What Do Successful Integrated Media Ideas Have In Common? - Tom Cunniff - MediaBizBloggers

"Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple."
- Edward de Bono

I think one of the reasons people quietly give up on the promise of integrated marketing is that it seems hopelessly complicated.

How can you possibly get all the silos and agencies and conflicting agendas perfectly aligned, particularly when the average CMO tenure is just slighter longer than the lifespan of a mayfly?

I don't think you can. It's like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle in a hurricane.

And even if you got all the pieces together, it wouldn't matter. By the time your plans were perfect the competitive landscape, the digital possibilities or your consumer's needs (and maybe all of the above) would have shifted.

Here's a weird idea: maybe we'd all make a lot more progress if we stopped trying so hard.

Why struggle to hammer everything into alignment when some media are already working together so well?

TV and Social Media: Natural Partners
TV and Social Media go together like beer and hot dogs.

As Time.com points out "Social media have turned the world into one big living room. The future belongs to those who pull up a chair."

This year, the Oscars did a major social media push, and 5 million more people watched than they did last year.

The producers of Lost created "The Lost Experience", an alternate reality game that played out across websites, voice mail, TV and newspaper ads to give players clues to the game. They integrated brands like Sprite and Jeep as part of the fun.

Smart. Tracey Scheppach of Starcom USA has it exactly right: "Advertisers are starting to think more like a programmer. How do I create content that people will watch?"

J&J Jumps In The Lake
And today, strong content doesn't even have to be on TV. J&J's Clean N' Clear was the sole sponsor of a WB.com teen drama called The Lake. As fellow MediaBizBlogger Ed Martinput it:

"The real impetus that should drive girls (…) from player to banner to coupon to store isn't the content of the ads or the placement of the products. It's the cumulative effect of watching several teenagers with perfect skin over and over and over again."

What Do Successful Integrated Ideas Have In Common?
All of these ideas:

1) Start by giving people something to talk about (awareness); and
2) Give people an interesting way to continue the conversation (activation)

The important prerequisite is that you have a product or idea worth talking about. (By the way, if you don't have either of those, then traditional ads won't work so well either.)

Don't Push TV Ideas Down. Push Good Ideas Across.
Ad Age reports advertisers have committed somewhere between $8.1 and $8.7 billion in the TV upfront this year. That investment is simply too big not to leverage.

TV is unparalleled at building awareness fast. But we still need to activate people to try it and talk about it, and buy again. So we can't just push TV ideas downstream with pre-rolls and video banners.

We need powerful business-building creative ideas that can run across media silos. And those need to be conceived so that they add up to more than the sum of their parts.

"Across" Thinking Comes From Cross-Trained People
This "across" thinking requires two kinds of people to make it work:

1) Media people who can help identify where a consumer's attention is and re-aggregate those splintered audiences back into a meaningful size that can impact sales; and
2) Creative people with broad, non-siloed experience who can think strategically across traditional and digital, and across awareness and activation.

As Yahoo's Shane Steele points out, we don't have nearly enough of these cross-trained people. And we're not yet doing enough to build those capabilities on the agency side, the media side, or the marketing side. (Note: On June 15, Pepsi took a step in the right direction, hiring Razorfish's Shiv Singh to direct digital marketing for its beverages unit.)

We may not have everything we need, but we do we have enough to get started. We have enough to create the best practices for integrated marketing that will lead us into the future.

We don't have to integrate all of our efforts at once. And we don't have to do it all perfectly. What we need is the courage to begin now, and the smarts to begin simply.

I think the advice of Teddy Roosevelt (our 26^th President and a polymath himself), is pretty useful:
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

Tom Cunniff began his career as a copywriter at traditional agencies, founded an interactive agency in 1994 and now works on the marketing side creating and integrating traditional and interactive. All of Tom's opinions are entirely his own. Tom can be reached at tomcunniffnyc@gmail.com.

Read all Tom's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Radical Common Sense - MediaBizBloggers.

Check us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggers.com
Follow our Twitter updates @MediaBizBlogger