The desperate need to restructure advertising and marketing




Only interactive marketing communication will provide clients with the

necessary communicaion and feedback necessary for effective marketing to take place.

For too long, marketing functions have been vertically organised by media

type. This approach is mirrored on the agency side, with rewards based on

discipline-specific models. These must be torn down.

On the client-side Marketing and Brand Managers must involve and lead a

team of colleagues who have the responsibility, vision, understanding and

commitment to engage in a media-agnostic planning process. And this team of

enlightened marketers must be willing to let strategic goals -- not historic

patterns -- drive budget allocations.

Achieving strategic integration requires a top-to-bottom reinvention of the

marketing organisation. Holistic professionals who are system thinkers,

customer-centric believers, innovators and dreamers must lead this

transformation.

These individuals should be cross-trained to understand the entire marketing

spectrum and learn discipline-specific skill sets. And to specifically

understand the real meaning of the word "communication" Increasingly, these

leaders will need strong quantitative skills -- in order to analyse the

data-rich resources and leverage mathematical tools now available, especially if

they are to drive cross-disciplinary approaches that fuse disparate

consumer-engagement channels. Above all, they need to be superior team

leaders who have the insights, talent and passion to take marketing integration

to new heights.

Engaging in conversations with relevant markets (Interacting) will become an

important source of knowledge and innovation, the quality of this market

intelligence has already (and will do so more in the future) proven to be more

accurate than research and will determine market share.