INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE DRUG OFFICE TANGLE

Advertising Versus Integrated Marketing: Which Makes More Sense?

The world of integrated marketing -- the process of reaching target
audiences with a variety of marketing techniques -- is definitely not an
ad-centric world, and therein lies the problem. Most ad agencies still want
it to be, and more and more clients are looking for solutions beyond
traditional media.

That's also the major reason the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy and the Partnership for a Drug Free America, the
organizations that are supposed to be working together to slow teenage drug
use, have ended up fighting each other at every turn.

'Comprehensive campaign'

The government sees its job as running a "comprehensive public health
communications campaign" -- not just an ad campaign. Alan Levitt, project
manager of the anti-drug effort, talked about how the program has a big
Internet component and taps into the entertainment community. He added that
Ogilvy & Mather, the controversial agency that handles media buying and ad
evaluation among other things, lined up sports celebrities like Tara
Lipinski and players from Women's World Cup Soccer. Alan told me that
advertising and marketing and public health experts all told the drug
control office that an integrated campaign was needed to change behavior,
but he said that even so 87% of the funds have been spent on traditional
media -- more than what most marketers allocate.

Differing opinions

On the other hand, Allen Rosenshine, chairman-CEO of BBDO Worldwide who
serves as vice chairman of the Partnership, testified at a hearing this
summer that while the anti-drug campaign originated with "an elegantly
simple vision, today it attempts to adhere to an unwieldy theoretical
construct of a fully-integrated social marketing campaign."

"The plan," he continued, "has called for achieving as many as 19 different
strategic communications objectives via an integrated communications plan
encompassing advertising, celebrity involvement, entertainment content,
on-line events, corporate involvement and sponsorship and so on, with
everything's impact evaluated by its impact on behavioral outcomes."

It all sounds good in theory, Mr. Rosenshine said, but he went on to add
that "significant amounts of money were written off by companies
promulgating the theories of fully integrated marketing in the 1980s, only
to conclude what we suggest to you today. The advent of new communications
technologies since then has only increased the appetite for theories that
have proved ineffective and wasteful."

Making a mistake

Mr. Rosenshine, I fear, is making a big mistake by minimizing the impact of
integration among clients -- some of which may be his own. At our Adwatch
conference this summer, Pepsi-Cola North America President Dawn Hudson told
how Mountain Dew and Dodge teamed for a joint promotion, but not at the
behest of their agency, BBDO. "We share the same agency. They could have
put us together," Ms. Hudson said. "What we're looking for is a marketing
solution, not just an advertising solution."

And contrary to the Partnership's complaint that the drug control office
isn't spending enough money on media, Julie Roehm, director of Dodge
communications at the Chrysler Group, put it bluntly. "If you're only about
30-second TV commercials, you're in big trouble. What other ways are there
to communicate your brand promise, to connect with consumers to create that
relationship and loyalty?" Ms. Roehm asked.

Partnership: Repeat the message

So, what we have here is that both sides agree the anti-drug campaign goes
beyond TV commercials and draws on many other marketing disciplines. While
the White House drug office feels the campaign is on the right track, the
Partnership contends what's needed is to return to the single focus of
repeating the same message over and over again and not dissipating media
spending with other less effective promotional thrusts. The Partnership
also feels the campaign has too many themes. Writing in the Washington
Post, Jim Burke, the former chairman of Johnson & Johnson and current
chairman of the Partnership, said that "with fewer messages being delivered
to the target audience -- and with multiple themes forced into the
advertising -- is it any wonder the campaign has had a negligible impact in
the last two years?"

But when the drug office did what the Partnership is espousing -- run one
campaign with the same theme over and over again -- it seemed to work, even
if the TV spots weren't created by Partnership agencies but by Ogilvy.

I'm referring to the series of ads the drug office ran earlier this year
linking drug use with helping terrorism. An annual survey sponsored by the
National Parents' Resource Institute for Drug Education found that 74% of
students surveyed said the terrorism ads made them less likely to use
drugs. Alan also points out that the Partnership's ads using J. Walter
Thompson Co.'s "It's not pestering, It's parenting" have been equally
effective.

Heeding the client

Here's my take on this whole mess. Whether the Partnership likes it or not,
the drug control office is the client, and more and more clients are
demanding some sort of integrated effort. On the other hand, the
Partnership has a point when its people say the anti-drug ads have been
watered down by too many themes and strategies, although with three
different target audiences -- kids, parents and other influences -- it
would seem to be hard to avoid.

One change that will certainly help the drug control office and the
Partnership is that the client -- the drug office -- for the first time has
direct access to the creative people at the Partnership agencies.

"We're not about to produce 'reefer madness' ads," Alan said. Changing
behavior is "much more subtle, and that's why the creative people need to
understand the nuances and have to know so much more about the subject."

You can see the results of the new interaction starting Sept. 17, when the
drug control office and the Partnership launch the biggest campaign against
teenage use of marijuana in our nation's history.