Close-Up: Live issue - Marketing directors 'in love' with their agencies.(AAR Group)

It may pain the incumbent, but marketers sticking with their preferred agency in a new role can be logical, Caroline Lovell.

It's like marrying someone who you've already lived with,' explains Martin Jones, the business director at the AAR Group. 'You know the pitfalls; it's tried and tested.'

No, Jones has not changed careers to become a marriage counsellor, but is attempting to explain why some marketing directors love to stick with their favoured agencies when they move to different companies.

And there are plenty of marketing monogamists out there, when you look around. Only last week, Tim Patten, the new marketing director at Space NK, appointed St Luke's to its advertising business. It's no coincidence that when Patten was at Mothercare, and BT before that, he also chose St Luke's.

Also recently, Katie Vanneck, Times Media's sales and marketing director, moved the pounds 15 million Times account out of Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R and into CHI & Partners just weeks after securing her new role.

Although this is by no means a new practice, it still has its detractors and can cause anger and consternation among many parties involved. One insider describes Vanneck's decision as 'still an open wound' at RKCR/Y&R and maintains that it was an 'unseemly practice to be that naked' about her motivations for moving across agencies.

As well as drawing the ire of any number of aggrieved agencies by moving their accounts to a favoured agency, there are disadvantages to this strategy that can directly affect a client's business.