We've talked about integrated marketing and advertising here before.  As time goes on, more and more advertisers are looking for integrated solutions to their marketing needs.  Way back in November of last year we even talked about an approach Chrysler was taking with CNN.  At that time, CNN said most of it's marketing and advertising solutions were integrated approaches.

And that's a good thing.  Some of the time. In "Integration: Irrelevant?", Dorian Sweet points out that it's sometimes better to go for less integration with your marketing campaigns.

It all really depends on your brand, your product, and your target audience.  Sweet uses beer companies as an example of a marketing that doesn't really do a lot of integrated marketing.  As he points out, the tagline and the brand are usually the only unifying components of beer advertising on the global market.  It's a really good example!

Think about it. Surely you've seen some of the beer commercials that run in other parts of the world.  They're completely and totally different than the ones we see here in the United States.  When those visitors go from the television commercial to the company's website, they see the same site, branding, and message that the rest of us see.  The television commercial and the online experience aren't integrated… and it works.

The markets that those companies are reaching out to couldn't be any different.  The United States has different regulations and different expectations of what's okay for advertising and what isn't (and from what I've seen, we're pretty conservative in both regards).  Marketing that would fly in some parts of Europe or Asia wouldn't fly in the United States.   So the beer companies have to "deintegrate" their marketing efforts to maximize those effort's impacts.

You might not sell beer.  And you might not market globally.  But you might also be able to benefit from a marketing approach that diversifies from medium to medium.  You can speak to different groups of people online and offline.  You can use one form of advertising to say one message and another form to talk about a different message.

So while integrated marketing and advertising has its benefits for some, it isn't suited for every company, brand, or product. Examine your audience.  Examine your mediums.  Examine your products.  And then develop the best type of marketing approach to suit your unique set of variables. If it's not time to jump on the integration bandwagon, don't do it just because everyone else is.