Ad Age Online has released three free documents about the 2006 state of agency:

• The 2006 Ad Agency Family Trees Poster
• A 15-page Agency Report
• An 81-page Agency Profile Report

You may have noticed an uptick in the economy that feels like the early 1990s, and these reports comment on the same trends. Of particular interest is their identification of interactive as a hot growth area, which is good news for anyone working on the Web.

What I find really fascinating, however, is that I have a giant pool of data that can give me an understanding of the advertising agency landscape; this is the shadow network that, along with the news media and entertainment, shapes our culture by controlling what we experience through mass media. Knowing who and what they are is good for you :-)