R U for the new model?

Let's face it: The days of having a sole "brand manager" are changing in the business trenches. Today more and more Client organizations (as cases show) aim to make sure that the entire internal team and the whole set of their partners is armed with clear standards, solid strategy and good judgment to act as brand stewards. Regardless of whether you come from the PR, web/digital, or the advertising side there is growing evidence for integrating the disciplines. With the rise of social media, mobile marketing and so many more options, there is often little delineation between PR and advertising. The upshot: the future of communications industry lies in true "integration" that clients expect now. Having limited budgets, hard targets to reach they want to find the best media-neutral / bias-neutral Idea. So how do we all do that? What best practices can we learn from PR council members and International Advertising Associations who are making it work?

1. We need to adopt a discipline-neutral approach. In today's media-saturated world, there are dozens of strategic ways to reach the same consumer, so we have to challenge ourselves and our clients to be open minded and flexible in determining the truly best solution. Agencies can exhibit a bias toward their own discipline. So, it's important to have an open forum among the Client and its comms partners to openly discuss discipline-neutral solutions. Nobody wants to be considered an add-on to a program once the strategy has been set. Client can push for all-partner-meetings (weekly conference calls or monthly 'agency summits'). All agencies sit together at the table to discuss plans, poke holes in strategy, challenge tactics and share information (can anyone imagine that the successful Dove campaign was achieved without Unilever pulling together all their marketing partners for planning?). Once the big idea was arrived at, they were asked to think of the particulars of their respective channels and disciplines (PR, Web, WOM, Advertising)

2. We should know the Client's business better than anyone else. Agencies often know their area of expertise but not the client's business (there can often be disconnects from agencies-partners about the company's business model). Know more than is expected about that brand or company you service. Show that you are already 'living the business'.

It seems that businesses need that real integration to survive the competitive game, and agencies to meet the increased Client expectations for acting as business partners, not mere ‘vendors'.