Journal of Marketing Communications

ISSN: 1352-7266 (Print) 1466-4445 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjmc20

Integrated marketing communications: From

media channels to digital connectivity

Frank Mulhern

To cite this article: Frank Mulhern (2009) Integrated marketing communications: From media
channels to digital connectivity, Journal of Marketing Communications, 15:2-3, 85-101, DOI:
10.1080/13527260902757506

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527260902757506

Published online: 25 Jun 2009.

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 Journal of Marketing Communications
Vol. 15, Nos. 2 3, April July 2009, 85101

Integrated marketing communications: From media channels

to digital connectivity
Frank Mulhern*

Northwestern University, Medill School, 1845 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208, USA
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Media is in the midst of a digital revolution that frees news, information and advertising
from the technological limits of print and broadcast infrastructures. The digitization
and networking of information transform marketing communications into a vastly
different set of practices for connecting consumers and brands. This paper overviews
the transformation in media and describes the implications for integrated marketing
communications (IMC) practice and scholarship.
Digital media brings about infinite reproduction of content, consumer networking,
user-generated content and an expansion of media from news and entertainment to
almost any technology that has a digital interface with people. The role of media in
marketing communications practices shifts from the execution of message strategies
into an extension of consumer understanding. Media planning, the practice of
allocating a media budget across a set of vehicles, will be replaced by a dynamic,
automated process that serves ads based on information streams of consumer intentions
and actions. Several of the core principles of IMC consumer insight, data-driven
decision making, cross-media integration and communications with multiple
stakeholders represent an improved framework for managing communications in a
digital world.
Keywords: media; advertising; Internet; communities

Introduction
The current revolution in information technology and digital communication fits the same
pattern as the previous industrial revolutions, including the most recent one that gave us
mass production, mass marketing and mass communications. In her book, Technological
revolutions and financial capital, Carlota Perez (2002) describes how technological
revolutions progress through four stages interruption, frenzy, synergy and maturity all
stages closely tied to the allocation of financial capital. The digital revolution has
blossomed into the post-frenzy synergy stage where a well-financed technology deploys
itself across the economy. In an interview about the proposed Microsoft acquisition of
Yahoo!, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer remarked that offline advertising will all be online
within 10 years (Wall Street Journal 2008, B1). This simple statement reflects the
enormous transformation of advertising as it migrates from a print and broadcast world to
a digital one. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of this transition on the way
companies interact with consumers.
Of all the differences between traditional advertising and media and the emerging
world of digital communications, none is greater than the fundamental difference between

*Email: fjm274@northwestern.edu

ISSN 1352-7266 print/ISSN 1466-4445 online

q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13527260902757506
http://www.informaworld.com
 86 F. Mulhern

the idea of communications being about the delivery of messages through media channels
versus communications being about an electronic world of networks, algorithms and
automated systems for managing the connections between information and people. While
creative messages remain at the core of communications, the encroachment of automated
advertising networks such as Google search advertising and data-driven ad placement will
shift much of media planning into a process that looks more like business logistics. This
transformation poses a serious challenge for media companies, agencies and brand
marketers who have constructed a sophisticated infrastructure to send messages to target
audiences through media channels but do not have the mindset nor the technical expertise
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to master the data analysis and modeling of the digital media world.
Traditional advertising long has been immersed in the process of aggregating large
audiences and delivering messages to them. While that approach to advertising continues
to dominate media spending, a parallel world is developing that focuses on search, spiders,
social networks, cloud computing and algorithms that filter and serve information
(Plummer et al. 2007). These capabilities are working their way through everything
digital that is, all information. It will include all of what we have known as media and
advertising. Remarkably, the traditional marketing communications business still places
much more emphasis on branding and creative work than on data, metrics, quantitative
models and digital technology (Ha 2008).
This paper overviews the transformative shifts in media and discusses what they mean
for the integrated marketing communications (IMC) and for scholarly research in
marketing and advertising. The digitization of media represents a phase change in the
history of communications. Advertising, with its well developed business models and
processes for targeting consumers with brand messages, is being reinvented for a world
where demographically targeted print and broadcast messages are supplanted with data-
driven, contextually relevant brand communications that no longer have to be paired with
news or entertainment. For example, some brand messages will migrate to mobile devices
that directly reach consumers without a connection to news or entertainment. The
implications of the current revolution for media and marketing communications are
systemic, profound and unlike anything the field has experienced, not even the advent of
television. While television brought on a revolution in advertising content and provided an
avenue for powerful messages and creative content, its inclusion in the media mix
operated with the same business model as radio the selling of broadcast time slots based
on demographically defined target audiences.
Before examining what advertising media is becoming, we consider what is has been
for the past few decades. Modern marketing communications has evolved from a mass
communications world that rested on a few key premises that underlie how marketing
communications are done, and how they are received by consumers:

