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Reproduced with permission of Admap, the world’s primary source of strategies for effective advertising, marketing and research. To subscribe visit www.warc.com/admap. © World AdvertisingResearch Center

Who’s going to sit at the client’s top table?
Jeremy Bullmore makes some predictions for the future of integrated communications

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UTURE HISTORIANS OF our trade will bebaffled. Towards the end of the 20th century, more and more marketing companies were converted to a belief in seamless, allmedia, 360º, harmonised, orchestrated, integrated communications. And at exactlythe same time, the purveyors of those communications disintegrated completely. Advertising agencies have always developed in response to client demand. So why, historians will wonder, was clientdemand for integrated communications met, paradoxically, by supplier fragmentation? Back in 1964, when Admap was born, clients who needed help with their marketing knew whom to turn to first; there was nohesitation. They would get in touch with an advertising agency. And if the agency was a full-service agency, it could provide the client with the following: a market analysis a business plan amarketing plan a communications plan a media plan, and creative work in all media, including merchandising, packaging, point-of-sale and PR. Like the man who never realised that he spoke prose, clients gotintegrated communications without even realising it. Forty years later, hesitation is rife. Today, as first port of call, clients may choose between a brand consultancy, a media company, a corporateidentity house, a management consultant, a public relations counsellor – or, still, an advertising agency. The choice of an agency is no longer automatic. It is not unusual for an advertising agency tobe briefed on the launch of a new product with the name, pack, positioning, budget and media strategy already determined: all that is required of them is some ads. The bigger agencies used to have...