A week ago I cited an Internet Retailer report about a company that had recently created a new department to handle all of its marketing and advertising efforts on various new and emerging media platforms.  While the company was one I hadn't heard of before, I liked the idea of a department whose sole purpose was to market in all of these newfangled digital mediums.

Today I read a report at ClickZ about a much bigger company doing the same thing.  Fox Cable Network has created a new integration and emerging media division to focus on beefing up the company's cross-platform advertising offerings.  The step, which I believe is only the beginning of a new trend in advertising, is designed to help Fox Cable prepare itself to offer advertising partners complete ad packages that span cable, wireless, video, and online forms of advertising.

I'm sure a lot of this cross-platform integration will happen along parent company News Corporation's current brands.  News Corporation is the parent company for the Fox family of broadcast and cable television networks, 20th Century Fox Film, Fox News, DIRECTV, TV Guide, the New York Post, HarperCollins book publishing, and Fox Interactive Media, to name a few.  In addition, MySpace, the social networking phenomenon, was acquired by News Corporation and added to Fox Interactive Media (which manages dozens of popular websites).

Like I said, I think this is just the first of many reorganizations or department creations by big corporations to handle advertising integration and emerging media.  It especially makes sense for companies like News Corp and Fox which own numerous companies that deal with numerous forms of these new marketing avenues.  They see the importance of Web 2.0 marketing and are responding to demand from advertisers.  It only makes sense.  Who are you going to spend your ad dollars with:  a company that can run TV ads… or a company that can run TV ads, online ads, MySpace ads, radio ads, movie placements, etc?

Yeah.  That's kind of a no-brainer.  The fact that big companies need entire departments to handle the new marketing landscape should also make a no-brainer statement:  the new marketing opportunities cannot be ignored.