. Audiences can be aggregated into monolithic entities with homogenous tastes

(Napoli 2003).
. Advertising can attach itself to media content and project itself onto audiences by
interrupting the delivery of that content (Malthouse, Calder, and Tamhane 2007).
. Consumers will accept the intrusive delivery of commercial messages in exchange
for free, or nearly free, content (Moorman, Neijens, and Smit 2005).
. Brand messages generate brand awareness and preferences that translate, however
loosely, into consumer spending (Tellis 2005).
. Brand communications can be bundled into media plans that span multiple vehicles
which constitute a relevant array of exposures to target consumers (Lee and Park 2007).
 Journal of Marketing Communications 87

These premises remain the bedrock of modern advertising and media planning. They have
served the industry well by building brand differentiation and driving consumer spending.
However, in the digital, interactive world that is emerging, these premises become less
appropriate. Mass communication, matched with mass production and mass distribution,
gave us the modern era of marketing and its focus on brand awareness, intensive
distribution and aggressive promotions. The Internet replaces this industrial era model of
communication with a networked information system that has as its bedrock a set
of properties that look more like an open, free marketplace than the centrally controlled,
top-down rigid one of mass communications.
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The networked information economy

One can approach the changes in media in a variety of ways. At the core, two related
things, both technological, underlie all of the changes taking place. The first is the digital
codifying of information. The web of the 1990s was the conversion of print content into
digital formats in the form of web pages and electronic files. The second is the networking
of that digital content. Once things are digital and networked, a whole host of things take
place that comprise what Benkler (2006) calls the networked information economy.
Benkler describes how a digital, networked media enables: (1) the production and
distribution of information through nonproprietary processes much like those in the arts,
education and sciences; (2) a blend of market and nonmarket mechanisms for making
information available to the public; and (3) large-scale, cooperative efforts that generate
output from many providers, best exemplified by wikis. Unlike the mass production
economy of the twentieth century, a networked information economy features:

Infinite reproduction and sharing

A print newspaper or magazine can only be consumed when it is physically in the hand of a
reader. Television can only be watched when the consumer is physically positioned in front
of a screen. However, in a digital world, media content is free of the physical constraints of
print and broadcast and can be copied and shared repeatedly, at little or no cost and with no
loss of quality. Infinite reproduction destroys the business models of media companies that
make money selling duplicates of content (Humphreys and Messaris 2005).

Modularity of content
In traditional media, news, entertainment and advertising are bundled by editors and
producers into relevant packages for audiences. A digital, networked infrastructure
enables individual pieces, news stories for example, to be unbundled and freely distributed
separately from packaged content. Advertising can attach itself to a news story without
being associated with a newspaper. No one needs to buy the entire newspaper to get one
story. The modularity of content has several ramifications:
. When information is unbundled and open, barriers to entry disappear. As more
participants produce content, large media firms lose control of content and
distribution.
. Modular information is more efficient than bundled information because it provides
people with what they want without extraneous content.
. Advertisements also become modular and travel with pieces of information, no
longer having to be packaged and sold in big bundles.
 88 F. Mulhern

. Content aggregation happens on the demand side as consumers construct content

bundles to suit their desires.

Consumer networks
The field of consumer behavior has produced an enormity of research about individual
consumer decision making, essentially (and largely implicitly) adopting the framework of
psychology that holds that the individual person, not the group, household or community,
is paramount. Consumers have always operated in social networks as demonstrated by
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research on household buying behavior. However, the absence of an ability to track

person-to-person connections has kept network effects largely off-limits. Today, Internet-
enabled networks provide social graphs depictions of who talks to whom, that promise
to remake the whole idea of who a consumer is. The centrality of the individual decision
maker will give way to meaningful social clusters that make purchase decisions and
effectively constitute the target audiences for advertisers (Barabasi 2003).

User-control and content production

Media companies and advertising agencies have long operated in a centralized
environment where content producers and distributors serve as gatekeepers for what gets
produced and disseminated. Technologies now empower consumers to control what
information they receive and to produce text, images, audio and video content for others to
access (Shirky 2008).

Customized content
Once users are in control, they will create whatever consumption experience they desire.
The media content, ads and all, will be customized not by the media company or
marketer, but by the user. This shifts the marketing communications role from one of
aggregating audiences to one of responding to consumer desires with relevant information
and services that are highly customized (Gal-Or and Gal-Or 2005).

Information streams
One byproduct of digitization is continuous streams of data about how people interact with
information. Marketing communications has built an enormously large set of business
practices on a very small amount of information from survey research and consumer
panels for things such as grocery shopping. The torrent of digital information now
produced by digital media will reorient marketing communications much the way it has
done for business logistics and operations research. Ongoing tracing of media use and
buying behavior will parallel, and to some degree replace, the static methods of market
research and qualitative research.
Nicholas Carr (2008) draws parallels between the Internet and the origins of the
electricity grid. He claims that the web is progressing toward the concentration of
computing power and storage with a few, major suppliers, just as electricity production
consolidated into a few, large utility companies. The declining cost of processing, storage
and transmission will contribute to the digitization of not just media but of all information-
based aspects of industry and government. Digitization overhauls entertainment, health
care and education and in many ways will make those industries operate with many of the
properties of media information archiving and sharing, audience aggregation and
 Journal of Marketing Communications 89

community development. For example, the ongoing process of digitizing medical records
created a media-like entity within the medical community. In a nondigital world, media is
information distributed on physical devices; in a digital world, media becomes the human
interface with the vast and expanding digital universe.

