“Integration” itself has many meanings, and we were sure not to restrict ourselves to a single one.
It’s both the ability to bring together resources within a marketer as much as it is within multiple and single agencies. To determine the “most integrated” campaigns, we did not consider only those involving a wide range of agencies. A good integrated marketing campaign can also be with Marketing, Sales and various e-commerce solutions are well deployed for a seamless solution. Likewise, for Colgate and other firms, they rely on a single source agency model to develop a complete solution. The work that comes out of Dentsu in Japan, for example, is highly integrated , but is rarely touched by any other agency.
All that said, the reality of twenty first century integration is one that usually involves multiple disciplined teams working together – on a single idea and approach. There is no ‘silver bullet’ to having multiple agencies aligned and working together , but as we will show over the coming pages, it takes a lot of patience, diplomacy and the right motivation.