies to know and understand us, to tour our facilities, to go to our trade shows and to see how they perceive not just us but also our customers and competitors.”

Pitney Bowes works primarily with GyroHSR, Cincinnati, which is overseeing the company's “There's a Lot More Here Than You Think” campaign. Pitney Bowes was a sponsor of the World Innovation Forum in New York in May, with GyroHSR demonstrating its digital bona fides by helping create a Pitney Bowes Bloggers Hub in a Broadway theater venue, with dozens of specially invited bloggers commenting on the event.

“What we're seeing is that there is just as much opportunity with the creative services agencies as with the independents if they just respond,” Blocklin said. “For many clients, these firms are most highly regarded for their partnerships and strategic resources. Clients do want that turnkey offering.”

“It's a big hairball,” said Blocklin. “Absolutely there are clients who have experimented with pay-for-performance models based on hard and soft measures. It's not a panacea, but it keeps the agencies hungry.”

Blocklin added that the new digital landscape may actually produce greater revenue for agencies dependent on the results of their campaigns. Targeting carefully identified, small pools of b-to-b buyers may cause budgets to shrink, she said, but the greater specificity of those narrow pools of interest can produce higher conversion.

“The agency is doing the same work to reach a narrower audience,” she said. “But now you get them. That can mean you'll have a positive ROI.”

Adding to remuneration pressures is the rise of procurement departments overseeing marketing expenditures.

“Sometimes you get these hilarious RFPs,” Miller said. “I got one from a New England bank asking for the cost of a full-page color ad. That just shows they don't know what they're talking about. Professional procurement departments like these are used to buying steel, not ideas and services.”

The Four A's' Finneran agreed, but said he sees improvement ahead.

“There is an unproductive focus on costs rather than on the benefits of marketing, but I think people will begin to refocus,” he said. “People don't market to save pennies. They market to earn dollars. Procurement is in its heyday now, but that will change as growth returns.”