Integrated Marketing: Is Blogging a Piece of Their Puzzle?

The New York Times reported yesterday that Cliff Freeman & Partners, a well-regarded but sometimes troubled creative advertising and marketing shop in New York has hired a new CEO. Of the chosen one, Jeff McClelland, the Times writes:

[His] experience in what is known as integrated marketing - that is, campaigns that include nontraditional elements as well as conventional outlets like TV and print - is of particular value as marketers strive to broaden their media selections beyond the usual choices.

My background has always been integrated accounts, but we called it ’survival,’ ” Mr. McClelland said in an interview last week, joined by Mr. Freeman.

“Now for an agency, integrated marketing is the price of entry to compete for clients,” Mr. McClelland said. “You can’t talk to them without the goods.”

Hmm….”nontraditional elements,” that sounds an awful lot like blogging to me. Since public relations has collectively dropped the ball on our little Web phenomenon - with a few notable exceptions - it’s entirely possible that blogging could belong to integrated marketing instead. It seems like the flexible spirit and big picture thinking of integrated marketing could be more in line with the sometimes unpredictable spirit of the blogosphere.

But Shel Israel disagrees. He says that:

Integrated marketing solutions are an attempt to take a series of messages and push them out to a company’s constituency. They are devised and polished by committees, then the work is divvied up by ad and PR vendors as well as internal folk. The key to it is to push the message out, and this is supposed to improve brand awareness.

Blogs are an example of from one-to-many communications. They fail when they push. They are downright assaulted by a great number of blogosphere denizens when they appear crammed with the marketing jargon of yore. Hugh McLeod finds such blogs and gives them Lame Awards, which is as damaging as a bad review of a Broadway play in the New York Times.

Obviously I agree that pushy, contrived blogs that are laden down with boring ol’ marketing content won’t survive in the blogosphere. That said, I think Israel overlooks the fact that in order to use the blogging technology, companies have to accept it first. I predict that the first sector of communications that will broadly accept blogging will be the integrated marketing teams. They’re just nontraditional enough to get it. Some of them will make the mistakes Israel prophecizes, but the good ones will quickly grok the content issues and learn to speak in a more authentic voice.