EDITORIAL: Barker and Leeves must heed history.(Larry Barker, Paul Leeves to set up as creative independents)(Editorial)

It's hard to escape a feeling of deja vu at the news that the long-serving creatives Larry Barker and Paul Leeves are setting up together as creative independents. The pair certainly have grand ambitions. Not for them the life of the creative carpetbagger. Their bag will be high-level creative problem-solving for which they will expect their customers to pay accordingly. What's more, Barker declares, this is a way of working whose time has come as agencies recognise the folly of retaining large creative departments when they can outsource.

For those whose memories stretch back to 1995, all this might sound a tad familiar. For a brief moment in time, creatives who, either through choice or necessity, were working outside the agency confines believed they had come of age. Fed up with being cast as a bunch of odd-jobbers, freelances began rebranding themselves as creative independents. They reasoned that recognition and respectability would be theirs because sizeable creative departments were becoming unsustainable.

There was even an attempt to form a professional association to represent their interests.

Eight years on, the concept of the creative independent seems to have lost much of its allure. Many of its leading advocates have drifted back into agency staff jobs, unable to convince clients of their ability to handle substantial ...