One size doesn’t fit all

Kate Cox, Denise Turner, John Crowther and Tracy Hubbard examine how advertisers have coped with the notion of integrated communication strategies. Based on a new IPA report, the article describes a range of models. Significantly the analysis shows that the choice of model should be on a ‘horses for courses’ basis

A recent global report by Aprais*, the marketing relationship management company, highlighted the critical importance that marketing professionals now place on delivering integrated solutions, and their increasing frustration with their agency partners, who they perceive as failing to lead the complex process of delivering solutions across channels. This leadership role falls to the marketing team, as it is viewed as ‘too important to leave to the rhetoric of agencies’.

The Aprais analysis also investigates the perspective of agencies, especially those working in the US, UK or with multinational clients. Agencies recount the sheer complexity of working in integrated agency teams across six to eight different marketing specialisms, especially when they admit they are ‘genetically programmed to compete’. Furthermore, as agencies tend to be paid on time spent related to implementation, they cite the ownership of the idea as a critical route to achieving their own business success.

Marketing practices in this area have yet to be fully established across the industry, with many clients using bespoke methods to achieve integration. There is also evidence that these approaches, developed in the mid-2000s, are now in a considerable state of flux due to the increasing dominance of digital channels opening up new ways of connecting brands and people, as demonstrated by Coca- Cola’s new strategy, ‘Liquid and Linked’.

Coca-Cola’s ‘liquid and linked’ Strategy

‘Liquid and Linked’ is Coca-Cola’s new strategy to deal with integration in the digital age. The springboard for this approach was the response to the fragmentation of traditional media and the mass reach of the plethora of digital channels. Brands need strong ‘contagious’ ideas that spread across multiple platforms in order to amplify the idea and increase brand engagement.

Coca-Cola has developed an approach it calls ‘liquid and linked’ to cross-media marketing. ‘Liquid’ relates to the need for a brand to be aware of the constant changes in the marketing and media landscape and be able to adapt its approach accordingly in near ‘real time’.

‘Linked’ relates to the idea that all brand messages, in whatever consumer touchpoint, need to belong to an overarching brand strategy. Coca-Cola aims to tell dynamic brand stories across all these touchpoints – developing an engaging narrative first and then working out which channel tells which part of the story best. Channel planning for Coca-Cola is thus a more tailored way of engaging people across channels in longer narratives.

Different models

A recent publication from the IPA, New Models of Marketing Effectiveness: From Integration to Orchestration, aims to shed light on the murky area of integrated marketing communications planning for the marketing and agency community.

It contains deep analysis of more than 250 cases from the IPA Effectiveness Awards, and aims to put a ‘stake in the ground’ for the industry by defining the different ways of integrating marketing activity, or ‘models’ of integration, observed in recent years – also assessing their relative effectiveness in terms of driving results. Importantly, it aims to quantify the additive benefits of seeking to integrate across channels versus planning each channel separately to specific channel objectives – arguably a far easier task to coordinate for marketing clients and their agency partners.

The report identifies four different ways in which marketing campaigns have been organised and proposes that creating and delivering effective integrated campaigns is becoming increasingly like conducting an orchestra. This trend has increased in the past couple of years as the digital age continues to open up the potential for millions of conversations, and as advertisers and their agencies look for ways to make the growing multitude of channels work in harmony together. This move towards ‘orchestration’ is then compared with more established models to try to understand the most effective methods of structuring marketing activity.

From integration to orchestration

The analysis uncovered four distinct ways that campaigns were integrating messages, exemplified in the IPA case studies.

1 No integration where a campaign either used a single advertising channel or took a laissez faire approach to merging channels.

2 Advertising-led integration around a common creative platform. This ranges from visual identity only – the so-called ‘matching luggage’ approach – to a full-scale advertising creative idea across multiple disciplines, including non-advertising channels.

3 Brand idea-led orchestration where there was unification around a shared brand concept or needstate platform. Within this segment, the creative work does not look united by a common advertising idea, yet the audience is able to decode the strands as part of one brand’s message.

4 Participation-led orchestration where the goal between brand and audiences is to create a common dialogue, co-creation, experience or ‘conversation’.

The IPA Databank of case studies contains numerous celebrated examples across all segments including Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’, Johnnie Walker’s ‘Keep Walking’, Honda’s ‘The Power of Dreams’, O2’s ‘The O2’, Cadbury Wispa’s relaunch in social media and Walkers crisps’ ‘Do Us a Flavour’ co-creation approach.

The results of this analysis have a number of interesting implications for marketers and their agencies, especially around working practices and ways of structuring client and agency relationships.

Integration is not necessarily more effective

Increasingly, it has been assumed that integrated campaigns must deliver more success than so-called non-integrated campaigns. However, one of the revelations of our analysis was that campaigns with no obvious integration device are on average just as successful as the majority of campaigns in the IPA Databank, as measured by the achievement of at least one very hard business effect.

This is defined as a brand achieving one of a number of different success measures, including: sales gain, market share gain, reduction of price sensitivity, customer retention/loyalty, customer acquisition, profit gain or market share defence. See diagram 1.

The relative success of the non-integrated approach makes sense when considering that such a strategy can be a reactive and flexible solution, as each channel and marketing discipline is given the freedom to develop ideas to deliver focused goals. For example, advertising can be used to drive brand consideration in combination with direct marketing mail shots to close the sale. However, when viewed through softer measures of business success such as brand awareness, fame, differentiation or strengthening brand values, it can be seen that integration does have significant additive benefits over a non-integrated approach. See diagram 2.

