Appointment Marketing, Consumers Check In

Led by the emergence of new media consumption habits, consumers and marketers alike have evolved past the interruptive media model and ushered in appointment aka engagement marketing. Consumers still seek to learn about new products and services but they are also interested in experiences worthy of their time.

Marketing professionals now look to create destinations, experiences and utility that will motivate an audience to engage with their brand. Moderated by Glen Sheehan, Group Creative Director of T3 (The Think Thank), this session exhibited a strong panel of experts including:

Glen Sheehan, Group Creative Director, T3 (The Think Tank)
Steve Calder, Executive VP, Executive Media Director, Mullen mediaHUB
Adrian Ho, Partner, Zeus Jones
Brian Morrissey, Senior Reporter, Interactive, Adweek
David Murphy, Co-President, Barrie, D’Rozario and Murphy

An emergent audience such as 13-34 year olds act differently. The panel walked through a variety of challenging questions such as “Our targets are choosing where and when to engage so what is a more valuable engagement?  Is that type of connection worth more?  Emerging audiences are ready but are we ready as agency and brand folks? Are we asking too much of online visitors?”

Clearly all media needs to be looked at differently when Burger King Xbox 360 games outsell Gears of War through traditional channels.

Steve Calder, of Mullen mediaHUB, thought that exhibiting more accountability to a client’s overall success rather than just grinding out a campaign against a set of metrics was important.  “It’s not just buying spots and dots anymore.” Forcing standard metrics against digital video doesn’t work either which was seen as hampering investment in it on all fronts.

Adrian Ho, of Zeus Jones commented that their new agency was launched to help clients create new things that help users rather than annoy users. But you also have to be careful about building a tool strictly for building engagement…you need to continue to work on following it through to see if it achieved the desired end results. Clearly, he was referencing everyone’s need to prove ROI.

Brian Morrissey, of Adweek, has seen more people paying a lot more attention to what is happening in the online space. Brands appear to be more inclined to invest in the experiential and move beyond the traditional.  He felt that there was too much branded entertainment going on which often seems like a shortcut to an desired end result.

Industry veteran David Murphy of Barrie, D’Rozario and Murphy said that the he feels that the currently described revolution has actually been coming on for a decade now and it is that which has created the current fragmentation.  What’s changed profoundly, he thinks, is that a form of wiki branding is going on where consumers are in control of not just the media but the brand itself and they are taking their version of what that brand means into their own circle of influence (friends/networks). 

The takeaway quote from this session was for marketers to “Swallow the brave pill some morning and then go do something.”

Great Information…Thank You….

By Femanol on 2008 11 03

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