This week’s infographic comes courtesy of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) which has released research highlighting the main barriers companies face in the development of effective integrated marketing communications (IMC).

Despite 80% of advertisers naming IMC a top priority, sceptics still remain, and advertisers still face significant challenges in realising their dreams of integration.

The WFA research highlights three key areas where these challenges to effective IMC reside: process, performance and people, with the latter two showing the biggest gaps in developing effective IMC. See the infographic for the top six areas (‘gaps’) for improvement.

The research, which polled WFA members representing eight categories and marketing budgets of around US$32 billion, is based on outputs from the IMC Scorecard, a tool developed by the WFA in conjunction with Naked Communications that is designed to enable advertisers to benchmark their ability IMC readiness against their peers.

Interestingly, it’s not the largest companies (ad spend greater than $2 billion) that are most IMC-ready. They come in second, behind companies with an annual ad spend of $500 million to $2 billion, with smaller companies most likely to struggle.

Geoff Seeley, global communications planning director at Unilever and chair of the WFA’s IMC Forum, which also includes representatives from other WFA member companies, says there are still IMC sceptics within many large companies. “Many members of the WFA’s IMC Forum therefore have to play the role of advocates. To be able to benchmark your own company against a pool of other large multinationals can be invaluable to help inform smarter conversations internally and help realise real progress.”

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) infographic from World Federation of Advertisers (WFA)