Do you remember the story line from the movie “The Breakfast Club?” It was based on a familiar theme: social groups are forced into close proximity and their differences seem insurmountable. In "The Breakfast Club," it was the Jocks, the Freaks and the Popular Kids. They were forced to interact because they shared a (long) Saturday detention. After hours of forced closeness, they realize that they aren’t so different after all, and, with the help of a catchy soundtrack, they join forces against the abusive principal.

We watch this story unfold over and over again and might conclude that it is both possible and highly desirable for everyone to get along. After all, we have to interact, we are more similar than different and together we can do things that we cannot do alone. So why does it never stick?

The same thing happens in marketing. For years we have heard, and taught, that the process of attracting new customers is not two things - attracting them and converting them - but one extended effort. It makes perfect sense. It has been proven over and over through testing that a coordinated advertising and site experience outperforms a disjointed one. Yet after an unusual effort to get advertising and site folks working to-gether, the sides soon revert to their natural behavior and group conflict.

Advertisers focus on one thing: designing and placing creative that encourages clicks. The site folks work on different things: maintenance and improvement of the site. Only occasionally, in the face of major changes or campaigns, do the two efforts coordinate.
The problem is that when we talk about integrated ad/site acquisition campaigns, it is usually one side or the other that assumes that they will take over the other’s responsi-bilities. The advertising people insist on controlling the site content, usually by creating a mini-site or custom landing page, or the site people take over advertising. Unfortunately, this rarely works and even more rarely works for long.

Maybe, for the time being, we should stop trying to change the behavior of the groups and try instead to create a new way where both sides can do what they do best.

Matt Schow from Men’s Wearhouse suggested a term that I think communicates a new approach elegantly. He suggested that instead of thinking of it as one campaign that spans from ad to site, we think of it as two campaigns that coordinate. Matt described a process where for every ad campaign, a “companion campaign” is created on the site.
His suggested that as the campaign calendar is created for the advertisers, the site con-tent people are put in the loop and they craft a corresponding campaign on the key pages that reflect not just the promotion, but the copy, products or services featured and the creative “tone” of the ad campaign. Of course many of us do this for the major stuff like seasonal product changes and discount promotions, but a flood of new leads, sub-scriptions or sales can be captured by taking the same approach to all campaigns.

It doesn’t need to require a ton of extra work. Simply by targeting content through mBoxes on the homepage, key landing pages and high-volume internal site pages to campaign identifiers we can present corresponding and supporting content.

Of course, we would suggest that you test 2-3 or more different variations on the “com-panion campaign” to make certain that your assumptions are correct about what will amplify each campaign.

Give it a try. It does not require site redesign or huge technology investments, and often the creative required either already exists, or just involves a quick repurposing of the creative generated for the ad campaign.

And who knows, maybe this time the value of working together will be so great that the new spirit of cooperation might stick.