The Argyle CMO Forum in New York was fascinating The audience was comprised of 150 CMOs and other top level marketing and communications executives. I was, by far, the least famous presenter. Richard Pilnik, Group VP ad CMO from Eli Lilly & Co., Ken Keller, EVP and CMO from Motorola, and Maryam Banikarum, CMO for Univision Communications were the keynote speakers and made great presentations that talked to the current challenges facing marketers and provided some glimpses of where they are heading in the future. I'll try to obtain copies of their presentations and share them with you.
I was joined by Pete Wengryn (CEO of VMS), Tom Stein (President of Stein Rogan + Partners), Bonnie Carlson (President of the Promotional Marketing Association), and Tom Collinger (Associate Dean of Medill's Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern). We presented some preliminary data on how news coverage impacts business outcomes directly, but also exerts significant influence on the effectiveness of paid advertising. You'll hear lots more on this in future posts as we refine our data.
Tom Collinger was great and had the very best sound bite..."AND." We are in a world where it is not PR or advertising, not qualitative or quantitative, not traditional media or new media, but PR AND advertising, qualitative AND quantitative, traditional media AND new media.
While there were lots of insights from impressive speakers, Collinger's was the simplest and most straightforward. AND is the future. Three little letters. Easy to remember.
A recent study by McKinsey & Co. cited "the most important corporate resource over the next 20 years will be talent." The search for talent in advertising, promotions and marketing has become a real challenge.
Dell is perhaps the most high profile company to create an integrated agency, but many others have seen the wisdom of integrated communications. One of the real challenges of creating integrated agencies is finding the talent able to work across multiple media and platforms.While the overall market is tight right now, it is even more challenging to find the relatively few creatives with integrated expertise.
Tom Collinger, Associate Dean of Integrated Marketing Communications at the Medill School at Northwestern, was a recent panel member at the CMO Forum in New York. He said a number of really smart things, but a key comment was the challenge marketers will face in finding talented employees with the background and training in multiple marketing disciplines.
Tom and Medill are at the forefront of training the next generation of communications professionals. More and more, companies are voting with their salary dollars and competing for the school's talent. Medill also publishes the Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications which is available free online.
Pending research is showing that news coverage not only has a direct impact on business outcomes, but also has a strong impact on the effectiveness of various forms of paid media. This puts a whole new slant on integration and the importance of consistent messaging. Just as there is no substitute for good creative in advertising, there is no substitute for talented and capable people who can understand and manage the intersection of diverse communications methods. And just perhaps, having an integrated and customer-focused strategy is likely to attract the best and brightest talent.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Promotions Marketing Association (PMA), better known for its core focus on sales promotions, wants to help their members achieve measurable brand-building goals by becoming a primary source for integrated marketing techniques.
This effort will be led by PMA's new President, Bonnie J. Carlson. Bonnie is no stranger to integrated marketing. She served as vice president of integrated marketing for ConAgra Foods until 2005, creating an integrated marketing plan and launching the shopper marketing program across all four divisions--a product range of approximately 70 brands, such as Hunt's, Peter Pan and Reddi-Whip.
PMA's programs offer a host of options to learn more about integrated marketing. They are: Consumer Promotion, Trade Promotion, Advertising, Public Relations, Database or Direct Marketing, Loyalty Marketing. Experiential Marketing, Sponsorships, Celebrity Endorsements/Product Spokespersons, Shopper Marketing, Cause-Related Marketing, Grass Roots Marketing, and Corporate Communications, such as incentive programs and employee communications.
In-store signage that electronically transmits product information to cellular phones and marketers experimenting with giving consumers perks for engaging at online sites like Facebook are just two of the new opportunities to integrate incentives and promotion into an integrated campaign. Kudos to PMA for recognizing this opportunity and developing tools to help their members take advantage of the power of integrated marketing and communications.
I love this comment from Nick Brien, CEO of Universal McCann. It's not about new media. 
Trying to make every new medium a magic bullet will fail. It's about the way we interact with our customers and stakeholders. It is about new marketing.