Advertising as a service
The placement of advertisements in media has long relied on fairly well-developed
software systems that allocate advertising budgets across media alternatives based on
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expected audience profiles. The digitization of media has brought on a higher level of
automation in advertising allocation. Algorithms now place ads based on key word
matches identified by search terms or context-specific placements based on web content.
While ad placement often suffers from a lack of contextual relevance, the continued
evolution of the Internet, particularly the development of the semantic web, will improve
advertising targeting dramatically. The semantic web will feature interpretations of
information that mimic the human mind; this will be an enormous improvement over
todays keyword-based systems for search, recommendations and advertising. Such
interpretive capabilities are, to a limited extent, in use by online dating services that
evaluate a wide range of detailed information to generate overall profiles.
The digital transformation means that media and entertainment companies can no
longer financially prosper by simply charging for content or monetizing audiences for
advertisers. While consumers are reluctant to pay for information they can get for free,
they will pay for ancillary services and intangibles such as trust and authenticity
guarantees that the information is what it purports to be. So too, consumers will pay for
services, mostly digital ones, that are matched with commercial messaging and brand
connectivity. The model is already in place with advertising-supported search engines,
online maps, social networking cites such as MySpace and Facebook and recommendation
and filtering services typified by Googles inclusion of ads with RSS news feeds.
Advertising will continue to align itself with services that users value (Plummer et al.
2007). In fact the present rush to develop widgets digital service applications
represents a small but significant advance toward advertising as a service.
The shift to advertising-supported services opens up enormous opportunities for
advertisers to expose consumers to brand messages and, more importantly, to interact with
them. Among the emerging advertising-as-service models are what Reubel (2008) calls
advertising-supported advertising essentially brand communication and interaction
platforms that bypass media companies. Brand manufacturers and retailers are beginning
to create online communities that feature information, games and social networks that
work much like digital media companies. One consequence of this is a reduction in the
need for advertisers to rely on media organizations. This enables organizations of all types
to operate as media entities connecting information to consumers in relevant ways.
Commercial messages and interactions with consumers will be partnered with media,
events, entertainment, retailers and digital services of all types. In todays commercially
laden economy, advertising is extending itself into countless forms to the point that
anything digital can host advertising.
From an economic perspective, advertising as a service represents an expansion of the
three-party economic model for media free content to attract an audience that is sold to
advertisers into other domains. In fact we are seeing a progression from product
marketing to service marketing and from service marketing to digital services, including
those for information. The Internet enables the extension of a media economy because
 90 F. Mulhern

it drastically reduces the costs of reproducing and sharing information and forces
businesses to partner with marketers to find a workable business model. The variety of
advertising-as-service examples noted above constitute a new advertising economy, one
not particularly married to traditional media, and one that is more pervasive, exact and
efficient than what we have known in the past.

Media planning
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In 1974, the Journal of Marketing published a paper about marketing theory written by
W.T. Tucker (1974). Tucker chastised marketing scholars for adopting a singular
perspective of a channel captain a master of the marketing universe, fine tuning the
outbound marketing mix variables to suit the marketers interests. In what has become one
of the more provocative quotations in the marketing literature, Tucker (1974, 31) noted:
The consumer was always considered the consumer at the micro level. That is, he was always
studied in the ways that fishermen study fish rather than as marine biologists study them. . . .
The point of view of the marketing theorist was virtually identical to that of the marketing
manager, and particularly the channel captain, even when his conceptual analysis was without
immediate practical consequence.
Tucker went on to advocate alternative approaches to marketing scholarship, namely
from the perspectives of consumers or the general economic performance and well-being
of society. Marketing theorists didnt follow Tuckers advice. The channel captain
perspective prevails in the literature, particularly with respect to advertising and media
planning. For example, the prevailing view of advertising and promotion is that of
outbound messaging designed to elicit a response (Tellis and Franses 2006). The premise
of media planning is that a manager can, with the aid of demographic profiles of media
vehicles and some software, allocate advertising budgets in ways that purportedly
optimize advertising to, using Tuckers terminology, catch some fish.
The networked information economy obviates the channel captain. Marketers no
longer control the entire media environment. Accordingly, they must learn to participate in
the consumers world. Media planning does not just change; it goes away and is replaced
by an entirely different mindset. That mindset will reflect the way consumers actually use
media, not the demographically defined media audiences. Current media planning grew
out of an era where audiences sat in front of televisions or sat at home or on trains perusing
newspapers and magazines. Consider the following facts about media use today:
. The continued adoption of more media technologies has led to a large increase in
the amount of time people spend with media a total estimated to be about 9.5
hours per day (Communications Industry Forecast from Veronis Suhler
Stephenson 2007).
. In addition to consuming more media, people are consuming the media
simultaneously. Pilotta et al. (2004) demonstrate the prevalence of simultaneous
media consumption. They find that over one-fourth of TV viewers are also online
and 10% are reading a newspaper. They note that, The existence of simultaneous
media exposures undermines most current media measurement systems as they are
defined as isolated environments (Pilotta et al. 2004, 291).
. The geographic locating of wireless phones and other handheld devices enables
advertising to person-based locations. This form of mobile direct marketing
represents a major advance in advertising precision that will match ads to where
consumers are and what they are doing.
 Journal of Marketing Communications 91

