Engagement is winning!

The following are on-the-fly notes from the Consumer Engagement conference: Taddy Hall, Chief Strategy Officer of the ARF

Welcome to day two at the Consumer Engagemet conference. Taddy Hall, Chief Strategy Officer of the ARF opened today's session by recapping a few (of many) important highlights from yesterday’s session. Cleary, Hall said, “Engagement is winning.”

Some of the definitions that he found provocative were as follows:

• The conceptualization of engagement itself, not a measurement, but a mental model or frame of how we approach brand demand or growth.
• The mind is what the brain does.
• Important clarification of “a turn on,” which means to occupy the mind with a particular concept or thought.
• Frames. So much attention gets paid to context, but that is only a tip of the iceberg.

Some new models that emerged from yesterday’s discussion:

• From “interrupt and repeat” to a model of co-creation.
• Thinking not about what ads do to people, but what people do to ads.
• Inversion of the linear model from "think, feel, do" to "feel, think, do" or "do, think, feel."
• Marketing is a service to the consumer.
• Media is a critical piece of the brand.
• We are in an engage- based world where the “big idea” has to be front and center.
• Advertising must give consumers “something.”
• The brand is no longer a passenger, rather, it can be a content generator and an audience aggregator.

Hall ended by reiterating that advertising changes our memory and research should take this into consideration. Our industry is at a crossroads in many ways. As Peter Drucker once said, “If you want to do something new, you have to stop doing something old.”