Sometimes it can be rather amusing, sometimes it's exceedingly irritating, but it's always very destructive - and usually the answer to "which area of advertising is the most important?" is normally relevant to whichever area the person you've asked works in.

Strange that.

The first advertising agency I worked for was very much an Old School company and the Men in Suits reigned, the Group Account Executives and their smart lackeys – and the Media, Creative, Production and Research departments all did as they were told (except the Tea Lady who, for reasons that I could only guess, was far more important).

Then I joined the newly formed Saatchi & Saatchi and I entered a different world.

The traditional rule book had been torn up, the Creatives were kings (and a few queens!) and woe betide anyone from another department wandering lost onto the Creative floor without a brief and a large budget.

I can remember so many cases where media schedules were ignored by a Creative team because 'the space didn't work with the ad' and many a TV schedule had to be re-booked because a 60-second commercial had been produced instead of a 30.

I actually heard a rather famous Creative bloke once say "I don't do 30s"

But then I had a brief incursion into a Media Buying company where, as you would imagine, the complete opposite was the case and Creative work was almost a by-product, and I can certainly think of an ad agency that once evolved very much around the investigative world of Planning and Research.

There is, of course, nothing wrong in a company specialising in one particular area of the business as long as they do not foolishly assume that other specialist areas are less important - and believe me, many do!

A certain David Ogilvy once addressed a large, highly opinionated, mixed discipline audience of ad-people and advertisers - and offered them this little conundrum.

You have a campaign to produce for a one-off event in 4 weeks time and have a budget of £20,000. How much would you spend on media and how much on creative?

The many answers he received were naturally biased towards the recipient's advertising area, but his suggestion came as quite a surprise and calculated I suspect to 'wind them up'.

He decreed that if the circumstances were correct, he would quite happily spend £19,500 on media and just £500 on producing an ad (much to the delight of the media guys) but then quietened their glee with "on the other hand however, if the circumstance were correct, I would equally be happy to spend just £1,000 on the media and £19,000 on the creative work" thus causing a perplexed ripple of applause from the creatives.

I suspect the 'advertisers' present were totally confused.

Of course it is possible that both scenarios could be correct and that generally you should expect to spend anywhere between 2% and 20% on the creative and production work, but this argument goes a lot deeper than just the percentage split.

The relative importance of any particular field varies immensely depending on the specific situation and in reality the successful advertising world is structured from a complex mix of all these highly specialist areas and disciplines.

So, who's the Daddy?

It's the Group Account Executive, the Copywriter, Art Directors, Media Planners, Traffic people, Studio guys, the Planners, Designers, Account Handlers, TV Producers, Research Managers, Production team, Media Buyers, Financial Director…

Oh, and the Tea Lady.

David Wood. 2008