Integrated Marketing

From a professional and business-smarts standpoint, you'll no doubt benefit from attending key industry conferences. No doubt. You'll acquire skills very important to your professional development.

From a File Power standpoint (however) Integrated Marketing (featured in one way or another at most industry conferences) has been a colossal failure. It's has been (however) a boon for vendors. This is a key distinction worthy of your consideration.

At the conference outlined above, the two featured speakers at the top of the list are from Google and Facebook. Anytime we learn about Integrated Marketing, those two characters seem to be in the mix. If you want to integrate across channels, you need a strong search strategy (i.e. Pay Google) and you need a strong paid social strategy (i.e. Pay Facebook). You spend money with Google/Facebook. You spend money with 3rd party vendors to work with Google/Facebook. And you always need to pay the paper people. Google/Facebook/3rd-Parties/Paper-Folks get paid, so Integrated Marketing is good for them.

What do you get for your investment?

You don't get File Power, and File Power is what you need to be successful.

If Integrated Marketing mattered, wouldn't catalog marketers have been the most successful direct marketers of all time? Shouldn't a catalog coupled with Google coupled with Facebook outperform everybody else who simply leverages Google/Facebook (or worse, those who don't leverage either properly)???

If Integrated Marketing mattered, wouldn't mall-based retailers have thrived with all of these channels and all of these 3rd parties working with Google/Facebook to drive mall-based traffic? Why are malls dying if Google/Facebook are so essential to driving mall-based traffic?

There's the common-sense portion of Integrated Marketing that is reasonable ... but do not expect to generate any File Power from the effort.

File Power, as you know, is the interest rate based on today's purchases. Integrated Marketing too often results in cannibalization (at a cost, no less) instead of incremental value. You simply pay third parties to facilitate an order that would have happened anyway. Others get paid, you end up with a minimal increase in sales coupled with a bloated expense structure.