Carlin (2005) describes how the framework for traditional media planning the sequential
delivery of messages to fit into the supposed Awareness, Interest, Demand and Action
model no longer applies (if it ever did). Planning may no longer be a useful metaphor.
First, planning implies that one lays out a well-defined set of practices and then executes
them over a sustained period of time. This is a mass media concept; and applies only to the
topdown channel captain described by Tucker. Planning also reflects an outbound point of
view featuring centralized control of messages to target consumers. At some level, there will
always need to be plans for how to allocate budgets across media alternatives. However, the
idea of completely planning which messages go to which vehicles is giving way to
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automated systems that make allocations based on real-time information streams. What is
emerging is a contingency system where messages are placed with respect to context as done
with online advertising networks. For example, Takoni, an AOL property, conducts
behavioral targeting that serves ads based on a persons online behavior at a broad array of
websites participating in Takonis advertising network.
Consider the difference in how media are purchased using Google AdSense compared
to television. With television, media buyers purchase predicted audiences for TV shows
that will run several months later. The media companies sell the predicted audiences,
defined by demographic descriptors. If the measured audience turns out to be substantially
smaller than what was sold, the media company compensates the advertiser with make
goods. In this world, planning consists of using some fairly well-developed software tools
to allocate an advertising budget across media alternatives to maximize exposures of the
demographic target. With AdSense, an advertiser authorizes Google to use an advertising
serving algorithm to place online ads in contextually relevant web locations. The only
planning that happens is determining what context the ad should be attached to and how
much money should be set as a cap on spending. Ads are placed with a real-time, dynamic
process controlled by an algorithm that gets smarter every time someone clicks on an ad.
Demographics, which more or less drive the entire traditional media planning business,
diminish in importance. Even more, the promise of linking ad serving to customer
databases and online behavior represents an even higher level of precision in targeting.
By the time this model migrates to television, it is already partially in place for secondary
print markets, the traditional media planning business will become much less important as
it is too slow to serve ads in a dynamic, digital media world. Advertising allocation is
evolving into a software system, perhaps even an artificial intelligence, which tracks
continuous streams of incoming data and serves ads to the proper person at the proper time
and location. In such an environment, Google and its contemporaries will constitute what
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, calls an advertising operating system.
The driving force in digital media will be automated systems that allow for scale in the
placement of ads. Since it is impossible for a planner to decide which of the millions of
websites an ad should be placed on, Google and other search engines developed the
automated ad serving systems noted above. As more computational systems come into
play, the process of serving ads expands to incorporate not just the Internet but also
interactive television (Kastidou and Cohen 2006).
The planning and execution metaphor is giving way to media as a complex adaptive
system (Holland 1996). In such a system what matters are the connections, the patterns of
media pieces, content and ads, that consumers assemble for themselves and share with
others. Understanding how to operate in this world will allow marketing to become that
which it has claimed to be consumer oriented. Media planning becomes much less about
picking among media alternatives and more about establishing patterns of interactions
with consumers. This shift from media planning to digital services is depicted in Table 1.
 92 F. Mulhern

Table 1. From media planning to digital services.

