Are traditional and digital communications antagonists?

I find it rather amusing when I hear this pointless discussion around traditional versus digital communications. For me this is just vanity as there is no point of having a battle between these two worlds, like they were rivals. Also, this digital and non-digital waste of time (and brain) discussion becomes quite irrelevant when we realise that people that are consuming media don’t really care whether they are getting a ‘traditional’ or ‘digital’ message. Therefore, what is more important is the actual idea and how well it engages a particular audience, whether is a digital, non-digital or integrated solution. Most importantly, we need to produce a creative piece of work that brings the best ROI for our clients.

In fact, the real debate should be around the challenge of making the best usage of integrated strategy. With so many tools and channels available, it is really difficult to come up with the best solution to reach this disperse and distracted target audience. It even seems that all possible methods and approaches have been already used, but here are a few examples to illustrate my points that it is still possible to engage with this fragmented audience if you have a well thought out and executed integrated strategy.

For me, a classical example of a great integrated strategy is the Barack Obama campaign. He managed to tie in his online presence, especially the well implemented usage of social media, with his traditional advertising and promo materials. Obviously, I don’t even need to comment on the results of this campaign…

Moving on to the brand’s world, there are two integrated campaigns that in my opinion are just brilliant. The first one is the Volkswagen ‘Fun Theory’, created to promote the company’s environmentally friendly cars. The main action started on the streets of Germany and was supported by a blog. The action was so successful that it generated a great buzz around it all over the world, with many people contributing with ideas to the campaign and heavily engaging with the brand.

The second example is the ‘Bud United’ campaign for Budweiser (http://budunited.ddbchicago.net/). During the 2010 World Cup, the brand was the official beer sponsorship of the games and needed to create better brand awareness and engagement. They created a massive integrated campaign that included the use of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Mobile, TV, print, outdoor and in-stadium signage. By empowering the consumers, they managed to create enormous brand awareness around the world and increase the sales during the competition.

From these examples, we can see that there is no better or worse approach, as the most important factor is how well we can integrate the traditional and digital worlds, bringing them together in a more effective and efficient way in order to best serve our clients and their needs.