Brand Clariti, a new agency aiming to integrate traditional and interactive marketing, opened last week in Chicago.
Founder Dan O’Brien has been in the industry for 22 years, most recently as director of global advertising for Accenture. He started Brand Clariti to combat the increasing disparities he saw between sales and marketing teams, and their uses of traditional and new media.
“My last job has influenced [this launch] a lot, but it’s an awful lot about what’s happening in the industry,” O’Brien said. “At Accenture, we had tremendous trouble integrating the programs we had, and doing it in an intelligent way. We had all these silos that were protected. These disparate ownerships created a disaggregated and dismembered brand in the marketplace. We had to go out of our way to get together.”
Brand Clariti helps clients devise marketing programs that combine Web sites, SEO, SEM and other interactive elements with more traditional marketing approaches. This centralized approach includes advertising, global branding and sales.
O’Brien cited customers’ emerging use of multiple media as a key reason to integrate marketing strategies. He noted that developing a campaign using only one or two channels would not speak to multichannel consumers. “The benefit of putting it all together maximizes the power of your brand” O’Brien said.
Brand Clariti will primarily target midsize to large companies as clients. Larger companies, O’Brien explained, have more developed programs across different media, and are at a size where integration becomes a huge issue.
The agency currently has some projects underway but is working on acquiring long-term, full-time clients.
“We’re simply taking a variety of marketing tools, and looking at ways they can intelligently integrate with each other,” O’Brien summed up. “The reason it doesn’t happen now is because the online group has created an online environment in isolation from the direct marketing people. But when the two get together and figure out clever things they can do together, then miraculous things happen.”