Concept Traditional Digital

Planning process Linear/batch Dynamic/ongoing
Targeting Demographics Consumer and/or context
Consumers Audience of individuals Users in social unit
Partner News and entertainment All media, digital services and places
Pricing CPM Contingency
Note: CPM means cost per thousand.
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Note that the stepwise process of deciding objectives, target audience, message and
media placement gets replaced with a dynamic process that does not decide all these
beforehand; it decides when it executes, using current information on consumer interests
or behaviors. Instead of batch-like campaigns, advertising becomes a continuously
evolving system of matching ads to people and contexts. In existing formulations of media
planning, media decisions have long been relegated to the later stages of marketing
communications planning. Marketing managers and agencies have long thought of
strategy as comprising consumer understanding, target marketing, brand positioning
messages and creative content. Media come into play for execution as depicted in the
linear marketing communications planning process. In a digital world where consumers
have numerable access points, media understanding must occur early in the process along
with consumer insight and market research. This leads to a more dynamic process that
continually monitors consumers and their use of media.
The changes brought on by digital media have many effects on advertising agencies.
Historically, the advertising industry has been dominated by the view of the creative
directors and brand strategists. While brand insights and creative messages will always be
important, advertising planning is gravitating more to be about matching the messages to
individuals and contexts in ways unthinkable in the past. As such, the message is not as
important because it is in the right place at the right time (as in targeted direct mail) and
therefore does not have to be as profane and attention getting as todays interruption-based
advertising.
Agencies are in the midst of a major transformation. This is not the first time they have
done so. Originally created to sell the advertising inventories of media organizations,
agencies evolved to become strategic partners of their clients, offering high-level services
in research, strategy and creative output. Today, agencies are remaking themselves again
to adapt to a digital world. Agencies incorporated digital media by adding stand-alone
digital units. As more media go digital, these units are taking on a more central role.
Nevertheless, agencies remain seriously challenged because their talent base, with its
strength in qualitative research and creative messaging, may be ill suited for the data-
driven, computational world emerging in digital media.

Implications of digital media for IMC

IMC has provided a consumer-oriented framework for strategic communication processes
that drive organizational performance (Schultz and Schultz 2003). The transformation to
digital media described here has enormous ramifications for IMC and how it is practiced.
In this section, we describe how digital media are influencing four important elements on
IMC consumer insight, data-driven planning, cross-media integration and communi-
cations to multiple stakeholders.
 Journal of Marketing Communications 93

Consumer insight
Sciences advance in accordance with the quality of their metrics. Data made available
from digital media are greatly improving consumer understanding. Consumer insight is
typically thought of as the qualitative understanding of the motives and behaviors of
consumers. As such, consumer insight analysis is conducted with qualitative research
methods and consumer surveys. In a digital world, extensive data on consumer behavior
and media use provide another avenue for consumer insight. Digital media data represent a
complement to existing approaches. Digital media data are unobtrusive and behavioral.
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While they do not provide interpretations, they can be used to make inferences about such
things as preferences, price-sensitivity and brand choice decisions in situations where
privacy concerns enable marketers to track behaviors.
A key challenge for marketing communications has been fully utilizing consumer
insight in planning processes. A disconnect frequently occurs between consumer insight
research and the planning process often because there are different people, even
different companies, performing those two things. By providing a continuous flow of
information about consumers, digital media provide the opportunity for more detailed and
continuously monitored consumer insight. In a digital environment, consumer insight
becomes not something that is done at a certain point in time say prior to a major
advertising undertaking but something that is always taking place. This represents a
more natural and complete way to process and make adjustments to communication
practices.
As a field that prides itself on having consumer insight as a foundation, IMC must
accommodate information from digital sources. IMC must develop dynamic analytic
systems that turn raw data from digital media into relevant consumer insights. The pairing
of such information with the traditional qualitative research provides a level of
understanding heretofore unknown in the field. What is required is an integrated approach
that leverages this higher form of consumer insight into strategic planning, tactical
execution and communication metrics. For example, recent research shows that many
consumers engage with multiple media devices at the same time (Pilotta et al. 2004).
Accordingly, the interpretation of those patterns of media use can be used to modify media
execution to optimize the presence of a brand in multiple media devices.

Data-driven planning
IMC has distinguished itself as a practice that uses evidence-based decision making.
Central to IMC is the use of customer databases as a source of information on actual
consumer behavior in contrast to the over-reliance on attitudinal information typical of
traditional approaches to marketing communications.
The presumption in a data-driven approach to marketing communications is that
detailed customer databases are available. Over the years, limitations in the availability of
customer databases have continued to diminish as exemplified by grocery store frequent
shopper databases. The move toward digital media greatly advances the availability of
customer data by providing data in real-time. As noted above, digital media provide
continuous streams of data that provide an unending flow of information. The availability
of such data improves the ability of organizations to implement as follows:
. Customer valuation and segmentation an IMC approach involves assessing the
financial value of customers and constructing market segments accordingly. Data
from digital media make possible more accurate and more frequent analyses of
customer valuation. Traditional batch customer valuation studies that take place
 94 F. Mulhern

