Traditional advertising giants are snapping up digital specialists as more ads move onto the internet.

Traditionaladvertising agencies are chasing marketing business online. Long-establishedfirms such still dominate the television advertising business,where the budgets are big and the campaigns high-profile.

However, the industry's growth  and biggest concern lies in the more complex and fragmented world of digital marketing.

As a marketeer, we have to be playing in the space where the consumer is, and we are looking to our agencies to help us do that. Most of the current agencies have grown up in the old world – as has Unilever. Their skills and competences are in traditional such as television. However, in the Western world,  TV is in decline as will become the case with Africa

British advertisers are now spending more than £2 billion a year online in a wide variety of ways. Pay-per-click search advertising remains the biggest category, but leading brands are also spending millions on digital banners,viral video campaigns, micro websites, product-spe-cific social networks, interactive games and mobile messaging.

The range of skills required makes life difficult for traditional creative agencies. The digital-only environment is the only place where there is a full service mix  with researchers, information architects, technologists, online creatives, search specialists, planners and project managers. It's quite a broad spectrum.

Many of these specialists would feel disenfranchised in the creatively led cultures of traditional advertising firms.  With skills in short supply, the digital talent can pick and choose where they are going to land in the agency world. Motivating them requires an environment that accommodates technical, creative, planning and other skills, and holds them all in equal regard.

In today's marketing landscape, building a brand is about a whole lot more than advertising. An advertising agency alone cannot deliver everything we need even though agencies may claim to deliver this, it's a myth.

He added: We haven't the time to teach an agency what mobile marketing is and sponsor them while they get up to speed.

The cultural weaknesses of traditional agencies explain why they have struggled to develop their own digital capabilities, and why they are likely to have to acquire specialist firms to meet the needs of their clients.

Publicis, the French group that owns Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett, recently took the first step when it spent $1.3 billion (£650m) on buying Digitas, a leading online marketing firm. Within the past fortnight, Publicis has announced it is restructuring Digitas to create Publicis Modem, an international digital-advertising network.