I had the opportunity to recently hear Mike Hughes from the Martin agency speak about their most recognized campaigns with Geico, UPS and Free Credit Report. One point he made resonated with me and has been hounding me for the last week. He said that they tend to excel in media that has lost popularity and that is where he wanted to focus energy on being creative. With the advent of new media everywhere we tend to forget that if we focus on producing excellent work we can still make any medium effective.

Clients get so excited about new media that sometimes they tend to forget about their audience and the purpose of a full “campaign.” An ad campaign is a series of messages that share a single idea and theme and make up an integrated marketing communication and appear across multiple media outlets. It’s the execution of this single idea across multiple mediums that make for powerful advertising.

Radio has declined over the past several years due to new media, for example, however advertisers that use this forum to communicate correctly with their audience are extremely successful. Ads such as Budweiser’s Real Men of Genius and Motel Six’s Tom Bodett’s ads continue to perform year over year. There is a reason for this. They created something that resonates not only with the audience, but in the channel in which they are communicating.  You can’t create a TV ad and then just replicate it in an online banner. People interact differently with TV than they do radio or the internet or social forums. You have to be creative. You have to think through each of these channels and talk to your audience properly.

I am a proponent of digital advertising, but this doesn’t mean that it’s a silver bullet or that it can live on its own. Great media plans look at the consumer and how they engage with marketing. Campaigns that use multiple platforms to communicate, influence and drive business are the ones that succeed. Look at what was done by Old Spice. They had a strong following with their hilarious TV commercials and ‘Smell Like a Man ‘campaign. They took the interest in their TV campaign and generated a forward thinking social media campaign where they tied video to a one-to-one consumer interaction with Twitter and YouTube responses. Not only did they generate a ton of press around the campaign, but the videos they produced took on a life of their own and received more online views than their TV commercials.  It’s creativity like this that produces great integrated campaigns.

Start to think about how you can leverage different channels to communicate a singular idea. Do you know any other examples of effective integrated campaigns?