What does The Wire have in common with advertising?

I was watching The Wire (Season 3) last night when an interesting point was flagged. Season 3 is all about change, it deals with how the drug game has to evolve as distribution channels ("The Projects") are demolished, the importance of product and efficient policing to keep to a commitment on crime numbers. Its all very political and man do I love it.

The brutality at Police Headquarters continues as Rawls and Commissioner Burrell terrorise Department Commanders over their failure to reign in the city's crime stats. In one scene in particular, one of the Baltimore's Police Sergeants gets verbally torn apart by Major Rawls after allowing his department to treat a number of thefts in a small locale with separate teams, shifting responsibility by fragmented cases, because apparently some thefts were corporate premises rather than retail outlets and individual homes albeit all on the same street resulting in poor efficiency and one really narked Commissioner.

I thought this a great metaphor for how advertising is often treated. A lot of agencies will separate by media such as TV, OOH/Print and Digital etc. which makes a lot of sense from a media booking standpoint but the irony being that at least from a strategic messaging standpoint, they all play a role in interweaving the overall campaign objective i.e. we're all working the same street.

Now I’m no expert in this, but a part of me feels that given the proliferation of media which moves away from static to interactive, we should all understand how each channel can be optimised and manage it collectively rather than in silo sharing learnings along the way. That means everything, from media, creative and production etc. or risk getting our asses whipped by the likes of Major Rawls in the not so distant future.