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80% of the World’s biggest advertisers face integrated marketing challenges

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Integrated Marketing

In the recent research by the WFA 80% of advertisers surveyed said they had challenges with integrated marketing.

This corroborates our own research from 2012 (see our homepage download here for full results) that showed similar findings to the ones stated in WARC’s article below. In our research we found that over 70% of our respondents thought that they could gain more than a 10% increase in effectiveness through better integration. No wonder integration is a top priority for the WFA members!

Advertisers face IMC challenges.

BRUSSELS: Over three-quarters of advertisers regard integrated marketing communications as a priority, but many are failing to generate big ideas and fully measure performance, new research has shown.

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), a trade body, gathered responses from a third of its membership, representing eight categories and a combined annual marketing budget of around $32bn.

Overall, 80% of this panel agreed that integrated marketing communications (IMC) was a “top priority”.

The four areas showing the greatest gap between companies’ capabilities and priorities were all related to people and performance.

Under the latter heading, the study found it was vital for marketers to understand what success looked like and to set the right key performance indicators. Single-brand companies and those with an annual global ad-spend of less than $500m were more likely to face these challenges.

Another performance-related issue was demonstrating return on investment, and it was the largest companies, those spending more than $2bn annually, that had most to do here.

People-based challenges centred on securing buy-in for IMC from business leaders, and ensuring proper resources were in place. The largest firms needed to address both these areas, while the food and drinks industry was also found to be lagging on leadership.

Generally, the smaller companies, spending up to $500m a year on marketing, had most work to do in preparing themselves for IMC, while medium-sized companies, spending between $500m and $2bn a year, were most ready.

“Within many large companies there are often still IMC sceptics,” said Geoff Seeley, global communications planning director at Unilever, and chair of the WFA’s IMC forum.

He argued businesses that were members of the forum should act as advocates. “To be able to benchmark your own company against a pool of other large multinationals can be invaluable to help inform smarter conversations internally and help realise real progress,” he stated.

Data sourced from WFA: additional content by WARC staff, 30 April 2013

Should you be one of the 80% with IMC challenges, wanting a minimum 10% improvement in efficiency or effectiveness, then give the only company designed specifically to meet your needs a call.


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