Rules of Engagement

An important lesson gained from Ad:Tech is the necessity of engagement in all marketing efforts. Engagement is the quality that allows a person to interact, interpret and implement some aspect of your marketing message in their daily experience. It’s the quality that helps a piece of marketing go “viral”.

The major rule of engagement in business is the same as it is in war: never underestimate the other person and never overestimate yourself. Keeping your message focused on yourself leads to a very boring message and as the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard put it, “the only thing worse than being bored is being boring.”

An engaging message is about the other person, but it is about the other person recognizing themselves in the reality that your messaging provides. When you underestimate the other person you can end up offending them, putting yourself in a position where future messages will require their active permission to be heard.

A good message, an engaging message, doesn’t require permission, it’s immediately accepted with active participation.

Exposure

We open up to participating in personal engagement when someone opens up to us. The same is true in marketing; the more open (perhaps even vulnerable) a message seems the more likely it is to engage another person. Again this is not about focusing on you or your company, it’s about relating to the other person through commonalities.

Think about the media messaging you’ve seen become prolific in the past, what is one of the most common themes that comes up?

Vulnerability.

Images of children, families, people in situations that expose their human frailty or the overcoming of that frailty; images that focus on commonalities amongst a larger group. These are themes that catch the attention and cause a message to be repeated, to become engaging. People repeat the message because they recognize themselves, their own victories, overcomings and failures in the message.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

As mentioned in a prior post, the movie American Beauty provides a great example of how carefully crafted (it might even be said - scientifically crafted) imagery can invoke a sympathetic response and engage an audience.

This kind of messaging focuses on the following:

It engages the audience in relating themselves, via pre-existent cultural cues, to the characters and setting the message presents. American Beauty presents the stereotypes of husband, office worker, house wife, disturbed army vet, insular teenage girl, etc. How can your marketing utilize character types/common settings to capture the viewer?
It takes the viewer’s previously held believes, values, and cultural position and realigns them to bring them into the reality presented by the messaging. In a car commercial it is assumed that the viewer drives a car and understands/relates to the driving experience. What is unique is that the commercial represents a specific company’s attempt to place their brand of car into the viewer’s assumed common experience.
It becomes a mirror for the viewer to recognize themselves and to potentiate an ideal existence in the future. This means that the message becomes a reflection of not only how the viewer currently sees themselves, but also provides suggestions for how the viewer should expect to see themselves in the future, ie. a customer seeing an ad might think “I recognize that person is similar to me, but with X product they look like a better version of what I am/want to be.”
Finally, it assumes a reality to the message beyond the message itself. Good messaging doesn’t sneak around pretending no one sees it, it walks down the street like it owns the city and assumes people will follow. A successful message with a baseball player in it will assume to be, and achieve the illusion of being, the definitive message with a baseball player in it.

Are your messages asking for permission or are they engaging the audience in participation?