mobites - ideas, inspiration, insight

A recent survey of 200 marketers conducted by CoActive Marketing Group among members of the Association of National Advertisers lists the biggest barriers to effective integrated marketing.

Here they are. Read carefully, there will be a pop quiz at the end.
1. Functional silos (59%)
2. Lack of strategic consistency across communications disciplines (49%)
3. Insufficient marketing budget (36%)
4. Lack of a standard measuring process (36%)
5. Lack of needed skill sets among marketing staff (36%)
6. The need to develop the “big creative idea” that can be leveraged across different media disciplines (32%)

What kind of cosmic bunny hole have we fallen through here

Maybe I’ve become addle brained, but don’t you think numbers 1,2,4,5 and 6 have a direct relationship to one another?

I think they do. And they do to the degree that they are symptoms of the same problem. Companies and traditional agencies are still organized and staffed by specific media specialists and not “integrationists.” This is especially true of interactive, on-line and direct marketing. And these specialists tend to function in the mode of the old adage, “To a person with a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.”

And so it will remain as long as industry publications, trade associations, traditional agencies, specialty agencies and clients keep talking about their integrated direct programs and their integrated online campaigns. In a truly IMC world aren’t those oxymorons?

Three things we can do

I think there are three things we can do to pull ourselves out of this hole and move on to a more satisfying integrated life:

1. Let’s all get the same page with a holistic, functional definition of what IMC is.

2. Establish highly collaborative teams who are trained, encouraged, processized and culturalized to be integrators.

3. Develop work processes and team organizations designed to protect integrated work from being reinvented every time it goes to a different medium

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.