The engagement guru chats with our exec editor about what engagement is, why marketers are buzzing about it, and the challenges ahead.

The theme of this week's iMedia Agency Summit is that "engagement is the new reach," and we opened Monday's session with a keynote address by Bob DeSena, CEO of the Engagement Marketing Group and a well-known expert on the subject. Bob and I chatted about engagement via email before the Summit. Here's what he had to say.

Brad Berens: Buzzwords abound -- particularly in the internet and in marketing -- and the latest one seems to be "engagement." How would you define engagement, and why do you think that it has taken marketing by storm?
 
Bob DeSena: I'm convinced that engagement is much more than the latest in buzz.
 
The MI4 Committee,  which is a working group of major advertisers, agencies,  the ANA, 4As and the ARF,  which is a lot of letters,  has defined engagement as "turning a prospect on to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context." This is a working definition, a work in progress, but it is setting the right course.

I think it has gained credibility quickly because there is almost universal support for the notion that the marketing model of the last twenty five years and the metrics that support it, are not adequate in a permission-based, active consumer market. Our industry is looking for accountability for what it invests. Engaging our customers and prospects, versus merely "reaching" them with a communication, is necessitated by the need for accountability.

Berens: Do you have any reservations about this new emphasis on engagement? And, if so, why?

DeSena: No reservations about a wide ranging discussion that is thoughtful, focused on the fundamental changes in the market and intended to take appropriate action to respond to those changes.
 
We need to recognize the implications of a phrase we have come to use to easily, i.e., the consumer in control. We have to come to grips with what that means and what we're prepared to do about it. What new skills are required? Are we organized to support the engagement of consumers? Are we paying our people to take the risks associated with change, or is it a new vision and an old pay plan?
 
There's a great deal of work ahead, but a great deal of opportunity as well.

Berens: You talk about needing metrics to support a newly interactive, newly-needing-to-listen form of marketing, but with interactive marketing we're swimming in numbers. The problem, as I see it, is in translating those numbers into a metric of engagement. Do you have any specific suggestions for how marketers, particularly the interactive ones, can reorient how they look at traffic, clickstream, clickthrough, viewthrough and the rest?
 
The engagement discussion is at a very early stage. It is setting a marketing direction for a new kind of consumer market, with an urgency to be more accountable for what we invest. We now have a working definition of engagement and plans for testing and validating hypotheses. Standardized metrics will come, across media, for the different levels of engagement and will be response oriented in nature. 
There are currently proprietary measures like R Score, which measures the intensity of a consumer relationship. There are GSR measures, which can get beneath conscious thought. Clickthrough, viewthrough are behavioral. The most meaningful measure of course is transactional which is sales. That's the reason for focusing on engagement, because in the end it will be our best predictor of sales.

Berens: Oscar Wilde famously quipped, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." But the rise of blogs and consumers having an easy soapbox with potentially infinite reach have shown that consumer engagement can be profoundly negative for a brand. What do you think are the biggest challenges for marketers when it comes to engaging customers in a real dialogue? Is it technological? Cultural? Something I'm not thinking of? Are some marketers so used to a one-way communications environment that they aren't able to think in two-way terms?

DeSena: The biggest challenge is an ironic one. Most marketers, like most people, have personal skills at engagement. They do it every day. When it comes to consumer marketing and media plans, however, we fall back to a familiar mass model, with efficient reach and frequency as the goal. That's how we've been trained and that's what we measure best. We think two way as people, one way still as marketers.
 
Berens: When you think about missed opportunities for customer engagement, who or what pops into your mind?

DeSena: I think the largest and most consistently missed opportunity is to recognize the important consumer changes that are occurring and to assume we can address them with minimal to no changes on our part. We need new skills, particularly in the area of databased marketing, which is what provides the insight we need to be relevant enough to engage.

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