Opinion: Perspective - Why two creative heads may be better than one.

Ken Hoggins and Chris O'Shea were together for 23 years; Richard Flintham and Andy McLeod spent 18 years together; Adam Tucker and Justin Tindall notched up 17 years, and Sean Doyle and Dave Dye managed ten These days people meet, marry and divorce in shorter time than some creative partnerships survive.

But the days of the long-term creative management duo seem to be numbered (all of the above have recently split, page 22) and few agencies can boast such strong, enduring bonds within their management ranks now.

It's not just a creative thing: this very real sense of partnership and teamwork, of shared professional history, is becoming increasingly rare across the board in advertising. Where it does exist, at, say, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the agency seems to be stronger, staff more loyal and the management team more consensual.

Finding a high calibre group of people who manage to work together over the long haul can be a real determiner of success. And when it comes to running the creative department, it seems more vital than ever. The breakdown in the old-style creative partnership surely couldn't come at a worse time, just as life in the creative department becomes more complex than ever before. Senior, management-level creative duos are increasingly rare, yet the demands on the creative director have never been more intense. The ever-more multi-layered requirements of creative department leadership are less likely than ever to be met by just one person.

The imperative for ads to engage and entertain is more pressing in the fragmented digital media environment and it's arguable that two senior creative chiefs are more likely to be able to create and nurture the right sort of creative ideas than a single visionary.

But even beyond the actual, tangible output of the creative department, the creative director role faces more management issues than ever. For starters, managing the internal structure of the creative department is a consuming challenge as agencies wrestle with the issue of embedding digital into ...