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Marketing and IT departments not talking – and losing their employers cash...
Communication breakdown causing site paralysis

By Jo Best

Published: Wednesday 19 November 2003

When it comes to getting an online campaign up and running, it seems that marketing departments are not talking to key people – their IT chiefs.

Research has found that 28 per cent of marketing departments don't bother talking to their techie counterparts at all when they're cueing up a new publicity campaign, while 46 per cent only talk to IT just before the campaign goes live.

While no one would dispute the value of good internet marketing, successful online campaigns without tech input do more harm than good, said Nigel Thomas, marketing director at web management firm CatchFIRE Systems, which published the research.

"Paradoxically, a successful marketing campaign can actually paralyse normal online business activity by flooding the company's web infrastructure with more visitors than it can support," he said in a statement, and urged techies and marketers to "bridge the communication chasm".

If traffic levels get too much of a boost from the campaign, companies can experience web overloads or site crashes - phenomena that 24 per cent of the companies surveyed said they had suffered, which is not surprising given that three-quarters of marketing professionals had no idea how many visitors their site could support.