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Integration seems to be the word of the day when it comes to marketing these days. Every brief I’ve seen lately refers to the “creation of a targeted and integrated online campaign”

But what does that truly mean? I thought I would start by defining the word integrate as cited by Merriam Webster.

Main Entry: in·te·grate*
Pronunciation: \ˈin-tə-ˌgrāt\
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): in·te·grat·ed; in·te·grat·ing
Etymology: Latin integratus, past participle of integrare, from integr-, integer
Date: circa 1586
transitive verb
1: to form, coordinate, or blend into a functioning or unified whole : unite
2: to find the integral of (as a function or equation)
3 a: to unite with something else b: to incorporate into a larger unit
4 a: to end the segregation of and bring into equal membership in society or an organization b: desegregate
intransitive verb
: to become

As you can see, integration involves unifying or bringing to together many elements into one larger picture. In theory this ties in very well with a general marketing campaign – obviously each element/tactic should reference/work with one another to achieve a more unified user experience.

But what does integration truly mean to the online space?

Does it mean taking your print ad and putting it online? No!

Integration needs to start from the ground up – at the very beginning of the project/campaign brief. The main idea or core theme of your campaign should lend itself to choosing tactics or campaign elements. Force fitting tactics around the theme is not a true integrated experience. (i.e. well we should do online or newspaper ads because that is part of the media buy)

Integration is figuring out how to tell the story you are trying to tell in many different forms, to maximize the reach of your target audience.

When looking at integrating a campaign, the most important piece of the puzzle is to figure out how each of the mediums you are looking at are consumed by your target audience, not just general consumers. You want to use the assets and stengths that each medium has to offer and then determine a strategy for tying them together based on your overarching campaign theme. If your target audience is online, then yes it should be included, but determining how they consume/use the medium is most important in determining which specific tactics can help meet a specific campaign objective.

If your campaign includes tv, OOH and online, you need to determine the objective of each medium and what it is you want people to know about your brand after interacting with each tactic – don’t worry if it’s different for each element – that’s okay – it should be. You and I don’t react to tv ads the same way we would banner ads on a website.

Here’s a theorectical example of how this should work.

Company X wants to create a campaignt that let’s people to know about their great new product and to help spread the word, they thought they would come up with a contest to give away some of this product. Target audience? 18-35 male and females

Now that they have a campaign idea, company X sits down to determine how best to go about this.

First off – they want to have a contest, they determine the best way to do this and to create a website that will host the contest and collect information on potential consumers. The objective? Begin a relationship with each person that enters the contest and ask for permission to continue the relationship by sending them enewsletters, coupons and so on to thank them for their entry. This would allow them the ability to create a database of interested consumers who have given permission and asked to hear more about their products.

They then looked back to their main campaign theme/objective and determined they still hadn’t completely met the objective of telling people about their product up front and creating awareness. They looked to see what their target audience was doing and realized that the main target consisted of users in Toronto and major urban cities and that many of these people either commuted to and from work in cars or on pblic transit. Knowing that iPods and digital devices were used more frequently than radio – they looked at doing an out of home campaign targeting users with billboards, wall murals and subway/transit domination in areas of Canada’s major cities that their target audience spent a lot of time passing. The objective of these ads were to show off the product and create awareness. They decided while to include a url, not to mention the contest given the contest served a different objective or purpose. In an effort to ensure people connected the two, they used the same tagline and same colour scheme for all of their campaign elements. The url drove people to the home page of their website, which had a house ad promoting the contest on the main page.

Now how to drive traffic for the contest itself in order to create that database? They decide some pay-per-click online advertising is the best approach. Some search engine ads and keyword lists – that spoke to the phrases used in the out of home campaign and general product category terms users were actually searching on to find similar products were created. Plus they added some basic demand gen web display advertising that simply focuses on driving people to their contest site. Nowhere in the ads did they talk about the product benefits – since that wasn’t the objective of that tactic. They chose not to advertise with large portals as they only wanted to pay for those people who clicked through to their site – achieving a large number of eyeballs wasn’t important to them in this campaign – not when the objective was to create a database.

As you can see, my ficticious company X took what some would call a different approach to their campaign.

Not every piece would look the same or carry the same message – but when put side by side, you can see how each piece could work together and fit together like a puzzle to create one overarching integrated campaign with tactics that that do more than just look nice together or like one another.

*Source: 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.