There’s a new buzz word on the virtual streets. Creative marketing. Sounds like one of those “could mean anything” phrases so beloved of advertisers, doesn’t it? Well, in a sense, it is – but then in this case, that’s precisely the point. It does mean anything: any application, any avenue, any method. For once, the old “catch em all and you can’t get caught bending” tactic, which has been applied by the marketing industry since its inception around the time Cain was born, is actually being put to a reasonable and correct use.

How so? By keeping options open for profitable, rather than backside-covering, purposes. The point of creative marketing is this – in the modern world, everyone has to fight for every second of public attention they get. So why streamline one’s marketing campaign down a particular alley – print, online, radio, whatever – and risk losing all those other possible “hits” in consumer consciousness? Pioneered by a company that describes itself as a “creative marketing Kent outfit”, the technique is starting to make waves all over the Internet, as businesses realise there are more ways than just one to skin the cat of online success.

A creative marketing strategy starts from basic principles – something the ad industry hasn’t been doing for years. That’s probably why it’s so fresh. Rather than starting out with some kind of neo-Surrealist concept, to which a whole company ethos has to be fitted, a creative marketer will identify the solid basic points of a company (what it sells, why it sells it, how it wants to sell it and who it wants to sell it to) in order to determine all the ways in which that company can make a decisive impact on the Internet. That creative marketing Kent outfit, for example, sells whole advertising palettes as a package, rather than individual campaigns – so a company might be encouraged to do some affiliate marketing as well as the more usual SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (Pay Per Click).

Creative marketing goes back to the first principles of advertising, without making them unwieldy. In the past, marketing strategies couldn’t really afford to be all encompassing, for fear that the tactic would alienate potential customers. Nutshelled, that meant creating a clique because cliques all like to wear the same clothes, drink the same drinks, listen to the same music and so on. These days, though, cliques like to be seen to be involved in hundreds of different forms of media. That creative marketing Kent company has realised that media itself is now the trend – before, media served trends, giving advertisers a place in which to shape them; now the trend is the media, which means that successful marketing can only be done through attacking all areas of social media at once.

And so, for once, marketing speak has actually coined (well, resurrected) a term that makes some kind of useful sense. Creative marketing is about more than just jargon. It’s about launching a blanket offensive on one’s customers, rather than isolating them in a spot that, this time next week, could be way off the cultural radar.