"Safe is Unsafe" - A New Approach to Integrated Marketing

The term "integrated marketing communications" gets tossed around pretty frequently nowadays. In principle, it sounds brilliant: create a campaign for your client that delivers a consistent message over a diverse assortment of media. What company wouldn't want their print, radio, tv, and internet messages to be developed all together? But how genuinely practical is the IMC method? In order for a small ad firm to really commit to integrated marketing, they'd either need their staff to be experts on everything or hire more staff. Since these companies don't usually have the resources to do either one of these things, they can't really succeed at IMC.

The people at Hub Strategy in San Francisco have found a creative and, so far, extremely successful way around this. By establishing solid connections with an army of freelancers, Hub is able to quickly meet a client's needs in any number of specialized media. With over 100 on-call workers to choose from, Hub makes the concept of integrated marketing not only work, but also work fast and efficient. Also, since CEO DJ O'Neil is committed to the philosophy that "Safe is Unsafe", companies are guaranteed that their work is going to get noticed.

Even though the company is relatively small, it's gained some impressive clientele and may become a model for ad shops in the future. To see some of their work, check out their webpage. Oh, and if you do visit their site, be warned: you're going to watch a video about sweaters.