Learn · every claim sourced
Plain-language foundations, primers and guides on integrated marketing communications, with a source for every claim. New here? Begin with the short reads below.
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A marketing mix model estimates what each activity added to sales from aggregate data over time, and what a different budget would do. This piece sets out how one is built and validated, where the open-source tools stand in 2026, and when a model is worth commissioning.
How to turn an integrated plan into a schedule: continuous, flighted and pulsed patterns, what the effective-frequency and recency research says about timing, one calendar for always-on activity, bursts, launches, PR moments and events, and the lead times each discipline needs.
How to choose and manage agencies: whether to pitch at all, what a pitch costs, the industry's pitch principles (the Good Pitch, the Pitch Positive Pledge, the ANA and 4As), remuneration models and what the ANA found about them, scopes of work, lead-agency, roster and in-house choices, and two-way performance reviews.
Why the brief decides the quality of the work, what the BetterBriefs research and the industry's best-practice guides found, what a client brief contains and how it differs from the creative brief, how to run the briefing, the brief back and the debrief, and the failures to avoid.