Integration and Collaboration: Avoiding Trickle Down Marketing
Six years ago when I started my career in the industry, the biggest buzzword around was "integration." The large, full-service New York ad agency I worked for played up its "integrated" offerings and stressed to potential clients how important it was to have a "fully integrated" campaign, and how we could help them achieve that Zen-like state of total "integration." And, the agency did so with considerable success for itself and its clients.
In more recent years, however, times have changed and most marketers are not interested in getting the total package from a single agency or even a network of agencies. Why? The reasons vary; however, chief among them is that it is typically not as cost-efficient as marketers expected when they park millions of TV, radio, print, interactive, direct mail, and promotional marketing dollars at one agency. Marketers are more often than not working with several agenciesoftentimes with direct competitors "shooting it out" for the same work. Then they're expected to play nice together in the sandbox for the greater good that is the marketer's bottom line. And, this trend will likely continue for the foreseeable future.
Where does that leave the sandbox dwellers? Fighting for work? Yes, at times. Fighting for the ear of the marketer? Absolutely! Ideally, we are all fighting for measurable results, at any cost. In an "integrated" fashion, of course.
What does this wordintegrationreally mean, anyway? According to dictionary.com, one definition is "behavior, as of an individual, that is in harmony with the environment." This is a potential negative outcome of multi-agency collaboration as it tends to foster ideas that promote sameness and unity in the name of doing what is sure to please the client, rather than the mold-breaking and risk-taking that will generate optimal return. Usually there is one group, which my experience is typically the ad agency, taking the lead and driving their TV or print campaign idea down below-the-line. Ever heard "How can we bring this to life across all channels?" Or "Let's see if it makes sense to do online or radio, once the print campaign is finalized." Not to say that this is done with malicious intent. In fact, most marketers probably enlist their advertising and media agency partners to take this leadership role, where they are mandating collaboration.
This leaves the "other" partners interactive, PR, direct, promotions fighting for a piece of the pie, and for their voices to be heard. Rather than driving a media-agnostic approach, this arrangement often results in a "trickle down" campaign (from the original ad concept, usually) spread thin across many channels, with whatever budget is left after the TV and print buckets have been filled. Sure, everything has a unified look, feel, and message, but marketers are not likely to realize great results on tactics executed as a result of this process.
As challenging as it may be, the goal of all agency collaboration should be simply coming up with an amazing campaign idea to support the marketer's overall business objectives. A separate, but equally important exercise is determining the marketing channels and levels of investment therein that will most effectively support those same goals, based on the overall marketing budget.
So what are marketers to do?
First, you need to trust your agency partners and rely on their expertise in their medium/discipline. There are certain brand goals and initiatives that are better as online initiatives and other that make less sense online but make absolute sense in an offline campaign. And further, there are better online ways to do things in some cases than others. A good agency partner will be honest about the effectiveness of their medium for certain goals, and if not, are they really a good partner?
Here's an example from my own experience. I recently had a client tell me he was interested in developing a new email campaign to promote a new product. Two important factors are that this particular product was available in select geographies, and the internal database for the parent brand of opted-in consumers who resided in these areas was very small. A new email campaign would have needed several hours of work on the creative and copy. To generate trial of the product in a more cost-efficient way (because of the select geographic availability), we instead tagged an existing email newsletter for a related brand with a coupon offer. Not the most splashy solution, for sure, but it generated a much higher interaction rate and ROI than a custom html email campaign would have because the audience was already familiar.
Remember, just because the various communications within a campaign have the same look, feel and message, does not mean the campaign will succeed, or that it is integrated at all. True marketing integration is achieved through a collaborative process that values campaign ideas over trickle-down concepts and tactical solutions over media plans. It is about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time and generating business value and results for the brand.
Kelly Rogers writes about SEO, SEM and search engine optimization .
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Integration and Collaboration: Avoiding Trickle Down Marketing