Can't creative and media all just get along?

Oy. Not another agency of the future. But that's exactly what they're cooking up over at SMG, which has just hired a creative from Avenue A/Razorfish to run an agency within the media-buying conglomerate to do creative. (Google the phrase "agency of the future" and you get almost 15,000 entries.) The unit, called Pixel, has been part of the shop for awhile, but now it's having what appears to be a coming-out party to be an official SMG offering. While the concentration will be on digital, SMG chief Laura Desmond doesn't rule out, according to Mediapost, that "it might migrate into more traditional forms of creative advertising." There are several levels of silliness here, first and foremost that SMG doesn't feel that long-time creative agencies are capable of the task. Here at the end of 2007—even though we all know she's right—that's pitiful. SMG also wants a creative offering that comes at it from a media perspective rather than the reverse. But what of SMG sister shops Digitas and Modem Media? Aren't they reasonable enough interactive offerings? I'm familiar with the work of both, and both are innovators when it comes to media-driven creative applications. Great advertising people these days should have neither a media perspective or a creative perspective, but an idea perspective that allows them to objectively assess the full range of marketing possibilities for them. Of course, there's an 800-lb. gorilla in the offices of SMG's "the agency of the future" and all others that are doing newfangled creative/media mash-ups: that creative and media are inevitably coming back together, and after the machinations to separate them over the last period, few want to admit that the changing media landscape means their inevitable remarriage. It's only a matter of time. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE: Mediapost's Joe Mandese has written another story about this.