By Claire Davies
   Associate Director
   Hill & Knowlton London

Whether you’ve felt its teeth yet or not, the global ‘crunch’ is starting to bite in marketing, especially in the UK.

In fact, the IPA’s recent Bellwether Report revealed that against a backdrop of rising costs and weakening sales, company marketing budgets are declining faster now than at any time since 9/11.

So, where does this leave all brands and their agencies and, in particular, where does this leave our clients? Respectable business analyses on behaviour during a recession period have shown that when times get tough, it doesn’t pay to pull the plug on marketing. Global brands not only need to retain customer awareness, but as important, they need to keep spending to establish themselves in the still booming emerging markets. Simply put, they can’t afford to keep hanging on to all their pennies during this rainy day if they’re looking at the bigger picture.

Accepting the premise that budgets – perhaps smaller – will still need to be committed to ensure that brands navigate the slowdown successfully, what will deliver the most bang for our clients’ decreasing bucks?

Maybe the most effective way of improving return on investment is greater cross-agency communication and cooperation. Quoted recently in a leading UK marketing title, Les Binet (Author of ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’) claimed that integrated campaigns could “increase efficiency by up to 100% because of interaction between different channels”. Such a return is a pretty bold promise, but when a leading global brand reported a 15% increase in its ROI due to adopting a cross-agency system, we see the illogic of underestimating the potential of greater integrated working.

The ability to capture the richest of rewards is to fully understand what true integration means and how it is fostered. The single most vital – but perhaps hardest won – factor is to ensure we all are getting round the table at the right time.

If a discipline in the marketing mix is to be part of delivering ROI to a joint client, then it’s crucial for that discipline to be integrated and involved from the very outset of the relationship as well as staying close to the client’s initiative pipelines and building links with cross-agency counterparts throughout the process. Collaborative briefings benefit the client; discrete or isolated briefings result in limiting invaluable insights that can be shared during the initial phase and beyond.

Impatient marketing staffs should heed the cautionary tale: ‘more haste, less speed, more cost’. In a recent case, the PR agency advised its client against the use of a celebrity in advertising as the star was not media friendly. Communicated too late, the ad agency wasted value time and money on creative and negotiations. A new personality was had after much back-tracking, reducing the ability to achieve the targeted ROI for the campaign.

Simply put: a truly integrated campaign should be based on a central theme or thought that is played out across the most relevant touch points to maximum effect and returns. Each separate element of the campaign needs to relate back to the business objective, but care must be exercised so that an individual agency cannot halo an idea that may be unworkable or limiting in a different channel. Limited funds and a dwindling customer base in a more demanding economic climate force us to go back to the business objective to help shape and demonstrate the strategic role of each part of the mix.

Being involved right from the start provides allows the parties to take a step back occasionally and re-examine the work. At minimum, a cross-agency team should deliver the sum of all its parts and ideally more through effective cross channel leverage. This only happens if all agree that the impact of the campaign is the only real test of bang for buck. There may be times when disciplines other than our own are better placed to have a more sizeable role in delivering against a brief. Being open and fostering trust with joint clients and cross-agency colleagues means we are more likely to deliver more meaningful financial returns for all involved.

The 5 Golden Rules:

• All partner agencies are briefed at the same time; no individual agency is greater than the sum of the parts
• A ‘big idea’ can come from any agency!
• Never start an integrated planning process with a script on the table – this is ad leverage, not the same as holistic communication
• Always have a core insight in the brief that can act as a springboard for ideas
• Social media & digital platforms add greatly to a traditional media plan, so don’t forget to involve them