Crossing The Line
24.06.2008
I’ve been working in digital media for 10 years now, in both specialist digital and integrated full service agencies. While there has been a shift over the years in the industry towards integrated methodologies, I’ve always known it’s the best way forward, despite my predictable bias towards digital as Head of Digital, here at VGroup.
As I client, I would never even entertain the idea of using different agencies to work on different parts of a campaign. Not only is the result never as holistic and “integrated” as it can be, it costs more and causes way more project management. Not to mention the politics of dealing with multiple agencies and third parties etc.
But even when the one agency/integrated approach is used, there are some pretty flakey ideas out there on what integration actually means and how to make it happen.
This definition (below) of integrated marketing I found pretty much sums up what many brands are still doing. It’s about as lack-lustre as the results this approach produces, in my humble opinion.
Apparently, integrated marketing is “a combination of two or more forms of marketing used to sell a product or service”.
Woohoo! What do you want – a medal?!
Newsflash: merely transferring an idea conceived at design or branding stages into a digital medium does not make your communications integrated.
Unfortunately, this is where so many clients - and agencies - are still at. They view the development of communications in a linear fashion, with offline/above-the-line leading, and digital following. A lot of this is historical, due to this being the way the communications landscape has evolved, and it being the order people learned things in. It’s also to do with agency models, and above-the-line agencies traditionally being given the lion’s share of budget, and trying to ensure it stays this way.
A better definition of integration is “all aspects of marketing communications working together as a unified force”. Convergence is a fact of life. Get with the programme, people!
The place of digital in the integrated mix
So now we’ve established that integrated is the way forward, what is the place of digital in all this? Even now that Google and Facebook run the world (I’m sorry, is there a world outside this Mac?), digital is still most often in a pretty sad position in the running order. Last. Bottom of the food chain, like an afterthought.
Imagine for a moment you work in digital. (Yay, how happy are you?!) The client briefs someone, someone does some branding, some creative, writes some copy, and then gives it to you to “do what you think” with it online.
Wow, cheers. It’s like getting a box of stuff that someone else chooses, and having to make it do stuff it was never made to do. (How happy are you now?) Let’s think inside this box for a minute. What if they asked you what you thought should be in the box? What if you got to decide what was in the box and then they had to make their billboard/brochure/press ad/TV spot out of that?! (It would probably still work, probably be in 3D, but might be a bit weird, and a bit low-res, for sure!)
Too often digital designers, animators and developers are just given a set of functional objectives to complete, without having any idea what the actual goal of the exercise is. Who’s to say they don’t already know a better way, or have seen something that’s really cool and would have really benefitted the creative thinking in the initial stages?
Often, the last-in-the-food-chain-web-team come up with some fantastic idea that is nothing to do with what they’ve been given to work with, but nevertheless outstanding. The peeps at the top of the food chain go “oh cool, I wish we’d thought of that earlier …”
Newsflash 2: You can’t be expected to. But don’t beat yourself up. We live, breathe and sleep digital. You’re a marketing manager. (No offence …).
Then it’s always too late.
Holistic communications
Maybe it’s a chick thing, to see things more holistically. The super-clever girl geeks at She Says.org have plenty to say about it, which I must go along and raise my glass to some day. The title of their recent event on integration in advertising says it all; “Another resize is it?”
Involving all channels right from the beginning is absolutely crucial to arriving at a truly integrated solution. And it’s only fair - not to mention logical - that all parts of the machine are working with the same proposition at the same time.
Meanwhile, back in the real world … this isn’t always possible. In the studio we don’t always know who will be working on a project, and in the interests of keeping costs down for clients, we can’t always have every designer and his dog at every meeting. But a key representative should always be there, and everyone should be issued the original brief.
As a producer, nothing makes me happier than watching designers, copywriters, developers, and flash animators huddled together trying to get their head around what others want to achieve, and along the way dreaming up new ideas that turn the original solution on its head and take it to a new level.
Sure, it’s all about “the big idea” and making it work across all channels – but the big idea can come from anywhere. A designer’s doodle, a marketing concept, an animation idea, a piece of copy … when working on a new brief, everyone has something to offer.
More and more, I wonder … what if the big idea started with digital and was then transferred into print? Is the transfer of ideas different or better one way? I know that transferring an idea that’s been conceptualized for print into interactive media as an afterthought is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, or a round peg into a square hole, because basically nothing fits and there are hugely missed opportunities.
Recently, while working on a branding and through-the-line pitch someone suggested we develop an online symbol that could be used, in a similar way to the RSS symbol, to indicate the availability of the client’s service. Conceptual work on the brand identity was in progress, but it soon came to pass that this digital symbol, which was a very small part of the big picture, became the mainstay of the new identity and brand proposition.
I love the way that often at VGroup when we review an awesome idea, campaign or website we’ve come up with, we can’t even remember who came up with what, just that it works. This, to my mind, is the sort of integration I’m on about … a seamless flow of concepts across channels, and concepts that have evolved organically out of multi-disciplinary collaboration.
We sit back and admire this thing that has emerged, a sum greater than its parts, and know it’s gonna exceed the client’s wildest dreams.
So next time you need something doing, forget everything you’ve ever known. Forget above-the-line, through-the-line, below-the-line. WHAT IF THERE WAS NO LINE?
Tags: digital, integrated marketing, through-the-line