It may be old fashioned to view the relationship between the two sides of media as a fight, but go into any agency and you will find plenty of tough talking about “the other side”.

The argument goes that aided by their numeracy and ability to talk the talk of targets and statistics, media agencies have earned a bigger place at the top table, while the importance of subjectivity in the judgement of creative agencies’ work has left them vulnerable.

The rise of the media agency may also have been helped, according to David Wethey, Chairman of Agency Assessments International, by the fact that the creative agency business model has become fundamentally flawed. The focus on revenues rather than profits and the practice of charging by the hour has created “an open goal for procurement people”.

Pitching for new business involves doing three-quarters of the work for free as well as taking up the time of some of the agency’s best people. The nature of the big operating groups which, Aegis apart, include both media and creative operations may have masked the scale of the problem.

He says there’s a remarkable difference in tone when you visit a media agency and a creative agency. A recent tour of the US found the media agencies were extremely aggressive about their role versus the creative agencies. “Media agencies were balls out and up and at them,” he says.

It’s certainly noticeable that every new UK media start up of recent years is keen to stress the non-threatening way in which they work with creative agencies, a clear point of difference from the more established names.

Wethey is due to present Sea Changes - a seven part polemic on the need for radical change in creative agency-client relationships – to the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, the Marketing Society and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising in the next few weeks.

As well as looking at agency selection and the need for media to work more closely with creative, it also addresses the tricky question of remuneration. He says his clients are seriously talking about changing their payment structures, pointing to the fact that more than a quarter of clients are now paying separately for media planning and buying services, evidence that not everyone is looking for cheap as chips.

If his ideas are accepted, the landscape will change. “I can see a situation over a year or two of change in which agencies are much more effective, and more profitable on slightly lower revenue,” he says.

As if to demonstrate what this might mean for the media space, Wethey predicts that the number of creative agencies with in-house media expertise, be it through employees or an import such as Naked Inside, is set to increase significantly.

This could of course merely be a defensive move but, just maybe it could also sow the seeds of a potential creative fight back.

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