individually planned ‘units’ of conversation; some PR, some direct mail, some point of sale, some advertising.
These ‘units’ may have had individual strategies, but rarely did these strategies ‘touch’ each other. A PR strategy was written separately from a direct mail strategy,
usually by people in different client company departments or in separate external agencies. Different channels were used to do different jobs and, as long as all the jobs got done, then that was fine.
Advertising became the dominant form of brand communication as it was clear that
it worked hard. Therefore, choosing the advertising channel became something of a default choice. The sheer power of broadcast media, especially television, to reach mass audiences reinforced this habit.
Therefore a good advertising strategy was the centre-piece of the thinking. Its purpose was to enable the creative content of the advertising (and not the placement of the advertising in media).