Integration: action speaks louder than words

Not so long ago at new business presentations one of the main things that kept the pitch team amused was to count how many times the term ‘integration’ was mentioned. My record personal best was 26! I’m not sure though anyone really understood what integration really meant. To me it’s more than media alignment, it’s more than consistently communicating a core message across all platforms. Integration is about enhancing the customer journey towards a profitable place – hearts and minds as well as the bottom line.

Nowadays social media practitioners such as Brian Solis from Future Works, are leading the way in integrated communication planning and we can learn a lot from them. They essentially build community through engagement and possess a great deal of knowledge about their audience. They proactively reach out to potential ambassadors to spread the word by integrating communication that’s personalised, real-time and consistent. At the very heart of this integration is being able to start and maintain a conversation that is amplified when it’s held across various platforms.

Good conversations evoke engagement and this is where TV has lots to offer. TV is the most effective advertising medium in generating talkability as we are about to see once more with the launch of this year’s Britain’s Got Talent. And ITV have made a huge effort in not only instigating conversation on a large scale but through its platforms are able to prolong and deepen them in terms of both soft and hard metrics. An example of this is where the advertiser on a mobile internet site can feature product information, special offers, downloads, games, competitions and data collection opportunities. Store locator – users text a keyword and their postcode to a short code on-screen. They then receive an SMS informing them of the nearest location where the product is sold. All this is in the context of talking about a show which for a huge part of the country dominates popular culture for weeks.

It has long been accepted that multi-media strategies are a good thing – sum of the parts and all that. The natural progression is that integration is an even better thing. Integration can only be achieved by strategically executing creative across all media. In our experience, creative relevancy appears to add value by matching creative to context. With huge pressure on budgets this has become a really important aspect of media planning for both direct response and brand campaigns although with integration the line between the two has become even more blurred.

At mc&c we like to prove the blindingly obvious just in case … For one of our clients we developed a model which helped them to put a value against integration for a campaign whose objectives were to convey trust as well as generate funded accounts with an average value of £30,000. The model compared multiple messaging across multimedia platforms to one single message deployed across multiple media. Interestingly, what we found was that the single-minded integrated message produced 25% more funded accounts. There was also the added benefit that in research carried out softer metrics such as trust and confidence, the campaign scored well. It seems creative integration wherever the dialogue takes place engenders brand acceptability and higher levels of response.

We’re probably still a long way to fully understanding integration but least we’re doing it rather than just talking about it.

Ian Prager, Planning Director