Learn · every claim sourced
Understand integrated marketing, step by step
Plain-language foundations, primers and guides on integrated marketing communications, with a source for every claim. New here? Begin with the short reads below.
The library
Which mix for which objective: sixteen objectives and the disciplines that serve them
A practical chooser for the sixteen objectives marketers plan for: which disciplines usually lead, which support and what to measure, with the balance between brand and activation, the caveats that change the answer, and links to every primer and objective hub.
Affiliate 101: paying partners for the results they bring
Affiliate marketing pays publishers, from review sites to cashback apps and creators, a commission when the people they send buy or sign up. It looks risk-free because you pay only for results, but the rules of tracking, credit and disclosure decide whether those results are real.
Sales promotion 101: discounts, coupons, sampling, prize draws and trade deals
How sales promotions give people a reason to buy now, from price cuts and coupons to sampling, prize draws and deals with retailers; what the evidence says about what they do and do not achieve; and the rules that govern them in the UK, the US, the EU and France, and the Gulf.
Events 101: bringing people to the brand, in person and online
Events and experiential marketing put a brand and its audience in the same place: trade shows, conferences, brand experiences and their hybrid and virtual forms. They are costly per person but rich in conversation and first-party data, and they are judged by objectives set in advance, a published sustainability standard and growing accessibility duties.
Public relations 101: earning trust you cannot buy
Public relations earns attention through journalists, experts and an organisation's own voice instead of buying space. It covers media relations, crisis and corporate communications, reputation and public affairs, is bound by professional ethics codes, and is now measured by outcomes under the Barcelona Principles, not by the advertising value of clippings.
Influencer marketing 101: borrowing trust, and saying so
Influencer and creator marketing pays or equips people with their own audiences to talk about a brand. How the work runs from brief to contract to post, what it costs, the disclosure rules from the FTC to the UAE and Saudi licences, and how to measure it and spot fraud.
Search 101: being found at the moment people ask
Search marketing has two halves that answer the same question: SEO earns a place in the free results, paid search buys one in an auction where quality lowers the price. In 2026 AI answers sit above both, so the job is to be the source those answers trust and to measure what clicks are left.
Out-of-home 101: billboards, transit, street furniture and digital screens
How advertising in public places works, from paper posters to screens bought programmatically, how its audiences are estimated by Geopath and Route, what the market spends, and the planning and environmental rules that shape where a sign can stand.
Measuring effectiveness: models, attribution, experiments and triangulation
What brand and activation effects are, and how marketing mix modelling, attribution, experiments, brand lift and the Barcelona Principles each measure part of them. No single method is enough; the answer is to use them together, each for the question it can answer.
Objectives and KPIs: from business goals to what communication must change
Integrated communication needs three linked layers of objectives (business, marketing, communication) and a short chain of KPIs for each. How the classic models help, where they mislead, and how AMEC's framework carries the same logic into PR and earned media.
Touchpoints and the customer journey: from the funnel to the messy middle
Every contact with a brand is a message. How the consumer decision journey replaced the funnel, what Google's messy middle adds, how business buying groups decide, and how to map touchpoints to objectives.