Brian Halligan wrote back in January that his number one marketing wish for 2010 was to see the term “marketing campaign” disappear:

My blood curdles every time I hear someone talk about doing a “social media campaign” or “blog campaign.”  Blogs and social media behave like compound interest, so if you treat them like “campaigns,” you lose all the benefits.  Marketers should be permanently creating, optimizing, promoting, converting, and analyzing.

A few segments aside, I think this dream is slowly becoming a reality. I think that the old mindset of campaign-based marketing is dying a slow, painful death. Consumers seem to be associating campaign messages with gimmicks, rendering the old Superbowl Ad model absolutely useless.

Instead, the companies that seem to be  having the most success are the ones who create a message, stick to it, and create a bunch of creative and compelling content around the message and across a variety of media. The “Get a Mac” meme, for example, shows how Windows is virus-prone and crashy, and how Macs are much better alternatives. (Similarly, Windows has done a reasonably good job with the Windows-is-simple motif.) Apple has put a lot of their eggs into this basket, but it seems to be a good basket for them. The point is that they didn’t just run one quirky ad and then move on to the next one. They’ve stayed with the same message for a couple of years now.

Sure, you could say that this is just an extended campaign. But if you check out Apple’s website, you’ll see the exact same substance that you’d find in the Get a Mac ads. Apple hasn’t just created another ad campaign. They’ve tied their entire value proposition — and to some extent their brand identity — into a defined set of bullet points, each of which they have spun into a creative advertisement.

It isn’t campaigning. It’s branding. And it seems to work.

So how are you changing the way your company thinks about marketing? Are campaigns still important to the way you do business? What would change if you decided to do as Apple has done, and turn advertising into a simple extention of your brand identity? How would you do it? Who would you hire to do it?