once or twice a year can be replaced with much more frequent analyses that provide
an ongoing tracking of customer valuation. Marketing communications can thus be
adjusted on a regular basis to better reach the customers based on their actual and
potential purchase behavior.
. Customer response analysis measures of customer response to marketing
communications improve with in a digital world. Tracking of communication
tactics and their impact bring about the closed loop of direct marketing.
The continuous data in digital media enable ongoing reassessments of spending and
adjustments to achieve better efficiency. This will have to be done by analytic
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systems that capture data and adjust allocations accordingly. Behavioral targeting
does this and offers great promise because it drives customization of digital media
content and ads.
. Market intelligence data from digital media provide numerous opportunities to
understand consumers, competitors and marketplace interactions better than ever.
We are now seeing the development of data mining methods and knowledge
management systems that harness information for digital media to build more robust
and informative market intelligence. A prominent example is the way Amazon.com
uses a recommendation algorithm that analyzes consumer preferences and makes
recommendations for future purchases.
. Financial models data from digital media will bring about a major boost in the
financial metrics used in marketing. The dominance of measures such as awareness
and attitudes will give way to financial metrics such as incremental profit, ROI and
customer value. Financial models based on data from digital media can guide media
spending decisions far more precisely than the budgeting models used today, which
are largely based on mass-media audience metrics.
Data from digital media help IMC move toward greater efficiency and accountability.
This represents a major re-orientation of the practice of marketing toward evidence-based
decision making. As such, marketing takes on some of the qualities of other business facets
such as operations and distribution where improvements in processes and execution have
enhanced business practice. IMC is uniquely positioned to lead marketing through this
transition by keeping the focus on consumers and the financial gains firms can achieve
harnessing data to drive strategy.

Cross-media integration
IMC originated around the idea of connecting objectives and messages across multiple
media vehicles. As more and more vehicles become available, connecting across them
becomes more challenging. Digital technologies allow for unlimited options in the
placement of advertisements. As such, media planning becomes something that planners
cannot manage without automation. Media planning software has long provided ways to
match ads to demographically defined target markets. Online, advertising serving
algorithms provide ways to match ads to topics consumers are searching (search engine
marketing) and to web page content. Increasingly, these algorithms will also match ads to
individual consumers done with direct marketing models that prioritize households for
receiving offers.
From an IMC perspective, the key problem is that algorithms that optimize placements
based on search, context or user identity do not integrate those placements over time or
media formats. Hence, consumers are likely to see bundles of brand messages that do not
systematically come together in a coherent way. The challenge remains for academics and
 Journal of Marketing Communications 95

practitioners in IMC to develop systematic approaches to placing and monitoring brand

messages across multiple digital media platforms. Doing so requires formalizing
principles of integrated media planning into algorithms that analyze consumer media use.
As a field, IMC has developed many principles that help guide decision making.
However, formalizing them into models represents a much higher level of sophistication.
What is needed is a set of axioms about relevance, exposure, timing, behavioral response
and other precepts of media planning. Axioms do exist for many aspects of mass media
planning and direct marketing. However, since digital media consumption is new and
constantly changing because of technology and usage protocols, axioms are not well
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developed. By bringing a focus on consumers, media integration and measured outcomes,

IMC is in the right position to lead the development of the next generation of media
planning tools.

Communications with multiple stakeholders

One of the most important distinctions of IMC compared to traditional marketing is the
inclusion of multiple stakeholders in communication planning. IMC accommodates
internal audiences such as employees, as well as business partners and professionals such
as retailers, vendors, franchisees, regulators and reporters. Cross-stakeholder integration
incorporates the interests and desires of different stakeholders in the way organizations
manage communications.
Digital media affect multiple stakeholders in many ways. Various stakeholders, often
with vastly different interests, come to the same corporate websites. Companies must
present themselves in ways that are relevant to all stakeholders while providing navigation
for each stakeholder to the information of interest. Stakeholders can now talk to each other
in ways impossible before. For example, employees can blog to the consuming public or
investors. Shareholders can communicate to management more easily.
An integrated approach to communications helps connect and coordinate
communications across multiple stakeholders. In some ways, new avenues to
communication opened up by digital media challenge existing approaches to interacting
with audiences. For example, corporate communication departments typically want to
control all communications with news reporters. However, when employees can blog to
the public or e-mail reporters, central control is no longer possible. An integrated approach
represents that each stakeholder deserves a voice and connectivity across stakeholders can
provide opportunities for building communities and strengthening brands.
IMC, having long supported cross-functional planning, provides a perspective that
allows organizations to manage and participate in communications with all relevant
stakeholders. Here, digital media act to facilitate such cross-functional and cross-
stakeholder communications by providing platforms and tools blogs, wikis, social
networks that foster participation. An integrated approach to communicating with
multiple stakeholders is far more preferable than the entirely outbound, centrally
controlled ways of mass media.

Scholarly research for a digital media world

To accommodate a digital world, scholarly research must adopt new approaches to theory
and method. Over the last several years there has been some research on consumer
behavior in the digital media context. Unfortunately, most of the research about digital
media deals with small behavioral questions regarding online behavior (e.g. Ratchford,
Talukdar, and Lee 2007). Because of the rapid changes in the Internet, many published
 96 F. Mulhern

articles on digital media are outdated before they are printed. For example, Danaher
(2007) provides an excellent study of how page views relate to reach and frequency.
The problem is that web software now allows content to change within a given page, more
or less obviating a page view as a relevant metric. The main areas of scholarly work that
need to change to accommodate digital media are: (1) consumer media use;
(2) computational models for advertising allocation; (3) network effects of brand
communications; and, most importantly, (4) a theory for marketing with digital media.
We consider each of these in turn.
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Consumer media use

