I am a marketing communications consultant and journalist in the printing and publishing industry and just finished reading What Sticks. I enjoyed the book and am a big fan of process and measurement. But I felt that the whole concept of marketing was approached too narrowly, very ad agency centric. It missed a big opportunity to take surround sound marketing even further.

One of the huge emerging trends we are seeing as print looks to find its footing in a world of lots of new alternative communications compettion is the linkage of campaigns across ALL media, including direct mail (e or snail), and that wasn't addressed at all.

The point should be to raise awareness and then start a dialog with some subset of the potential universe, ultimately with a direct mail piece tied to a personalized Web URL that takes the dialog to the next level in a personalized way and also collects more data about the recipient. The whole process can be automated and is really slick.

I would be interested in comments from the authors on this rounding out surround sound marketing in this way. I read with interest this week's J&J announcement and especially for a company like that, it would seem to be an approach that could increase the ROMO even more.