Integrated Marketing Communications has been around for over two decades and is continuing to evolve in practice. It was born in the early 80s’ because of the increasing focus on brand building, as marketers scrambled at garnering market share to achieve leadership, in an undifferentiated and cluttered market.
Brand building entailed the full suite of activities of finding new customers, getting them to try the brand, keeping existing customers and developing long term relationships with them. Mass media advertising did play a definitive role in building an image, generating awareness and preference, but was found wanting in delivering comprehensive brand building measures in the most effective and cost-efficient manner.
This gave rise to the role and importance of other communication disciplines like PR, Direct Marketing and Sales Promotion. Citing an opportunity here, specialist agencies began offering a slew of new services to clients who were willing to set aside – more by rule of thumb- a small proportion of their budget to experiment with these new disciplines on their own.
Realizing that they would lose their absolute sway over the planning and execution of brand building initiatives, not to mention the revenue drain to specialists, advertising agencies swung into action to regain the custodianship of their brands. The ever ‘creative’ agencies quickly floated divisions to offer these services and branded these one-stop-shop offers.
Over time, these attempts at integration by advertising agencies have come to naught for various reasons.
To begin with, the specialist divisions were staffed with advertising agency personnel with little or no experience and at times with lesser inclination or interest. To overcome this, agencies started acquiring specialist outfits who were, in the early days, far and few.
There wasn’t a common strategy that knit all the disciplines together. While advertising strategy has evolved to communication strategy today, its purpose is still predominantly to serve as the underpinning for the big idea which is then translated into TV and print executions.
Adapting this idea to other media and thereafter into other communication disciplines was termed as integration, euphemistically.
And the question of what should be the legitimate share of revenue among disciplines and the revenue sharing ratios among partners in a joint program ended up being the bane of all efforts at integrating the communications for a brand.
Finally, if the purpose of integration is to optimize investments across various initiatives taken in building brands and to ensure adequate returns for all the effort taken, advertising agencies were the most ill suited for the task. For them, the whole business of communication is a creative process that is neither measurable nor accountable, financially.
The failure of the advertising agency to dominate the integration process led to the proliferation of some strong specialist agencies across the various disciplines. The unbundling of the advertising agency itself into creative and media led to further specialization. The ongoing technological revolution has spawned many a new media and provided a platform for far more intrusive ways of communication. And at the center of all this today, is the marketing organization, integrating all these elements for the benefit of their brands.
From messengers of messages to managers of content
Media agencies, which have served as messengers of messages through traditional measurable media, have now started actively considering these specialist disciplines and the new media as newer ways of carrying messages to consumers. These new ways have become increasingly important in an era where consumers are exercising their power not only in choosing the product and service they want, but also in accepting or rejecting the way the information is beamed at them regarding these offerings.
Thus, it is not enough to have a message rendered in the most creative way (the creative agency focus) it is becomingly equally important to present it in a manner that engages the consumer. This dynamic has redefined the way media agencies work, going into the future.
The new requisites for a media agency behoove that it forays into areas that were the traditional preserve of its creative counterpart. The need to engage consumers require media agencies to become consumer-centric rather than channel-centric and that too beyond mere demographics and psychographics.
Generating insights into how and when consumers prefer to consume information are central to enveloping the consumer with the requisite content in the right place and at the right time, thereby transforming media agencies from messengers of messages to managers of content.
Leveraging the uniqueness of each medium / discipline appropriately, to make product claims or to demonstrate them or facilitate an experience goes beyond creating mere awareness to penetrate the information-numbed consumer psyche.
Integrating the content across various media / disciplines in a manner that moves the consumer along the purchase process of trial to repeat goes beyond the cosmetic integration of merely adapting an idea across different media.
If in the past integrated marketing communication efforts were optimized for awareness, today, it is optimized for relevance, receptiveness and responsiveness. This links back well with the business objectives set out by the client – which in the past would otherwise remain a mere statistic in a media strategy document- and promises greater accountability.
With its newfound role in engaging consumers and its already well-developed skills in handling research, data and analytics to measure ROI or to develop new metrics to do so, media agencies are better poised to integrate marketing communications than their creative counter parts and, in the process, contribute significantly to brand building. Media agencies today should usurp this role and evolve the discipline to do justice to this new remit.
Are we prepared for such a future?