Get your head in the game

New wave, old wave, blow wave? Integrated marketing is a buzzword that has been around the block a few times already in various guises. But what does it mean in today's marketplace and have Singapore's marketers got their head in the game? By Sarah Hardy.

Some agencies are literally tearing down walls to remove barriers between marketing specialisms, others are hiring gurus to more dynamically unite single-discipline creatives while some clients are abandoning traditional long-term agency relationship models in favour of a continual trawl for the best ideas du jour, from whatever source. All are strategies pursued in the name of integration; a term that has as many definitions as practitioners and like the Holy Grail is proving a hard nettle to grasp.

The Centre for Integrated Marketing in the UK defines it as "a holistic discipline that involves the whole organisation in developing congruent, sustainable and high-value brand experiences for all stakeholders".

Its white paper published in 2004 surveyed 200 leading British brands over 18 months and found that only one in ten had integrated marketing nailed, despite the fact that research by the Centre determined that the typical scale of benefit for marketers adopting integrated marketing was a 10 to 25% enhancement in business performance.

Take the more modest standard definition: that integrated marketing means using a host of different media and techniques to reach consumers or achieve a marketing objective, and you have another chimera. Wasn't that always the good marketers' goal? And didn't every agency who wanted to keep the client's business do their professional best to help him or her achieve that?

Move beyond the new media buzzwords, which all rather strangely end in ‘al', and integration sounds, at heart, more than vaguely familiar to any marcoms professional weaned before the web.

So what's really changed? Well everything, and essentially, nothing.

"Integration is being driven by consumers because media is fragmented and going integrated is the only way to reach them," Michael Rebelo, chief executive officer, Saatchi & Saatchi explains.

He believes integration is all about maximising resources, creating a powerful message and leveraging off all media.

The agency launched an integrated campaign for the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone Laura W580i in August, promoting a new function that allows you to shake the handset to shuffle the music. The agency created a series of music genre-specific characters that can be shaken up and morphed into each other

Saatchi & Saatchi account director Cory Jimmieson explains: "For Laura, the idea was digital at the heart of the solution...a digital idea that works at all touchpoints. It's very integrated, strategically and visually. So why choose digital? Pioneering youth, teenagers have a huge digital consumption. Their attitude is aloof and cynical to advertising and marketing. They need a compelling reason to buy and you need to speak to them in a language that reaches out to them."

A microsite was the starting point where consumers can play with the characters and download to their phones. The line, ‘I Love Shaking Up My Music" is entrenched in the benefit. The campaign is running across 13 regions and includes single page ads and double-page spreads, six-sheet posters, life-size standees for retail and moving POS.

"We had many ideas but we challenged them. Is it big enough to be integrated across all touchpoints and all markets? Is it big enough to justify the price?" Rebelo says.

"Saatchis has always been an ideas company not silos of different disciplines. It's not who's going to solve a problem but what is and how, with no one group trying to carve out a piece of the budget pie. The only way to integrate is to demolish structures and put the client's problem back at the centre of the table."

Rebelo believes integration is nothing new and it's a direction his agency has been working towards for several years. But what has changed in the past 12 months is that it's become a driving force.

Whether it involves investing in more multidisciplinary resource or demolishing plasterboard partitions, all agencies appear to be trying to change the way they work.

"There's nothing new. It's just about doing it better. It still goes back to the big idea," Ogilvy RedCard managing director Robert Doswell says. He thinks agencies are going back to the future, back to the 80s before media moved out, when creatives, suits and planners all worked together as one core group.

"You need that strength and knowledge to think 360.To have people thinking through the line on every competency."

(In)famous for its guerrilla style approach, RedCard with its mantra of ‘commonsense and bravery' has just posted the brief for client Coppertone on its website inviting anyone and everyone to contribute creative ideas.   

"I don't care where the ideas come from," Doswell says. "I want collaboration because it's a vital part of integration. You don't view customer profiles in the way you used to. Integrated is much more difficult. Consumer behaviour has changed; they buy things differently. Word of mouth is not new but the way it is driving the market is."

