David Ogilvy once described Integrated Marketing as “one-stop shopping” – setting up your agency to deliver all the functions a client might want to buy, and managing them together.
That’s not a bad way of looking at it, but how many agencies really deliver this effectively?
Back in less complicated times, ‘integrated’ was much easier to define and to deliver. Today, agencies need to offer so much more if they are to meet their clients’ needs. The digital revolution has created an explosion of new communications channels and customer touch-points. Suddenly it’s not so easy to be ‘integrated’.
Specialist agencies – the bane of marketing managers?
This revolution has divided agencies into myriad specialist shops – digital agencies, activation agencies, social media agencies, shopper agencies, creative boutiques and more, with clients often using three or four different agencies to create their campaigns.
Delivering integrated marketing campaigns has changed from a “one-stop” convenience to a mall-style outlet. This can often prove counter-productive as each agency fights to get its voice heard in what amounts to a committee approach to the whole process.
So why are clients choosing the hard way – is it because integrated agencies have lost their way?
The truth is that the kind of integrated approach clients want isn’t the kind of integration most agencies are offering. Clients are left with a complicated task; first, work out for themselves what media channels they need to use and then the best specialist agency for the task.
However, there is a new breed of integration emerging – an integration that simplifies marketing, improves client experience and delivers better solutions and results.
True integration
At Volume, we pride ourselves on being a truly integrated agency; that’s why we’ve made a bold claim.
We provide creative, innovative work across all media, and also the means to provide the deliverables for every campaign, from digital content creation, online platforms, mobile and even print. Put simply, it enables us to think holistically about your campaigns, address your challenges, and ultimately measure the effectiveness of everything we do.
If you would like to find out more about our services, please get in touch. In the meantime, here are ten things you probably don’t know about Volume.
Ten reasons why we are the truly integrated marketing communications agency
- Our HQ is a12,000 sq. ft. Digital Campus with its own digital photography studio and digital theatre
- We have a Technology Centre in Colombo, Sri Lanka, that supports our Technology Innovation Team here in the UK
- We host and manage over 75 websites and applications for our clients
- We developed the world’s first social media mapping tool www.sociview.com
- Our Creative Team has been here for 27 years, collectively
- We develop and deploy mobile applications across all the major mobile platforms, including Apple, Android and Blackberry
- Our digital press not only prints onto paper, but all kinds of substrates including plastics and magnetised stock
- We manage clients’ databases each with thousands of unique records and millions of transactions. Our biggest contains over 200 million
- Our Client Services Teams work with contacts in more than 140 countries
- We regularly translate into 17 different languages including Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and simplified Chinese