Chatting with Russell Davies and Malcolm White of KROW today. We were discussing, in our tedious, self-obsessed fashion, the way agencies are assigned meaningless labels like 'digital', or 'creative', or 'network', or 'traditional' (as blogged about below) and the idea of a better way of distinguishing the approach and values of agencies was suggested.

The thought was just to categorise agencies by dress code. It works for bands – easy to understand what you're going to get from, say, Velvet Revolver or Girls Aloud just by looking at them.

So, you have

1. Your beardy Barley agency with their plaid shirts, cut-off cargo pants, facial hair and sandals:

Hey dude! We are Tofu of New Cross. We come to work on horseback, we sell our own home-made organic honey and all our ideas grow out of magic beans, man. We're not so much an agency as a bunch of guys and girls just trying to spread cool awesomeness and make beautiful shit.

2. Your smart agency, where the suits actually wear suits. And so does everyone else.

Pleased to meet you. We are MBMMDBBM & MB (London). We have a cab account, we order bikes every five minutes, whether we need one or not, we have big vases containing artfully arranged twigs in reception and we develop Blockbusting Business Ideas (TM) using our proprietary tool Brandalyst (TM). We are not an advertising agency; we are a global integrated ideation hive mind.

Well, I think that makes things much clearer. 

(Apologies to The Ozark Mountain Daredevils and Be Bop Deluxe.)