organizers and other promotional activities. Each of these communications disciplines was treated as a "silo"; with little thought to the synergies between them, with the result that many different stakeholders involved in presenting the company's external image throughout the breadth and length of a campaign. In that environment, both practitioners and theorists recognized the potential for confusing or inconsistent brand images to develop across media and across different communications disciplines. The fragmentation of audiences presented marketers with particular challenges. No longer were they able to communicate with mass markets via mass media; instead they needed to communicate with increasingly tightly defined market segments, using highly specialist media and communications disciplines. New media and the use of databases were enabling marketers to communicate with customers on a one-to-one basis. The old methods and practices associated with mass communications were failing to serve the realities of the new era. The imperative to present a clear, coherent and unified narrative in both internal and external communications was becoming increasingly apparent by the late 1980s. In 1989, two discrete events served to draw attention to the fact that industry attitudes to marketing communications were shifting. Firstly, the consulting firm, Shearson-Lehman Hutton published a report on the subject of consumer advertising, signaling that a number of market-place changes would force packaged goods marketers to adopt a more integrated approach to marketing communications. Their report also noted that high-end manufacturers (e.g. automobiles) and up-market services (e.g. cruise vacations) were more inclined to use integrated promotions. Secondly, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A's), instituted a task-force to investigate integrated marketing communications (IMC), with the result that the first official definition was published. The AAAA defined IMC as, "a concept of marketing communications planning that recognizes the added value of a comprehensive plan that evaluates the strategic roles of a variety of communication disciplines (e.g. general advertising, direct response, sales promotion, and public relations) and combines these disciplines to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum communication impact." At this stage, the development of IMC, focused primarily on the need for organizations to offer more than just standard advertising and to integrate the various communications disciplines. The 4As originally coined the term the "new advertising"; however, this title did not appropriately incorporate many other aspects included in the term "IMC" – most notably, those beyond traditional advertising process aside from simply advertising. In 1991, the faculty of Medill School