Again, it can be argued that the benefits of additional frequency of the same idea delivered in a consistent way across channels will increase the likelihood of correct brand recognition and attribution.

However, these findings have interesting implications for the industry, as they start to suggest that a slavish pursuit of the perfect integrated campaign may not be the best way to achieve more effective communications in all circumstances. The addition of more communication channels, which are given separate tailored campaigns, may actually be an easier route to business success.

This is a factor often omitted from the literature around integration; if achieving perfect message integration produces a better impact than a pragmatic approach, but requires significantly more marketing resource to manage, is it still an effective route to pursue at a business level?

The answer to this question lies in the degree of additional success achieved. It may deliver business results greater than the additional investment in marketing resource, or it may not. Since the IPA Databank does not directly capture the full costs of creating and managing different communications strategies by channel, this is a factor that cannot be evaluated here. The idea that it may be more efficient to develop separate unique media campaigns rather than attempt any form of integration is a provocative one, and worth exploring elsewhere.

The power of a big brand idea to orchestrate activity

The IPA Databank analysis suggests big brand ideas are better at delivering business results than other ways of organising marketing activity. They are also effective at driving softer brand metrics such as brand fame, awareness and differentiation versus campaigns with advertising-led or no integration. See diagram 3.

This is an important lesson as it demonstrates that generating a hard business response does not require ‘matching luggage’. There are many pragmatic reasons why brand ideas win over visual advertising-led ideas. Interviews with leading marketing practitioners and entrants to the IPA Effectiveness Awards suggest that this approach may not always be the output of the communications planning philosophy, but rather a function of the timescales required to deliver the activity.

The advertising-led model requires campaigns to be built around a common visual identity and demands that a strong central creative work is developed which can then be sequenced across different media. However, sometimes there simply isn’t time for this approach, and work needs to be developed in parallel around a loose and higher-order idea.

Integration can evolve into an orchestration model

The IPA Databank records many long running campaigns, including several of the brands in the interviews, namely HSBC, which had run for ten years, O2 for eight years and Audi for 27 years.

With these sorts of campaigns, often they had developed and changed en route. For example, the HSBC paper entered in the awards in 2010 described a ten-year journey. The ‘World’s Local Bank’ started life as an advertising idea, but the requirement to deliver meaningfully against the promise in the creative execution rapidly turned it into a brand idea that has grown and developed, and now permeates business strategy around the bank.

The Johnnie Walker global case study also demonstrates this point with an 18-month launch period that used advertising channels almost exclusively to introduce the ‘Keep Walking’ brand concept across the globe. This was opened up and developed into a more orchestrated brand idea-led approach using local sponsorships, PR and CSR initiatives to tailor the activity to each individual market.

As campaigns bed-in and show effectiveness, confidence grows and often very executionally led campaigns gain the freedom to become more conceptual. The passage of time also allows the development of an initial advertising idea into something more powerful and longer-lasting for the brand.

Participation-led model is yet to prove its worth

A further surprising finding of this analysis was the relatively less successful performance, in terms of hard business effects, of the newly emerging model of participation-led activity. This segment contained famous examples of modern marketing such as Cadbury’s use of social media to relaunch the Wispa chocolate bar and Walkers crisps’ ‘Do Us a Flavour’. On the other hand, participation-led orchestration was the most effective model at delivering softer effects, and also the most effective route for a brand pursuing fame as a key objective. See diagram 4.

The analysis showed that the participation-led model was excellent at achieving market share defence but less successful at driving new customer acquisition, suggesting that campaigns that demand higher levels of engagement need to be built on a degree of existing love for the brand and are therefore usefully employed by large, mature or declining brands needing a shot of brand fame.

In these cases it is harder to demonstrate large business effects because even very successful years tend to be measured in fractional percentage gains in market share rather than huge lifts in sales. It is also true that our ability to measure this activity probably lags the development of ideas in this space.

It is possible that these campaigns are a newly emerging hybrid of two communications disciplines – advertising and direct marketing – and that the link through to sales has yet to be made from a direct marketing perspective. This makes measures such as customer lifetime value impossible to apply. However, these campaigns tend to fall short of traditional measures of advertising business effectiveness, such as econometric modelling, due to the length of time the activity is in market.

This is useful knowledge when considering a participation-led approach. Interviews with leading practitioners highlight the considerable extra investment in time to deliver this model, and the requirement for a major change in behaviour from both clients and agencies. Participation demands a collaborative approach to campaign development, with the client closely involved throughout the process.

While this can be said of other model types, the demand is heightened when participation is required. Not only do lines between roster agencies blur but the distinction between client and agency also fades. There is a sense that for this to work, everyone has to be in it together and egos have to be banished.

‘IPA Datamine 3, New Models of Marketing Effectiveness: From Integration to Orchestration’, was coauthored by Kate Cox (kate.cox@mpg. com), Denise Turner of MPG Media Contacts ([email protected]), John Crowther of Creston Unlimited ([email protected]) and Tracy Hubbard of i to i research, with advice from marketing consultant Peter Field. It is available to purchase from www.ipa.co.uk/Content/Datamine-3- New-Models-of-Marketing-Effectiveness or www.warc.com/newmodels. * The study ‘Timelines, Bottom Lines and Egos: How to Manage the Creation of Effective Integrated Communication’ is the result of 50 in-depth agency and marketing management interviews, and datamining of 8,000 individual Aprais relationship evaluations. www.aprais.com

The addition of more communication channels, with separate tailored campaigns, may be an easier route to business success