Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

IMC leads to mediocre ideas

By IMC, I'm referring to integrated marketing communications – integrated comms planning specifically. Not long ago, at a previous employer, we talked a good deal about the merits of integrated campaigns and integrated communications. There were those who thought it was a good idea, and those who thought that perhaps a better idea was simply to have a coherent communication plan across all mediums. I tend to subscribe to the latter philosophy.

When you see an agency that's really good at TV venture into digital ideation, that doesn't have to deal with video content, they produce horrible results. Usually this the end result of an IMC approach. You can tell that there might have been a really good idea somewhere, but forcing it into an IMC platform turns it into garbage. It's like forcing a banana into a square box half its height. And why does anyone believe that an integrated communications platform matters in the first place?

I don't own a TV. It's not really going to matter if the communications for the TV spot is the same as the message in a blog post. I'll never see the TV. Integrated communications just doesn't make sense in a world of personalized communications platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. An idea that works on TV doesn't always work online – and 'online' or 'digital' is no longer a single kind of media. The broad message that you have to create in order to have make sense on every platform means it's going to be diluted, non-specific, non-personal and get lost in a sea of other messages.

Sometimes you'll read some really good TV and flip forward a few pages only to see that there are other ideas for other mediums that are simply horrendous. You wonder how it ever got to be, then you notice the line about "integrated communications" or a "360-degree approach" and all you can do is sigh and  *facepalm*.

A Good Idea: Advertising + Economics

In recent years, marketing's models of human behaviour have been mostly naive or self-interested. Every discipline (advertising, DM, online, sales promotion, PR, design) has simply created a model of human persuasion designed to suit whatever proxy measure their own discipline moves most. Just as troublesome, these models date from a pre-digital media age, where commercial communication was largely one way and occurred at the behest of the advertiser, not the consumer.
via campaignlive.co.uk

I'd love to see more agencies and brands read this—think about it—and start to develop a new paradigm for digital and mobile communications. So much of what happens today is just a layering of new technologies onto old without regard for context or the actual consumer experience.

Agencies are still creating Flash heavy behemoths that people don't want to use; and PR companies are just layering social media on top of their existing business process. But everything truly innovative on web today is about efficiency and utility. Kids in high school are creating applications that are more useful and more engaging than most of the experiences that multinational brands pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for. Truly effective digital advertising is moving away from "experiences" and into application and product development. Understanding the social media component is more than hiring an intern to update your Facebook and Twitter status. It's about understanding how to use it effectively to provide the consumer with a framework for them to communicate with everyone else in their network.

All of this requires research. Perhaps that’s why it hasn’t happened yet. You can’t create ads and applications that will change behavior unless you understand what that behavior is in the first place. And you can’t unravel consumer behavior after a 90-minute focus group.

But we do have the technology and the capabilities to solve some of the puzzles, such the mysteries associated with what happens between the time when a person sees an ad and when they reach retail. We've got this medium that now that's always on and travels with people. Why don’t we use it? Most of the smartphones on the market today can track where you go and where you've been. They can even, in some circumstances, know what you've seen. At the same time, you’ve got people pouring out tremendous amounts of information about their experiences with brands, events, and retailers. There exists this huge new opportunity to use mobile and social media to do research that can provide an entirely new realm of insights and analytics. Insights that can be used to understand behavior and, ultimately, change it.

The question is this: Who is going to do this? Who will pave the way? Is this the job of advertising, PR or consumer research groups—or is it something new entirely? I don’t know, but I want in.

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