ENGAGEMENT

The whole world is looking for a definition of brand engagement. For the past several months I have been listening hard to the definitions being put forward on the topic. Listening, but perhaps not really thinking about the problem. What I mean is, it's easily to see the flaws in various definitions, but more challenging to actually put forth an idea for inspection ones self.

So for my next several posts i want to put forward some ideas about what I think engagement is.

To me, engagement must be experiential. People learn by doing things themselves. Not by being told things, or perhaps not as well.

Sometimes a seemingly passive experience like watching an ad on TV can be experiential -- what's necessary in my view is an ad that contains an idea that forces the individual to process a brand message. Not forces like a welcome screen but rather one that puts forward an idea so interesting - no, fascinating -- that we stop what else we are doing and actually give it a thought. Apple 1984 was like that. Imagery so powerful and evocative that we made mental connections -- to a book we read in 12th grade, to what we view ourselves to be (individuals and free thinkers), to what we accept as true about a brand without much question.

Another example would be the Mercury ads in the mid 1980s that used songs from the 60s and 70s to evoke associations in Boomers about who they "really are", and tied those to some fairly revolutionary car designs that were a departure from the Grand Marquis of the past. We listened, we connected, we evoked, and we remembered.

There aren't too many ideas like that out there -- ideas that can turn passive exposure into genuine engagement. In my 22 years of advertising, I think I worked on about 5 of those out of the hundreds of campaigns I helped to field. Not that I haven't worked on a lot of good campaigns, but rather that there aren't a lot of ideas out there that cause rich cognitive processing when delivered passively like in a TV or print ad.

Engagement of this sort was always a good thing, but definitely not as critical before as today, when the proliferation of media options, products, and distractions fairly overwhelms consumers.

What digital technologies allow us to do are offer many forms of concrete experience, with or without evocative ideas. Give me a banner with 5 tabs to click on, or a way to customize the content, and you have achieved engagement whether or not your brand can truly support a genuinely evocative campaign. Combine that sort of interactivity and you can create powerful brand engagement.

Don't get me wrong, it absolutely helps to have a great idea. But digital enables us to physically engage people in ways heretofore impossible. And those physical interactions are, in my opinion, a key component of what constitutes engagement online. I am completely convinced that physical activity with a marketing message always causes brand engagement -- physical engagement but mental and emotional engagement as well. Serve me a big square that lets me click and change the color of a new cellphone, and you have achieved engagement. You've given me a reason to give a sh*t, and have dimensionalized the relevance of that brand to my personal world.

So my first principle of digital brand engagement is that the marketing message must offer and drive physical activity, because this enables the user to personalize the brand and make it theirs. A magnificent example was the avatar maker that was fielded in support of the Simpson's movie last summer. I could make a Simpson of myself -- connecting me directly and dare I say completely with the franchise. This is an infinitely richer consumer connection than, say, a preroll vid of Homer saying D'oh in 127 different situations. The former is engagement, the latter is fun, but ultimately passive. And I submit, the former makes it far more likely that I will want to see the movie, remember to see it, or log on to Fandango to buy a ticket.

The implication of this, of course, is that the best web environments for brands are the ones that allow and encourage users to physically interact with marketing messages. The thing I am going to think about for the next day or so is whether content quality on the page that surrounds that physically interactive message plays a role in the task of brand engagement.

More coming.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.