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Integration of marketing across channels makes sense - Fatter funnels mean more marketing buzz.

There’s plenty of talk at the moment about how traditional advertising and marketing is being killed off by the Internet.

For example, Eric Clemons, a professor at a prominent US business school, has written a touchstone piece for the TechCrunch website proclaiming that the social, interactive, search-based nature of the Internet is shattering all forms of advertising – ironically, including Internet advertising itself. His treatise has touched a nerve with the industry, with nearly 700 comments posted at last count either furiously attacking or passionately defending his position.

I think the article raises a lot of good points about the trust issues consumers have with advertising and marketing. But I think it’s a stretch to say advertising will disappear. However, it will definitely have to change. Marketers need to take a broader view of how their brand messages are distributed. Integration across different media, including interactive, is the key.

This isn’t a brand new idea. Originally called integrated marketing communications (IMC) or 360-degree marketing, it’s now called cross-media or trans-media. Call it what you will, it’s a good opportunity to effectively get your message out to a variety of potential customers.

Australian cross-media specialist Christy Dena, director of Universe Creation 101 and a lecturer and researcher at The University of Sydney, spoke to me for our most recent HotHouse podcast, and she says that although the concept of cross-media has been around since the 1980s, the difference now is that the skill set of both the people creating cross-media campaigns and the audiences who consume them has changed.

Eliciting responses

Back in the beginning, IMC just meant replicating your marketing and advertising campaign consistently across different media – for example, if you used Shane Warne in your TV campaign, you’d use images of Shane Warne (along with the tag line from the TV campaign) in your newspaper, magazine, radio, billboard and DM campaigns.

In this scenario, which Christy calls the design-oriented approach, an eye for blending and consistency were the key capabilities agencies required.

Now, although the Internet hasn’t destroyed traditional media campaigns, it’s made them considerably more complex. Adding interactivity to the mix means not just broadcasting a message across, it’s as Christy Dena says, “Providing content that’s appropriate for each audience.”

Rather than a wide and shallow broadcasting approach, online audiences are looking for depth of experience, according to Christy:

“You’re aiming to elicit a response, you’re not just telling them something.”

The fragmentation of online audiences also means you have to create a multi-layered campaign that has features that appeal to a multitude of audiences.

“You can’t design for a massive audience – you can use mass appeal gateways, but you need to offer different levels to different types of people,” Christy says.

Stealing cross-media

Many marketers would be aware of the Audi A3 “Art of the Heist” campaign, a textbook example of 21st-century cross-media. Audi of America launched the A3, a premium compact aimed primarily at affluent 25-34 year-old males, with a cross-media campaign revolving around the theft of a prototype  A3 from Audi’s Park Avenue headquarters in New York.

The three-month “alternate reality game” (ARG), which started with the online release of CCTV footage showing the car being stolen, blended fact and fiction, encouraging people to help follow the exploits of two recovery experts as they looked for the car and chased the thieves across the company. The search for the car finished at a gaming convention in Los Angeles nearly US$4 million ($5.8 million) later.

And when I say cross-media campaign, I mean cross-media: over the course of the campaign, media used included television, newspapers, outdoor, commuter rail, magazines, websites, blogs, live events, email, podcasts, films, online advertising, direct mail, radio and voicemail.

But what did Audi get for their $5.8 million, I hear you ask? During the first 90 days of the campaign, the Art of the Heist campaign achieved 45 million PR impressions, 2 million visits to AudiUSA.com (double the traffic for the same period the previous year), 500,000 “story participants”, 10,000 dealer leads, 4,000 test drives and, finally, 1,025 cars sold within a month of launch and 5,400 in six months.

Engagement in the form of audience participation from the car-hungry gamer community included scores of fan websites that popped up. The agency behind Art of the Heist, McKinney & Silver, won Best in Show at the 2005 MIXX Awards for the campaign.

Christy Dena said, “People who were interested in the format, not just the brand, were attracted to the campaign.”

Extra effort required

The Art of the Heist works on several levels, unlike other more recent examples such as the local Witchery jacket campaign on YouTube, where a winsome blonde who posted a video looking for the stud she met at a cafe who left his jacket behind turned out to be an actress spruiking Witchery’s foray into men’s fashion. The Audi A3 campaign didn’t involve deceit like Witchery’s campaign and, as Christy says, “it projected the brand and the image at the same time.”

(As an aside, I have to admit that when I watched the Witchery video, one of my first thoughts was, “Nice jacket, I wonder what it costs?”)

As the Audi A3 example amply demonstrates, unlike traditional media campaigns, the launch of a cross-media campaign is just the beginning of the process, not the climax.

There are not an enormous amount of examples of successful cross-media campaigns to point to (although a future blog post will include links to a few of them). And there’s a good reason for that  – it’s bloody hard to do it. It requires a lot of extra effort from the client, not just the agency. More effort in planning, more effort in execution and more effort in analysis – but with potentially far richer rewards.

It demands a new way of thinking and behaving – you need to retain your old knowledge of traditional media, while building on it to include interactive in the mix.

It does have some aspects in common with traditional broadcast media campaigns. You need to build the biggest, widest funnel to attract people, and then allow them to self-select and decide whether they will move further down the funnel.

Even if your target audience is fairly specific, it’s not a good idea to restrict participants in cross-media campaigns, according to Christy Dena. “You can’t say only people who will buy this product can come in.” More people equals more buzz, and buzz will greatly enhance the success of your campaign. Besides, you may pick up customers you wouldn’t have under normal circumstances.

You don’t have to go to the lengths Audi of America went to – and in the Australian market, who can afford to? But in this increasingly complex world, embracing cross-media can give your marketing added relevance.

Are you up for the challenge?

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