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This paper concerns the aegis and rapid growth of the concept of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), firstly in terms of considering theoretical underpinnings and, secondly, by means of a five-country empirical (but still exploratory) study of the topic within advertising agencies from the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and India.

We start by reviewing the burgeoning literature on the topic, considering academic and practitioner opinion on a worldwide scale. This is done in order to locate IMC conceptually and consider how valuable the concept is to advertising agencies or the clients they seek to serve in today's increasingly competitive markets. We then provide the findings from a five-country exploratory study. The findings, though based on convenience sampling, indicate that IMC is not a short-lived managerial fad, nor is it just a reworking of existent theory or practice. Instead …