 "If media didn't change we'd be dead in the water. Today we have an opportunity to talk to consumers in a different way at different times. Digital will plateau and become a large part of the budget and if you don't get it you might as well pack up now. But it won't replace traditional media. It has however changed the way we think and approach projects and the way you can talk to people."

TBWA/Tequila managing director Dan Paris says his agency has moved beyond integration. The hiring of executive creative director Graham Kelly as ‘creative integrator' is more for uniting people and processes across the region than in the local office, he says.

"A neutral view of what we do is all the agenda we need. Where you place the message is going to change all the time but clients have to decide and we have to help them. It used to be that the core of any marketing meeting was presenting the TV ads, now it could be below the line or new media. Digital in all its forms is becoming increasingly fundamental, a core activity but not just for cost reasons (because it's a cheaper place) but because that's where the consumers are."

Being wherever the consumer can be found - and engaging them new ways - is a strategy that Singapore's savviest clients are beginning to take increasing advantage of. Tangs, one of Singapore's oldest brands whose ads have won numerous creative awards, places a premium on integration.

Tangs senior manager marketing & communications Lin Pei Hua says, "Our marketing campaigns are totally integrated. They have to be. We are organised 360 internally and it's top down from management to marcoms to frontline, all supporting the Tangs platform of ‘retailtainment'. Our major campaigns like Battle of The Brands involve everyone from merchandising to shop interior, to events, PR, direct marketing and media and we pull in outside partners - ideas have to be strong. No good having a great idea if it can't translate into all the different contact points our campaigns need to move our customers."

Currently Tangs focus is still very much in traditional media but that is changing according to Lin.

"The direction is to go more targeted, more personal. We hope to move away from one ad talking to all our customers and produce more personal marketing where we use more new media. In online we are lagging behind compared to the level of sophistication in other media. We have tried a microsite and we could have done it better. Next time, we will."

Tiger Beer, now consumed in more than 60 countries worldwide, recently carried out a number of integrated campaigns, including the cutting-edge Tiger Translate out of its regional office and the Tiger World campaign from its local team.

According to Daniel Teo, general manager commercial, Asia Pacific Breweries Singapore, "Integrated marketing will become increasingly important as consumers' lives become more complex, with more reasons to go out or socialise in various settings and for numerous occasions.  Thus, communicating a single message across several consumer touch points is critical in integrated marketing".

On Tiger World, Teo says his brand teams analysed the daily life of an average target consumer for the brand, and tried to find touch points that would hit the consumer as much as possible in a 24-hour period. The Tiger: World Acclaimed campaign included above-the-line executions, as well as a 360 degree activation programme and islandwide promotions, below-the-line executions to publicise the promotions, as well as consumer events, and climaxing in an interactive event with consumers' given a chance to win a gold bar.

"The integration was a combined effort of the commercial brand teams and its agencies, and the success is measured by how well consumers comprehend the campaign message, and its subsequent impact on brand equity and sales volumes. In this time and age where consumers are becoming more advertising savvy, integrated marketing is getting increasingly important, and I think it is largely applicable to all products and brands. However, there are also other factors to consider, such as whether the product is a niche or mass brand; or at which stage of the brand life cycle the product is currently in, that will contribute to the overall relevance and success of creating an integrated campaign for the product."

Tiger World effectively leveraged on a host of traditional media, whereas the international Tiger Translate campaign was ‘experiential marketing' through and though.

For Tiger Translate, The Works Singapore created an Asian art platform and staged three high profile art events in New York, Beijing and Berlin taking the most avant garde young Asian artists and introducing them to a carefully selected target group in each country. The Work's experiential director and PR Tanya Wilson said Tiger approached it as a result of an international music DJ platform it created for Heineken in The Works London office.

"We looked at Tiger and decided the music scene was too cluttered so we went for the art route positioning Tiger as synonymous with cool, contemporary Asia in art, style and design. We took top up coming artists from Asia and introduced them to early adopters, to media, to leading art people in each market, what we call ‘influential sneezers'. We believe ‘ideas that spread, win'."

International PR, viral, blogs, YouTube, local media coverage of event and individual artists and coverage back home in Asia markets allowed 13 markets to leverage off pre-, during and post-event activities which included product sampling and merchandising. Hewlett Packard, who wants access to the creative community, came on board as a partner.