With traditional media, until recently, media consumption followed fairly straightforward
patterns of behavior, and media research concerned itself with the size and composition of
audiences. Today, the proliferation of media devices and user controls has made media
consumption far more complicated and nuanced. Research is needed to ascertain the ways
consumers participate in media to construct their mediated experiences. Of particular
interest is the blending of personal and mass media. While mass and direct media,
including print and broadcast, have long been commercialized, personal media such as
telephone and personal written communications have not. The digitization of personal
media as e-mail, wireless phones and instant messaging provides opportunities for
advertisers to attach messages to personal communications. This practice will increase
substantially in the years ahead as advertisers subsidize wireless communication services
now largely financed by customer fees.
The proper way to understand media consumption is from the consumers perspective.
Schultz, Pilotta, and Block (2005) show how media research is much more valuable if it
adopts a consumer perspective and tracks media use across all platforms. Importantly,
research should not approach consumer media use from the narrow view of cognitive
psychology that has dominated consumer research for decades. Theoretical approaches are
needed to consumer media use that explain how people assemble personal mythologies for
themselves and their social groups. Jenkins (2006) describes how consumers participate in
communities to vastly extend content and brands beyond what media companies produce.
Sports fantasy teams, Stars Wars conventions and Harry Potter communities exemplify the
kinds of phenomena consumers create for themselves and each other, all built on what
were originally media experiences.
Such undertakings fall outside existing theories of media production and consumption.
Accordingly, theoretical developments should include both communication content as well
as interpersonal connectivity made possible through digital media and social networks.
These developments bring into question exactly what the boundaries of media are. As digital
content and advertising expand into digital services, media become far broader than the set of
communication channels heretofore controlled by media organizations.
Some existing research addresses consumer construction of media experiences.
Beaudoin (2002) and Beaudoin and Thorson (2003) develop such a theory for newspaper
consumption. That approach evaluates the determinants of newspaper readership and
the relevance of newspapers in the consumers life. Glasser (2000) describes news
consumption as play something undertaken for its own reward. Conceptual approaches
to media consumption such as these can provide a starting point for theories of media
consumption.
The proliferation of media options now available vies for consumers attention.
Lanham (2006) describes how the economic model for allocating scarce resources across
 Journal of Marketing Communications 97

a set of alternatives gets reversed in todays media world because of the abundance of low
cost media content. The more pressing economic model is the consumers allocation of
scarce attention across media alternatives. Research is needed to connect the
characteristics of media content, including social aspects, to the allocation of consumer
attention. An understanding of this can address the emerging paradox between the
multitasking practice of people allocating continuous partial attention to multiple media
options versus the deeply immersive experiences of video games and online social
networks. Immersive environments in particular represent extensions of consumers into
digital worlds where information, entertainment, social connectivity, digital services and
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advertising converge.

Computational advertising
The literature in marketing and advertising has had a fairly well-developed stream of
work on advertising allocation models (e.g. Little 1970, 1979; Lodish 1975). This
literature includes probabilistic models of advertising effectiveness as well as
qualitative models for allocating budgets. Separately, an extraordinarily important
literature on advertising allocation systems is now developing. It differs from the
existing literature in two striking ways: (1) the models are based on data mining and
artificial intelligence, not probabilistic statistics: and (2) the models are being
developed largely by computer scientists and software engineers, not marketing or
advertising academics. For example, research on advertising placement models for
digital media is much more evident in electrical engineering journals (Yang et al.
2006).
Yahoo! (2008) has coined the term computational advertising to refer to the software
systems that serve ads. They define computational advertising as:
a new scientific sub-discipline, at the intersection of information retrieval, machine learning,
optimization, and microeconomics. Its central challenge is to find the best ad to present to a
user engaged in a given context, such as querying a search engine, reading a web page,
watching a movie, and IM-ing.
Anagnostopoulos et al. (2007) provide an algorithm that serves ads based on a tracking
of consumer online behavior. This approach is exemplary of the kinds of allocation
systems that will dominate advertising placement in digital media. Advertising allocation
algorithms are at the heart of what media planning is becoming and they represent the only
way that digital media can scale. Scholars in marketing and advertising need to join the
developers of these algorithms in computer science and software engineering. While an
understanding of how these models work should be part and parcel of advertising
scholarship, the models are scarcely mentioned in the traditional academic journals and
textbooks.
Research on advertising algorithms needs to be paired closely with the understanding
of consumer media use described above. Advertising algorithms, like much of the software
behind the web, attempt to mimic how consumers think. For example, algorithms allocate
ads based on website content on the presumption that the content of web pages visited
reflects the intentions of the user. This practice of mimicking the intentions of the
consumer represents a vastly superior approach to modeling consumer behavior than the
isolated, controlled experiment approach that prevails in consumer research. The data
streams produced by digital media provide an enormous recourse for understanding
consumers. Harnessing these data for research will lead to enormous gains in our
understanding of consumer behavior.
 98 F. Mulhern

