Integration - a dirty word?

What are Integrated communications, and why are they a bad thing?

“More and more marketers are embracing Integrated Communications Planning to ensure that all their marketing communications work together in harmony”. (IPA)

(Mediacom): “In essence it means joined-up thinking. Joining up all agencies (advertising, media, PR, below-the-line, sponsorship etc) so that they work in harmony and with focus. Joining up all knowledge about the target audience so that they are fully understood. Joining up all the sources of data to fully understand how the advertising will work, and how well it is working”.

Lovely.

But, in reality, integrated communications are campaigns made to look and feel the same in multiple channels, for international, agency, or client convenience. There’s a misconception that the brand has to be delivered in a consistent way at all consumer touchpoints.

This belief is rapidly being dispelled by a few progressive agencies and marketers. Alan Rutherford at Unilever coined the phrase ‘holistic’ which is now taken to mean a brand idea or brand essence at the core of a campaign that is optimised for each channel. So the TV can look very different to the web to the RM programme.

A fundamental driver for this approach is the emergence of the experience economy. From Pine & Gillmor’s book (published by HBS), brands have moved to a new stage of added value, from products to services to experiences. “I think by now, many marketers have come to realise the importance of tangibility and experienced quality” (John Grant, The New Marketing Manifesto). In order to deliver the best possible brand experiences, they have to be optimised for each channel, not homogenised for every channel. Another proponent of this view is Jean-Maire Dru in Beyond Disruption: “The medium is no longer the message. The medium is now the experience and the benefit”

Cases in point include W+K’s Honda work. W+K, or Chemistry for that matter, work on the principle that creative has to be interesting, engaging and respectful of the time and place it is consumed. As Howard Gossage said 50 years ago: “People don’t read advertisements. They read what interests them, and sometimes that’s an advertisement”. Our creative for Baileys is based on the same brand core as BBH’s TV but has a different executional idea, look and feel, optimised for the direct and digital channels we operate in. This approach is 3 times more successful for the brand

We’re seeing this trend evidenced in all the major IPA award winners – even small agencies on comparatively small brands are punching above their weight with well-crafted holistic campaigns. http://www.ipaeffectivenessawards.co.uk/shop/index.html

And this approach is working with consumers because the time is right – that technology in particular has changed the way people interact with brands; and the entertainment industry has conditioned people to new experiences that the communications industry have copied – e.g. BMW’s films & their new audiobooks.

As Nike puts it: “I believe that the best, probably the only job, for TV advertising, is to wrap a bundle of feelings and associations around the brand. Good advertising is very good at doing this. (Not that there's a lot of good advertising around.) - the conversation today is more about brands engaging in two way conversation - not broadcasting. Nike didn’t discover the power of advertising – they discovered the power of their own voice. It was true for advertising, it's even more true in the world of blogs and allied trades” (Russell Davies, Nike)

Integration is dead – long live integration