“Unified Marketing” was a term that had been stuck somewhere in the “theorosphere” for quite sometime. It was a concept and a practice we had been testing at CCA but I had never expressed it publicly until October 15, 2008.

I was a guest speaker on a panel discussion for Boston’s Social Media Club. The event was held in one of the luxury suites at Gillette Stadium with a terrific view of the field below. The topic for the evening was, “Corporate Responsibility in the Digital Age”. My colleagues on the panel included Peter Prodromou, Executive Vice President of Racepoint Group and Jay Welz, Assistant Director, Online Marketing, Jimmy Fund / Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

I must say that speaking to a SoMe savvy audience like the Social Media Club is a very different experience than presenting to any other audiences because everyone is so busy tweeting and writing blog posts on their laptops while you are talking. I soon realized that if people were looking at me, it is likely that I was not doing very well. If, however, I touched on something that was interesting to them, they would immediately look down at their mobile devices or the computer balancing on their laps and begin pecking a message to the world.

The first few times people stopped looking at me while I was saying something and suddenly started typing, I felt inclined to stop speaking and the sound of clicking keyboards filled the room. Realizing that I did not understand the protocol of this crowd, the moderator stepped in to ask me a follow up question, which let me know that it is okay for me to continue even if I was speaking to the top of everyone’s head.

One question posed to the panel was pertaining to the marketing mix and how should someone integrate social media together with traditional marketing tactics. As part of my answer, I spoke a little about the long standing need for measurement and a marketer’s tendency to put different tactics or channels into silos. This is often because marketers do not always know how to integrate their marketing effectively.

That’s when the tangent happened… and I said, “If you think about the word ‘integration’, regardless of what you are trying to integrate – whether it be people of differing persuasion, animals of varying size and appetite or, in this case, marketing tactics – ‘integrated marketing’ is quite difficult to execute successfully and nearly impossible to measure.” I continued saying, “At CCA, we are a web-centric marketing and advertising firm and rather than employ the ‘integrated marketing’ approach of yesteryear, we prefer to call it, ‘unified marketing’.”

At that moment, everyone started tweeting again and I realized that while we were still building our first case study for these principles at CCA, I had just introduced an important new philosophy which is now at the very center of every engagement with our clients.