I can’t stress enough how important understanding context is when it comes to communications. In fact, I don’t think there is a more helpful word in the marketing dictionary of wank. Agency silos, land grabbing and out of date marketing department structures have a huge part to play in this, so without going into too much of an obvious rant here, there are two things that don’t allow us to see context.

Sorry, kind of a rant already, but the first one is opposites – the age old human behaviour (and marketing sensationalism) that requires you to fall on one side of the fence or the other. You can’t possibly believe in the power of influencers and mass media. And we all know that one media has to be dying in order for another to flourish.

The second is our inability to be human focused. Let’s be honest we all think we are, but stuff gets in the way of actually observing things through the eyes of actual normal people that buy our products. Things like numbers, brand tracking studies, media plans, focus groups and important meetings all contribute, as well as it feeling just all too simple.

However I came across this great post over at Plannerliness highlighting Ray-Ban as a classic example of this. Everything is happening in isolation without much consideration to other stuff that is going on around it. The result is below.

A lovely looking, well presented brand site

That is probably found via a line of text on Google surrounded by a lot that is probably unhelpful

It really shouldn’t be that hard to get your social media come, digital PR, come PR agency to strategically ensure that all search results on that first page are from positive and trusted sources. It wouldn’t be hard for a creative copy writer to work with the search agency to develop some good Keyword ads that are contextual, even if people don’t click on them.

It wouldn’t be that hard for an above the line agency to come up with a TV campaign that is more participatory and spills out in to Youtube, Flickr, Facebook etc. You get the drift, but it highlights how media, despite being fragmented, is more dependent on each other than ever before. I think Faris phrased it well somewhere as media now being additive not repetitive.