Bob Barocci Opening of Consumer Engagement Conference

These are on-the-fly summary notes of Welcoming Session:

Bob Barocci, president of the ARF, opens up the conference, following welcome by O. Burtch Drake of the AAAA.

“We’re honored to lead initiative called engagement. This may be the single most important initiative going on in our industry. Today and tomorrow will be different than other engagement events. No speechifying. People here today are believers and that is major criterion among all the presenters and panelists…they’re changing their practices to reflect their ideas about engagement. Here are some examples:

• NBC will now begin to price television time based on engagement. First broadcast network to have courage to do that.
• Seven blue-chip advertisers have agreed to lead engagement consortiua. P&G, USPS, P&G, Microsoft among others. They will overlay engagement theory over their own practices.
• Experiental marketing council. Cisco, Frito-Lay, Microsoft, IBM, Coke, Oracle and ten others.
• Major agencies, like Publicis, have started appointing directors of engagement.

It’s a scary proposition. Nielsen is about to offer commercial ratings, which many media companies are afraid of. They’re likely to find that commercial ratings will be lower than program ratings, and we can be sure that engagement ratings will be even lower.