For the simple fact is media agencies are engaged in a cut-throat "race to the bottom" - driven in many cases by their clients - whereby they are offering their services for such small margins that their whole business model is becoming untenable.
Take the recently concluded £300m Nokia global media planning and buying pitch. Incumbent MediaCom had the squeeze put on it by the Finnish mobile phone giant for months prior to the review, culminating in the WPP agency offering its "absolute best price" deal.
It is suggested those terms involved the agency working at cost, or even below cost. But the client still wanted to go ahead with its fishing exercise to see what else was on offer in the market. So MediaCom made the unusual decision not to pitch for the business - a brave one in the current economic climate.
If a multibillion-pound network such as MediaCom can't make money out of an account, you have to wonder who can - and what sort of service the client will receive. But, of course, there were several eager agencies happy to go for the business, which was eventually won by Carat.
I don't want to get into a WPP versus Aegis spat, and I'm sure Carat would say it has won the business fair and square and fully intends to make money out of it. But it is an example of what's going on in the market, illustrated by numerous similar pitches over the past 12 months involving all the major agency networks.
The danger, as also illustrated by our feature, is that the cut-throat nature of this race to the bottom forces agencies to rely on some of the less transparent ways of making money on accounts - and that is surely the reverse of what needs to happen if agency business models are to successfully evolve into more sustainable areas such as content and consultancy.
Steve Barrett is editor of Media Week, steve.barrett@haymarket.com
www.mediaweek.co.uk/stevebarrettblog
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