"The team from ________ was a little less experienced, and heavy on the digital, light on the creativity"

Throngs of faceless CCOs and ECDs will, when speaking at a 4A's meeting or accepting a Titanium Lion, profess that 'there is no line' at their agency, and that 'digital isn't an afterthought' at their shop.  For many of them—likely most—this isn't true.  There is a line. There exists a prejudice. There most definitely is a glass ceiling.

The unfortunate truth is that, for the majority of agencies, the definition of integration has so far been a one-way street. Most agencies are perfectly comfortable throwing traditional talent into digital assignments (even if it results in disaster), but virtually never staff in the opposite direction. They will spend years teaching a young AD/CW team how to take a commercial from script to air, but won't extend the same courtesy to established creatives in the same agency who started their careers with websites instead of film.

This applies to shops big and small, halls hip as well as hollowed. 

If you had a candid conversation with the creative leaders in these places, you'd probably get a similar story out of all them eventually—that digital folks just aren't really conceptual; they are incapable of separating themselves from tactics and thinking about the big idea.

Now, in fairness, if you look only on the surface, this argument might have a thin leg on which to stand. Scanning the portfolios of most digital creatives, you see the same tired shit—flash sites, banners, a lame social media stunt that had been rehashed beforehand by 20 other teams—and that isn't sexy. 

But below the surface, if you actually talked to most of these people, you would find that they are uncannily similar to their traditional counterparts. They love art and/or cinema and/or literature. They dress funny. They talk, ad nauseum, about agency gossip, winning awards, and the like. They drink a lot. And, most importantly, they have a lot of clever ideas that never get mounted to a foam core board and dragged in front of suits.

The reality of the situation is that "digital" rarely gets a fair shake. The deck is stacked against it from day one. The budgets are a tiny fraction of the campaign, the mediums are infinitely more complicated from a production standpoint (and constantly changing), and most of the time it's done at a completely different agency than the brand work, and forced to take direction from an unknown traditional campaign team that "figured everything out" three weeks before they were briefed in. 

So, yeah, a lot of digital portfolios are "light on the creativity," but it's because we, as an industry, set them up for failure. It's not that digital creatives can't conceive "big ideas," it's that we have shackled most of them to non-conceptual desks and force-fed them big ideas created by other, more highly-ordained, teams. It should be no wonder that finding people who have evidence of doing both in their work are so damned hard to find. 

Beyond this is the word "digital" itself. It is the year 2011. Ask yourself what isn't digital, and I would speculate that you'll come up with a pretty small list. Television delivery has been digital for most of us for the better half of the last decade. We're shooting television commercials less and less on 35mm film and more frequently on REDs and Phantoms. Short run color jobs have brought "digital" even as far as offset printing. 

Everything is digital, and everything is not. The king is dead, God save the king.

"Digital" is now, in my opinion, the most damaging term in the pervasive industry lexicon. Not only is it an albatross around the necks of likely thousands of smart, untested creatives, it's also completely meaningless.  

Let's all stop saying "digital" (except, of course, in the rare cases when it actually applies). Imagine the changes:

Instead of hiring "digital" creatives, just hire creatives—if they can't be creative in both traditional and interactive medias yet, that's fine—cross-train them. If you don't think that's possible, then they probably aren't that great of a hire to begin with.

Instead of presenting the "digital" work, just present the work. Imagine how many meetings this is going to eliminate. If you think that you're not going to have enough time to show all the ideas, you're probably showing too many.

Stop hiring "digital" producers, and just hire producers who specialize in what you're trying to make. Do you make a lot of websites? Hire producers who know how to make websites. Do you make a lot of banners? Hire producers who know how to make banners. It's not as if these skills were seamlessly interchangeable to begin with.

And, finally, stop trying to be a "digital" agency, or even an "integrated" agency. Just be an agency. Ideally, a good one.