Yes, that’s me as Thor, along with my beautiful wife and children. No, this blog is not a shameful excuse to exploit them. I want to tell you about a Halloween epiphany I had last night.

The sun was setting behind the Rockies as we went house to house. It was Spiderman’s first trick or treating and he was amazed that people just kept passing out candy because he asked. We choose to wear coordinating costumes because we’re a family and we’re in this crime fighting business together. However, I started to notice an unintended consequence of our coordination as the night went on: our kids seemed to be getting more candy than the others.

I searched beyond my natural bias to assume it was because they are the coolest kids in the universe. As someone used to testing variables for marketing studies, I decided to send the kids up to the door on their own while we watched from the sidewalk with the other parents. They came back with a single piece each, a departure from the solid handfuls I saw when we went to the door as a family. I wanted to run further trials but Captain America gets really grouchy past his bedtime.

Once we were home I kept thinking about why we got a better response as a team (I know for a fact it wasn’t because of Thor’s flip flops). I checked some work email and saw an award given to a company simply for buying the right keywords around the SuperBowl. It got me kind of riled up. It’s almost as if we’re back where we started at the beginning of the digital marketing industry, where search was seen as a commodity. As a single channel you should be investing in, just because you didn’t want to seem behind the times at an industry conference. Times have changed since then: digital marketing encompasses hundreds of media channels in and of itself and is no longer an “add on.” So why are we seeing this regression to a “set it and forget it” mindset? Running a successful digital campaign isn’t just about buying the right keywords, it’s about syncing social, mobile, display, paid search and SEO to play off each other and work together.

And that’s when it hit me. Team Superhero was more successful because we were a committed unit: we got more candy together than we ever could have individually. That’s the power of multiple channels working together to improve a brand’s findability.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get all God of Thunder on some Twix.