Marketing has always been about communicating with our customers. But new tools and capabilities let us tell our stories in a richer and more relevant fashion than ever before. "In this new marketing model -- where media enhances personality -- brands have to become experiences and destinations and consumer insight has to be smarter."
In his keynote address at Ad Tech in New York, Mr. Brien further states, "A brand is ultimately a promise..." and this promise is not ownable by a corporation any more.
We need to integrate all of the ways we can interact with our customers and reinforce that promise. Sometimes that will be traditional advertising. Sometimes it will be an event. Other times it will be a PR or image campaign. More often it will be all of these.
And each of these activities has to be coordinated and carefully orchestrated to communicate our messages. And measured in their entirety.
Ads for celebrity fragrances that conjure up images of cool and hip and sexy fall flat when the news presents that same celebrity out-of-control and anything but cool. Ads portraying utility companies as environmentally friendly and green do more harm than good when the news exposes them as giant polluters.
Advertising and news and all of the ways our brands are communicated to our customers become equally valid in this new marketing. We need to take an integrated approach and follow Mr. Brien's advice. It's not about new media, it's about new marketing.
As Rick Bird from the Cincinnati Post says, "We have seen the future of TV and it is...'Gossip Girl.'"
The CW teen soap is symbolic of how the traditional networks will judge hits and misses in the new media age.It also shows how the "traditional media" are learning how to use the "new media" and the power of integration.
As Rick points out, "'Gossip Girl' became the first new series to be picked up for a full season 22-episode order. At first glance that seemed mighty curious. It was averaging just 2.41 million viewers, one of the lowest-rated new shows, even below average by CW standards."
So why was it picked up?
Welcome to An Integrated Perspective, a forum for all aspects of integrated marketing and communications.
My personal focus has been on correlating the impact of news and editorial coverage on business outcomes. Since late 1999, I have been developing tools and metrics and the concept of Share of Discussion, which has shown significant relevance in correlating earned media / PR with business outcomes such as sales, preference, loyalty, awareness, etc. There are two white papers that do a good job of explaining most of these findings on the Institute for Public Relations website. They are also attached below.
We have been able to prove that news coverage drives outcomes, but we have had less success in demonstrating the same types of correlations for paid advertising. We believe an advertising effectiveness metric is needed and are actively working to incorporate one into our research and analysis.
While we have specific beliefs on what is needed, how paid and unpaid media intersect and support one another, or the impact of one form of communications over another, our core belief is that an integrated approach, combining all forms of media communications, is key.
A recent study of the fragrance industry demonstrates the value of viewing communications in an integrated fashion.
The fragrance market is highly seasonal with the majority of sales made at Christmas, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Paid advertising is clustered around these buying periods with the majority of ad spending in the pre-Xmas time period.
Celebrity brands, such as Sarah Jessica Parker's Lovely or J-Lo's Love at First Glow, because of their significantly higher levels of news coverage, have generated higher ROIs and their sales have been somewhat less seasonal than non-celebrity brands.
News / Editorial coverage
Thought leaders around the country are relatively unanimous in their belief that integration is a key to effective communications with our customers and stakeholders.
A series of "Thought Leader Roundtables" was held around the country earlier this year, sponsored by VMS, PR News, and Media Industry Newsletter (min). Senior level participants from PR and advertising agencies, corporate communications, brand management, or other marketing functions discussed all aspects of integrated communications. There was near universal support for abandoning silos and looking at advertising and public relations from a unified perspective. PR News covered each roundtable. A compilation of their coverage is listed here.
One of the participants, Rose McKinney, president of Risdall McKinney, suggested that one way of integrating communications effectively is to remove the labels that organizations place on what PR does, what marketing does, etc. The focus, as she and the Roundtable participants agreed, should be on the goal of the particular campaign or initiative first and the communications tools second. Marketing, advertising, and PR - whether they're in-house or outsourced - need to be comfortable with a little ambiguity of roles and more fluidity in how internal departments and outside teams work and interact for the end goal.