Wilson believes this kind of experiential approach can be applied to almost any form of sponsorship.

"Clients have to go beyond ‘logo slapping' at events. The shortcoming of traditional advertising is that it tells and shows. What we do involves and engages. We turn passive consumers into active ones. What Tiger did was pioneering and forward thinking for what's essentially a traditional brand. All big brands in the West are using experiential marketing but in Asia some brands are just starting to consider this approach. Yet in Singapore experiential is one of the most effective ways of reaching a young target market."

Another zealous advocate of experiential approach is Iris, an independent integrated marketing agency, whose clients include Sony Ericsson, CNN, Adidas and Coke. In July it launched an integrated campaign for Sony Ericsson's Cyber-Shot range of phones. The objective was to tell consumers more about its award-winning product benefits and get them to be more creative with their phones and ‘make their own news' to share with friends. Iris created a free newspaper which was given to consumers and ultimately directed them to a website where they could upload their own shots and enter a competition, and supported with POS materials to drive sales. Top Shots was launched in July across eight markets.

Dan Saxby, managing director of Iris Singapore, believes Singapore marketers understand the challenge and rewards of integration but don't quite know yet how to make it happen for their brands.

"Integrated marketing is about understanding the consumer journey and they way you manage the medium to maximise the message. It might be a combination of three disciplines or 10. Whatever the choice, executing the marketing communication today is complex and we have to manage the delivery."

According to Saxby other barriers to integration in Singapore include a culture adverse to risk, individuals and organisations held back by the potential negatives of being first. He believes clients are also concerned about how to measure an integrated campaign for effectiveness or how to recognise whether a quote is value for money.

"Since there is no established media cost as there is with traditional media, clients just don't know how to value it. Everything we do has a tangible KPI that's not just about increasing awareness. Clients want ideas with a strong business case behind them. Online media has driven the need for integration because of new ways of reaching the consumer, but you don't choose digital if that doesn't reach your customer. At the end of the day you have to find the best solution. Our job is trying to explain how to pull all that together to win for the client."

 TBWA's Paris agrees. "A lot of clients get it. What I think they are asking us to do is help them join up the dots because their internal structures are not as flat as ours. They are locked into divisions and can't see the market the same way as we can. Agencies can turn quicker than most clients."

Well practiced, integration often spurs more collaboration between stakeholders and more external partnerships whether that's co-opting other brands in sponsorship of events like Hewlett-Packard and Tiger beer in the Tiger Translate campaign or working more synergistically and creatively with retail channel partners or media owners.

Low Teow Seng, general manager of Focus Media Singapore says, "I believe clients of today understand the value and importance of sharing and partnership. They involve their communication partners right from the start so that integration would be seamless. This positive step forward also allows agencies to brief the media owners like us more effectively."

Choice of media, he believes, still boils down to "target audience and objective'. "If the objective is to drive ‘word of mouth' publicity amongst the target audience, say in the case of Xbox gamers, then the strategy would be to invite gaming expert, who are ‘opinion leaders', to test the Xbox games," he says.

Measuring the success of an integrated campaign, he believes, is more of a ‘synergy decision'. "With integrated marketing campaigns, the marketer can establish milestones for each of the integrating components. Thus, it will enable the marketer to ‘qualify and determine' from the onset if a particular component is going to be the key driving force behind the overall campaign while ensuring that each of the integrating components leverage on the strengths of one another."

Sounds complex and challenging? It is. Today's clients - and their agency partners - have a Pandora's box of media at their disposal, and just like the original it's still hard to predict what will happen once you open it up. Clients need integrated  mutli-disciplined multi-media marketing to reach their customers, yet how to assess the combined effect on the consumer of measurable media and often unmeasurable new media and how one leverages on an other appears to be still beyond the powers of most agencies, media and clients.

Like Lord Lever in another century who famously said he knew half of his advertising was working but he didn't know which half. One point on which all marketers do agree is in the continued power and importance of the big idea. To connect the complex dots in a truly integrated campaign using various media clients need the biggest and best ideas money can buy. Back to the future, after all.