Advertising Pros: Get Ready To Engage!

Greetings! I’m Max Kalehoff, vice president of marketing with Nielsen BuzzMetrics, and I’m thrilled to introduce Engagement By Engagement! As the title says above, this is a grassroots blog to provide highlights of the ARF/AAAA Consumer Engagement Conference, as well as developments in the advertising industry’s Engagement initiative. This blog is led by Nielsen BuzzMetrics and supported by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA).

Why? We wanted to contribute to the engagement discussion in a unique and compelling way, and this blog is an experiment to achieve that goal. We outlined four key objectives:

• Facilitate dialogue at the Consumer Engagement Conference, and continue contributing to the industry’s larger Engagement initiative.

• Experiment with and demonstrate Consumer-Generated Media (CGM) firsthand by engaging industry stakeholders at the summit – physically at the event and virtually. We’re turning on minds, right?

• Capture raw, unvarnished highlights and permanent archives of the Consumer Engagement Conference.

• Leverage blog communication to deepen ARF and AAAA member satisfaction, loyalty, and likelihood of engaging with future ARF events.

What will we blog about? We’ll include periodic entries leading up to the Consumer Engagement Conference, including links to relevant articles, short summaries of industry events, Q&A’s and a few short videos. But the real action (and work) will take place during the conference, where we’ll have a small team on site at the Conference, to blog the sessions, panels and other.

Who are the bloggers behind Engagement By Engagement? I’ll be the lead author; you may know me from my weekly advertising columns at MediaPost (archived here), as well as my writing on AttentionMax.com, my personal marketing blog. But in addition to me, you can expect contributions from my colleagues Pete Blackshaw, Stephanie Calip and Sandra Parrelli. The latter two will be on site with me at the Conference.

Will other people participate? Yes, and we sure hope you will! We’re open to accepting short, written contributions from anyone who has something smart or pithy to say about advertising, media, research and, of course, engagement. Also, let me know if you’re interested in doing a written Q&A or four-minute interview on video. You can email me at max (dot) kalehoff (at) buzzmetrics (dot) com, or leave a comment here.

What will happen to Engagement By Engagement after the Consumer Engagement Conference? I don’t know, but I can tell you there will be a permanent archive of this experiment – right here on this blog. Maybe we’ll continue on, maybe not. Who knows? But I did promise the ARF I’d present my experience and results to them. This is new ground, so I don’t fully know what to expect. I hope ARF and AAAA stakeholders will find this blog interesting and actively engage in some way.

With that, I’m going to declare this my first post. I hope to see you at the Conference, as well as in the comments section of this blog!