Opinion: Perspective - Media-creative nirvana benefits from early start.

What do in-house media people bring to an agency? Assorted companies from Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy and Soul at the smaller end of the scale to Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO and TBWA at the other have hired media experts. Grey nearly did it and BBH continues its search for the perfect media person to join its ranks.

It's certainly a more meaningful progression from the 90s crazes where agencies went to extraordinary lengths to make their offices conducive to better work - Let's have a cappuccino bar! Let's make all the walls curly! Let's take everyone out of their offices and make them work open plan! - and still everyone had their best ideas away from the office When it comes to media people in agencies, as our feature (p22) reveals, their contribution looks rather more meaningful.

I'd have thought a legitimate use of their time would be to steep themselves in media by reading Heat, surfing the net and watching This Morning, Home and Away and Richard and Judy. Instead, it's work, work work.

Actual examples of where in-house media made a difference are pretty thin on the ground. But that probably has much to do with not wishing to give away any competitive advantage in a business where ideas can be copied in a nanosecond.

The fact that all four writers offered slightly different solutions to the 'how to work better with creative agencies' question means that there are many ways to skin a cat. And in every case it's easy to pick off some of the individual's comments and say there's little in their wisdom that you wouldn't find in any media person with 12 months experience. 'We're looking at ways of generating more cut-through and stand-out in the media executions we employ,' one says.

None of them ...