Engagement part II

As promised I wanted to share some more thoughts on the Engagement conference I was at this week.  There was some good stuff, but I won't try to summarize any of the other speakers because I took crap notes and wouldn't do them justice anyway.  But here are some general observations:

1.  Unintentionally, Leo Burnett & Starcom kind of took over the day.  The event was chaired by Lauren Richards, CEO of Starcom.  Steve Meraska, our SVP Connections Planning was on the first panel, and Judy John our CCO was on the second one.  In the afternoon, I presented twice, and Eleni and Steve from Starcom were on two other panels.

2. Why do conference venues almost always look like this?  We're in a creative industry.  We should have interesting venues.  I don't buy the argument that bland hotel ballrooms are the only places that can handle large conferences.  Earlier this year I spoke at an event held at the MaRS building, a new innovation center for interdisciplinary scientific work that's airy, high-tech, funky and inspiring. These places exist, we just need to find them.

3. Panel discussions tend to suck. It's rare to see one that actually works, even when the particpants are interesting on paper.  It often devolves into a battle of egos, self-serving comments ("Well, at MY company we do it differently..."), or five separate conversations that don't really have anything to do with each other.  I think it's because, frankly, the moderators are usually not very good - it's usually a senior industry person who is nice and smart, but not skilled in panel moderating.  Like research moderating, panel moderating is a skill that is both delicate and tough, and it can't be done by just anyone.

4. There still doesn't seem to be any agreement on how to define engagement, or any shared understanding of what we're talking about.  The majority of the speakers used lots of examples and case studies - this ad was engaging, that campaign was not - but this made it all very subjective.  And most followed the usual script of how the world is changing, consumers are in control, advertising isn't a one-way conversation, we need to try new things or collaborate more, etc.  Which is fine (and true), but the frustrating thing is no one (that I saw) actually took the trouble to try to really define engagement, or lay out meaningful steps for getting there.  I had a feeling the day would be like that (the UK conference on engagement I attended a few months ago was similarly vague) so in our presentation we tried to get more specific and put an opinion out there, right or wrong.

5. Which brings me to my bit.  We're going to be rolling this out on a much larger scale so I don't quite want to give away the farm.  But the gist of it was that to get past the subjectivity and fuzzy definitions, we designed and invested in some research of our own, in partnership with a major broadcaster (CanWest MediaWorks) and a great research company (Ideas Research Group).  We did some qual, some quant, and some ethnography.  And found some interesting things. 

The major thing was that what drives engagement is personal stuff, human stuff, not marketing stuff.  People become engaged in a communication when it (not the product/brand, but the communication) fulfills basic human needs like providing something useful, being entertaining, provoking thought, reinforcing ego and status, making the person feel more clever or better about themself in some way, and so on.  What doesn't drive engagement is being sold to.  Clarity, branding, message take-away, new information: none of these correlates with engagement.  It's not that those things aren't important in some way, it's just that they're insufficient.  If engagement isn't there, then it doesn't matter how brilliant the strategy or message is, people won't spend time with it.  If the engagement is there, we can rhapsodize about our products and people won't mind. 

Getting to that engagement comes from treating people as people and figuring out how to fulfill their needs as people, not as consumers.  We lose that as soon as we treat them as targets or users or segments.  There's no room for interestingness in the standard marketing "brand-consumer relationship."  And that affects everything from our communications to our research to how we plan media.

We weren't really saying anything new, but we were able to finally put some data around a lot of the stuff we all know intuitively, which makes it all the more powerful. If we can nudge the discussion forward a few inches, I'll be happy. And the response seems to have been good so far, lots of supportive messages and comments coming back over the last few days.

Comments

[Lee McEwan]

My personal bugbear at conferences is those people who ask rambling and self-serving off-topic questions. They are the conference equivalent of spammers.

You know the ones. They are usually independent consultants and are invariably there to network rather than to listen. They take every opportunity they get to grab the microphone and lead us off on a merry tangent.

I find that most speakers (in the UK at least) are much too polite and fail to despatch them like the leeching hecklers they really are.

Anyway ... I look forward to hearing more about your research programme when you are in London next week.

[Jason]

Lee - It's funny, that's one of my greatest annoyances too.
I saw Frank Gehry speak once and he took questions afterwards. One of the questions was just like you describe, some wannabe architect who asked what Gehry's influences were, but managed to go on for 5 minutes dropping all the names he could to show off, with audible groans from the crowd.
When he was finally done Gehry looked down over his glasses at this guy, waited a beat, and said "Look, kid, I just like squiggly lines."
It brought down the house.

[Lee McEwan]

Thanks again for sparing the time to present your engagement research to us while you were over in the UK this week.

P.S. I love the photo of Millie at Breakfast on Russell's site! Where did you get that fab papoose style effort from? We really need one of those.

[Neil Perkin]

I totally agree with your thought about not selling but keeping it useful and entertaining. I've posted something on my blog about it too...