The silos are starting to creak, if not crumble. We have been hearing this for how many years now? Are we really ready to move beyond the technical, channel, platform divisions that the digital revolution of the last two decades has given us? In so many op-eds, at so many of our own conferences, we hear marketers and agency executives chant the same mantras. “We need to break down the silos.” “Your consumers don’t care or think about ‘channels.’” And a current trending quip that gives you two tired tropes for the price of one, “Omnichannel is the new Holy Grail.”

If only I had a buck for all the “Holy Grails” on which I have reported in the last 20 years on this beat.

But better integration of marketing channels into a more holistic view of campaigns, branding, persistent messaging is a “grail” perhaps more worthy of the name. It represents an ongoing quest with no likely end. Integration will become more complicated as new technologies and screens emerge and as consumer media use fragments across them. The user is no longer tethered to a tightly constrained set of media, let alone channel experiences. Some recent accounts of the consumer path suggest that even an impulse purchase may now involve consulting three or four different screens before hitting a buy button just a few hours after the inspiration hits. Even the retail environment is now fragmented into countless personal experiences crafted by a user armed with a smartphone. Marketing into this mess with static “models” for allocating and attributing each channel seems, at best, quaint. And, at worst, dangerous. The reality is most brand and agency organizations map against a media and consumption environment of the 20th Century.

Helping marketers deal with the realities of 21st Century user and media fragmentation, the melting of channels, and the need for genuinely integrated, 360-degree planning is what this new MediaPost series of columns, newsletters and events is about. After years of evolving platforms like online video, social, display automation and targeting, mobile and search, the imperative for marketers is to bring these pieces more effectively together and tie all of them to CRM, retail, out-of-home and TV channels that are themselves becoming digitized and automated.

This cross-channel "Insider" series and companion summits coming next year will serve as a large umbrella to engage this second stage of the digital marketing revolution – pulling it together. Operationally, how are marketers and agencies lurching towards integrated planning and execution? Organizationally, how are discrete departments and skill sets finally blending so that media, creative, CRM, data, search, mobile and retail groups really inform planning and integration at all stages? Is point-of-sale data finally tying back to online ad targeting? Are loyalty programs helping to personalize email? How will paid, earned and owned media work together across screens? How will customers be tracked and targeted through fragmented and increasingly personal paths to purchase? How does brand storytelling and messaging evolve when media and attention shatter into increasingly smaller fragments? What, if any, attribution models can accurately measure the synergies of cross-channel planning when it works well? How do the various pieces come together to make a whole that is more the sum of its parts?

Those are a lot of questions. But the common thread here is integration and a better understanding of the interdependence of channels.

Solution providers already sense the shift and claim to address this need for holistic planning with the inevitable wave of products and promises. Cloud marketing solutions promise centralized, device agnostic access to data and reports. Data management platforms claim they will crunch the customer numbers from all sources and apply them both to online campaigns and eventually all digitized marketing. Shopper marketing and retail tech companies say we can finally “close the loop” on advertising and sales and really see how those TV, digital and OOH dollars impact point-of-sale. Attribution platforms are throwing algorithms at your campaigns to guide allocation decisions across channels. And speaking of algorithms. Just about every ad platform in creation is pitching their special sauce for tracking your customers through a cookie-less new world of devices. Ready to hear a lot more about “probabilistic modeling” and “match rates?”

We will engage all of these topics and more in the Cross-Channel Marketing Insider and related summits. The biggest task at hand for marketers now is not mastering each new technology so much as crafting plans and visions that are not as fragmented as the media landscape itself.

"Holy Grail" image provided courtesy of Shutterstock.