iMedia Editor Jodi Harris reports on the Amelia Island Agency Summit's keynote presentation.

This year's iMedia Agency Summit focuses on the essence of the latest industry buzzword: engagement. It's becoming clearer that as online moves from being accepted to being essential, it is no longer enough to just get consumers aware of your brands; they must interact with it, and feel that they have a personal stake in its success as well.

For marketers in the online arena, the challenge is now to define, design and measure experiences that achieve the desired level of consumer participation and support. Appropriately, the summit's keynote presentation, "Consumer Engagement: What Does it Mean?", aimed to help attendees do just that. Presentation moderator, Doug Weaver, president of Upstream Group, began the session by putting it all in perspective:

"One thing we all know from being part of the industry is the consumer is in control. Another thing that is clear is that the old metrics no longer work," said Weaver. In order for marketers to do their jobs in the current media climate, Weaver stressed that, "the internet should not be seen in a vacuum, and neither should engagement. We need to be part of the larger mosaic, part of the larger world of media and marketing."

Bob DeSena, CEO, Engagement Marketing Group, then took the microphone. He discussed the great fragmentation of media that marketers are coming to terms with, as well as three fundamental changes that are resulting: 

1. Democratization of content
2. Communication that has gone from passive to active
3. The new importance of consumer choice and control

DeSena then stressed the need to start moving beyond the point where we recognize these changes to the point where we are starting to see the actions marketers need to take. He feels that agency personnel are active co-creators of brand content, and that it is their job to provide opportunities for the audience to not only see something but to do something; to capture what they hear about a brand and use that knowledge in a personal way. "We are moving through the 'awkward teen years' of mass targeting to personal communication." DeSena asserted that the question each company needs to ask itself is, "Do we have the skills to get there first?"

Essentially, engagement is a way of thinking about today's marketing and media from the perspective of today's active consumer. Along with this shift in focus is the need to alter the fundamental approach, to become accountable for the ideas that marketers present-- a concept that DeSena refers to as marketing directly. He then went on to outline four easy steps to achieve these engagement goals: 

1. Understand who is the target
2. Understand where the target is (where and when I can meet him)
3. Understand how to use unique characteristics and attributes of active media channels (determining the creative plan/brand idea)
4. Ensure that you listen to what was said, can analyze it and then use this feedback to refine your understanding of Step 1 through 3

The next panelist, Ken Wollenberg, the EVP at Simmons Strategic Planning and Marketing, presented engagement from a research perspective: "Change is the enemy in the syndicated research side that I come from… To survive we needed to become consumer neutral."
 
Wollenberg asserted that for his company, engagement is a multidimensional concept: "It is the ability of the brand and the brand media environment to meaningfully connect with the consumer."

Wollenberg's presentation focused on the point at which the urgent need for more sensitive research kicks in: knowing whether your efforts are achieving the level of consumer engagement that your clients are looking for on a specific campaign. To this point, he shared some key measurement objectives:

• To create a metric for planning buying and selling that goes beyond the simple measure of age/sex and click streams.
• To create ratings of cognitive, behavioral and emotional involvement
• To validate that engagement translates into a positive halo effect for brand advertising
• Examine inter- and intra-media channel synergies
• Enable users to identify brand attributes that resonate with engaged consumers

Wollenberg feels that a global set of involvement dimensions will be developed that will be measured across media channels. "Overall, engagement will be measured against trust, discovering personal timeouts, relationship building, critical images and action receptivity," he said.

The final panelist of the session, Kate Sirkin, EVP and global research director at Starcom MedaVest Group, provided a lesson on engagement from the agency point of view.

When talking about exposure vs. engagement models, Sirkin talked of finding the right contact points and feels it's clear that exposure models are failing. "Contacts are valued for the way they connect with the consumer; the effect that results when the exposure occurs, the ability to captivate the consumers' attention and the response that is co-created," she said. "The job today is to find contacts that both expose and engage."

Sirkin outlined four suggestions for choosing the best contacts from the almost infinite array of options.

1. Select the right criteria (and be sure to bring in the creative team as early as possible)
2. Assess the tradeoffs you will likely have to make
3. Use tools and processes that inform the decisions
4. Be innovative

Of all the questions and discussion points raised by the keynote panel, it seems to all come down to where agencies should be focusing their efforts. According to Sirkin, it's, "the ability to get response, to learn what is engaging for content and contact and refine it in real time."

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