Network effects
Network effects the connections among people are not well understood in marketing.
With mass media, network effects could be ignored because the advertising and media
industries could do no better than identify broadly aggregated clusters of consumers.
However, with digital media, network effects are paramount and measurable. Network
effects are well represented in economic models. The network effects represent the
linkages of buying and selling through multiple parties. For example, a consumer purchase
of an automobile yields substantial monies that go into paying for steel, upholstery and
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component parts. The makers of those parts use their revenues to pay for their raw
materials, etc. This is known as the multiplier effect in economics (Auerbach and Kotlikoff
1998). Media and marketing research conceptualize multiplier effects including content
sharing, viral marketing and word-of-mouth. While those ideas have been around in the
literature for quite some time, the formal models of media planning and the measures of
the effects of media communications only minimally include them. The poor
representation of multiplier effects for marketing communications stems from a lack of
data a problem that is quickly disappearing in a networked world where
communications among consumers can be tracked.

Marketing with digital media toward a theory

The theoretical foundations of most research for marketing communications were
developed for mass communications, and are of limited value in providing a proper
framework for research on digital media and communications strategy. There is a dire
need for a theoretical framework for the emerging world of digital media and digital
services that is emerging.
While trying to establish a theoretical foundation is beyond the scope of this paper, we
can set forth some characteristics such that a foundation should have:
. Demand-based marketing communications have been about the creation and
delivery of messages to consumers; digital media empower consumers to pull and
aggregate content to satisfy their needs.
. Social digital media blend information and interpersonal connectivity. A useful
theory for marketing with digital media must incorporate social networks and other
manifestations on interpersonal relationships.
. Interactivity overly simplistic mass communications models depict senders and
receivers of messages. In an interactive, social media landscape, interpersonal
connections are more important than information. Theories must incorporate
network effects that represent all possible interactions among consumers and
between consumers and organizations.
. Metrics the theoretical foundation should support a breadth of metrics that
represent the variety of digital media experiences in peoples lives, as well as the
value of communication expenditures to organizations.
When television advertising was new, agencies treated it as a separate entity from print
and radio. Similarly, until recently, media companies and agencies have regarded digital
media as a separate entity, particularly because it required skill sets different from those of
print and broadcast. The distinction between online and offline media disappears as digital
swallows all other media. We are also witnessing the migration of media from places such
as homes, office and trains to people themselves. Personal media devices allow media to
travel with consumers. Digital media must be approached as the interaction with
 Journal of Marketing Communications 99

individual consumers and social clusters, not the management of media channels. As such,
digital media, rather than being a manageable set of channels should be viewed as an
emerging ecosystem an interactive web of patterns and connections that seemingly has a
life of its own, which can be monitored and participated in, but not entirely managed.
Advertising in such a system becomes a matter of finding the right customer in the vast
web of infinite communications (Kelly 1994, 201).
The weakening of the control of media content by the major media organizations
brings forth an era of a digital, networked world that blends commercial and
noncommercial content, digital services of many types and, perhaps most importantly for
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consumers, interpersonal connectivity. The onus is on scholars and practitioners in

marketing and advertising to develop the theories, concepts and methods to allow brands
to successfully participate in this world.

Conclusion
For marketers, media have long been construed as a set of communication channels
through which marketing messages are sent. Within that framework, media institutions are
intermediaries that provide access to desired audiences. The economic function of media
institutions is producing and packaging bundles of information and entertainment that
attract audiences for advertisers. In a digital era, the viewpoint of media as
communications channels cannot be sustained. One reason is that there are too many
communication channels now available for any media planner to effectively allocate
communications across them. More importantly, the media-as-channels framework fails to
incorporate several of the dimensions described in this paper. These include:
. The evolution of media beyond information and entertainment to include other
digital services and experiences.
. The ability of organizations of all types to communicate directly with consumers
and other stakeholders, without the need for traditional media organizations.
. The networking of communications among audience members and the ability of
people to exchange information directly with each other.
. The availability of continuous streams of data about consumer purchase and media
use behaviors.
. The expansion of mediated experiences beyond what media companies generate
and control.
. The replacement of outbound media channels with multi-dimensional communi-
cation networks.
. The blending of commercial and noncommercial content not just branded
entertainment but the inclusion of noncommercial information in ads.
As more aspects of everyday life converge toward digital, opportunities for organizations
to interact with consumers expand dramatically. What we have known as media broadens
to potentially include any digital experience using a mobile phone, playing a video
game, walking past electronic billboards, even programming ones microwave.
As commercial messages spread into all things digital, organizations can communicate
with people in vastly more ways than those typically thought of as media. It remains for
academics and practitioners to establish theories, concepts and methods that organize the
digital landscape into a hyper-media ecosystem that subsumes traditional brand
communications into a networked world of instantaneous and archived information.
 100 F. Mulhern

Notes on contributor
Frank Mulhern is Professor and Associate Dean for Research, Medill School, Northwestern
University, Illinois.

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