We’ve turned “integrated marketing” into matching luggage.
Same campaign. Same image. Same headline. Same palette. Rolled out across every channel until someone can point at the Instagram post, the OOH, the paid social ad and the email and say: “Look. It’s integrated.”
Except… is it?
I’ve sat in plenty of brand meetings where the answer to a lack of integration is another set of guidelines. More templates. More rules about where the logo goes and how much whitespace to leave.
Consistency matters. But consistency isn’t integration.
Integration starts earlier, with strategy. With a shared understanding of who we’re trying to influence, what we want them to think or feel, and the distinctive point of view our brand brings to that conversation.
That insight shouldn’t change every time someone writes a new creative brief. Neither should the point of view. What should change is how we express it.
A TikTok shouldn’t feel like a TV ad cut into vertical format. An email shouldn’t read like an OOH poster. A search ad shouldn’t sound like a brand manifesto. The job is to take one strategic idea and make it feel native to the context.
I learned this at HSBC, rolling out a new brand look and feel built on the belief ‘Together We Thrive’. The manifesto voice worked on 48-sheet OOH. It didn’t work in social or email – but the fix wasn’t a tone edit, it was a laddering test: for every piece of product comms, ask how it connects back to that brand promise, and let the answer tell you how much of it that piece needs to carry. Some comms could say it outright. Others just needed to deliver on it. Match the visual and you get consistency without the connection. Do the laddering and the connection survives the change in voice. .
It’s getting harder, too, because teams are becoming more siloed, not less. Creative, media, performance, social and CRM each have their own objectives, and somewhere in the middle “collaboration” starts to sound like extra work.
So we settle for one of two versions of integration: everyone uses the same asset, or everyone spends three weeks in meetings agreeing on one. Neither is integration.
Dr Grace Kite’s “lots of littles” thinking is useful here. The econometrician and founder of Magic Numbers argues that modern brand building happens through the accumulation of small exposures across a fragmented media landscape. I’ve heard her speak about it and it’s stuck with me: the compounding effect of those moments matters more than any single execution.
Which creates a challenge. If your brand lives in thousands of little moments, you can’t afford for each one to be a mini reinvention.
People don’t experience marketing as a series of neatly separated campaigns. Those exposures build and reinforce the memory structures attached to your brand – the associations you want retrieved when someone thinks about a category or a need. Reinforce them consistently enough and they compound.
But integration doesn’t mean every channel has the same job.
A brand activation might build salience, emotion and preference. A product page needs to remove friction. A retargeting ad closer to conversion needs proof: price, benefits, reviews, a reason to buy now.
Those executions can look and sound different because they’re doing different things. What connects them is the strategy underneath – the same insight, the same point of view, the same memory structures being reinforced. Forcing every channel to communicate identically usually makes the work less effective, not more.
The answer is a brand system, not a campaign template.
The Lloyds rebrand taught me that one. Without pushback, we were rolling out performance creative that was quietly working against us – a mobile phone device shot anchoring every asset, in paid placements where space was the scarcest thing we had. The fix wasn’t an exemption from the Brand. It was a conversation with the Brand team that produced a system: one that still positioned us as a leading fintech, but gave us the room to hold a message in a small space with space to flex and optimise.
That’s what a system does. It gives teams a shared insight, a recognisable point of view, distinctive assets and behaviours – then gives them permission to interpret those differently depending on audience, placement and platform.
That’s the bit we seem to have lost.
Integration isn’t everyone using the same image, or another 80-page document telling people where the logo goes. It’s making different things work together.
Less matching luggage, more language. You recognise the voice even when the sentence changes.
Maybe that’s the real lost art: not making everything look the same, but making everything contribute to the same memory.
In an age of “lots of littles”, integration isn’t about reducing the number of executions – it’s about making sure all those little things add up to something bigger.
Jay Safdar is a growth marketing leader with experience spanning global financial giants, British icons and tech innovators – including AllSaints, Amex, Amazon, Barclays, EE, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Hyperoptic, John Lewis, Lloyds and WEX Inc. Specialising in demand generation, performance marketing and marketing effectiveness, Jay has a proven track record of driving commercial impact through data-led strategy and insight-driven creative.
