In this months revolution magazine (which incidentally seems a better read than usual - have you guys changed some stuff around at revolution towers?) john Owen, planning partner at dare, comments that “online marketers have succumbed to an attack of generosity” and that a rash of campaigns involving various product and physical world integrations (ie giving stuff away for free) show that for a modern marketing mix product or sales promotion “ideas like these are now central to the marketing effort”.
I couldn’t agree with him more on this and it makes me happy to see a comment in an industry print mag along those lines.
I’m working very hard to tie together the seemingly disconnected worlds of product and digital and am, I think, making good steady progress, but don’t be fooled - it can and often is a hard slog.
Consumers don’t live in bubbles - we all know and respect that. But often the promotional side of things is seen as a poor relation to it’s trendy cousin digital - it shouldn’t be like that.
What interests me is tying these two together more and more and making them work with and around each other to create fully integrated campaigns.
John adds that perhaps in a past life “this stuff would have been classified as sales promotion or brand activation”.
I personally think they still are john and that actually it’s being realised more and more in the traditionally offline and plastic “gift with purchase” SP worlds that digital is a key component of those kind of marketing campaigns rather than the other way around.
Howard