Dan Belmont, CMO of The Marketing Arm, talks about engagement marketing

Dan Belmont is the chief marketing officer of The Marketing Arm, which is part of the Omnicom Group of agencies. The Marketing Arm (or TMA) is actually an umbrella brand for four other Omnicom agencies that focus on helping brands connect with their customers through what Belmont describes as "emotionally powerful platforms." By that, he means things people are passionate about -- music, sports, movies, TV shows, events, and causes that are relevant to them.

I emailed Dan asking if he'd be interested in a brief Q&A about "engagement marketing," a topic he spoke about recently at a conference in New York.

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Q: There's been a lot of talk about engagement marketing over the last few years. How do you define it?

Engagement is the turning on of a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context. By “turned on” I mean activating associations, symbols, metaphors and experiences to co-create personalized brand meaning.

According to the Advertising Research Foundation in New York, the governing body of all advertising research, engagement is what all marketing should strive to create. It’s a process by which we activate associations, symbols, metaphors, and experiences to co-create personalized brand meaning.

The basic definition of “engagement” is “choosing to involve oneself in something.” It means “to participate in” or “to commit oneself to something.”

Based on those abbreviated definitions, you immediately begin to get a feel for what we’re talking about when we talking about “engaging the customer.” It’s about active involvement between consumers and your brand. The result is this co-created image of what that brand means to you.

It’s really what marketing is all about.

When I’m talking with people, and employees, and clients about it, there are concepts that come up again and again. Words like “involvement,” “participation,” “connection,” “experience,” “community,” “sharing,” “interaction,” “authenticity,” “customization,” “relevance.”

For many of us on the experiential and event marketing side of the business, these concepts aren’t new to us. They shouldn’t be. Nor should the concepts required to plan and activate engagement campaigns – things like creativity, integration, and execution across a range of disciplines from entertainment and music to talent and sports to wireless and the web to mobile to hospitality to promotions and PR.

Q: When did this movement toward engaging the customer begin?

The global marketing officer for the largest advertiser on the planet, P&G, Jim Stengel, started us on the path to engagement a few years ago when he stated publicly that the traditional models of advertising are broken. He challenged the industry to come up with new metrics that would better reflect how we plan to connect with consumers.

He took an advertising model that was typically led by creative, and placed media planning out in front. To Jim, context comes before the message. This wasn’t that important before. After all, you could bet a company like P&G would be looking to television first.

That’s not the case anymore. In our effort to make our brands relevant, we need to understand how the consumer might be open to our message, how we can make the message part of their routine, their rituals, their passions… how to make an emotional connection, to get them turned on to an idea of what our brand represents to them.

Consumers are bombarded with millions of messages every day, most of which they don’t care about or aren’t interested in. That’s because they come from brands and products that don’t matter to them.

We live in a world today where the consumer is in charge of how they get information, where they get it from, and when they want it.

I have yet to watch an episode of “Lost” with commercials.

Thanks to Tivo, my favorite show is down to just over 40 minutes of what I want to see, and I would much rather watch it at a later time when others commercial messages aren’t being forced on me or interrupting my show.

I now have the freedom to decide, on my terms, how I will consume media. I am in charge. We are in charge.

So it’s no surprise that – thanks to websites like YouTube – marketing strategies must now deal with the consumer’s control of content.

And, thanks to little devices like the iPod, consumers can customize and access content whenever and wherever they want it. After all, that is the current working definition of engagement.

Q: So a lot of it is driven by the fact that it’s so easy for consumers today to avoid traditional advertising. That’s the basic driver here?

Clearly, that’s a big part of it. But it also has to do with the reality of shrinking brand loyalty. It’s the intrusive and interruptive nature of much marketing. And, that the traditional approach to advertising doesn’t work.

And I think we all have to admit it isn’t as simple as reaching consumers at places and at times when they can’t escape the message, no matter how they try. Frankly, it all seems a little desperate.

Q: Is engagement, then, a more effective way to capture and hold the consumer’s attention?

It is, but engagement isn’t just about getting a consumer’s attention. Traditional advertisers can do that with graphic images, and sounds and music, and arresting colors.

They’re good at getting our attention with hopes that we’ll stick around and listen to their message. They’re shouting at us.

USA Today had a headline last month that caught my interest. It read: “More ads pumping up the volume.” In the article, there’s a quote from a creative director who says: “The industry is desperate to find clever ways to reach people, whether or not it has any legitimate value.”

That’s absolutely stunning to me and it’s another reason why traditional marketing is so ineffective today.

Q: At the risk of oversimplifying it, are there some “engagement principles” that marketers – whether at global brands or small businesses – can focus on to help them better understand and apply “engagement”?

I’d recommend focusing on three things: Content, experience, and dialogue.

We’re interested in content that’s relevant to us. Things that effect our lives, issues that effect the lives of the ones we love, the world in which we live, and the things that we like to do.

Leveraging content that resonates with consumers and their ideas is how we get engaged in a brand’s message. Content is critical to engagement.

Next, ask how you can make your brand part of my experience with this content or this message. How can you create a unique experience that will build upon this model that the brand and the consumer have co-created?

Finally, give people a voice. They want to interact. They want a dialogue. Talk with them, not at them. Engage them in your message.

More people participated in the American Idol competition than they did for the Bush-Kerry presidential competition. That’s because one more effectively engaged people than the other.

So it’s about creating content – in many cases in conjunction with the consumer – or creating an experience in a way that actively and emotionally engages the customer, instead of simply talking at them.

Think less about whether something is an ad or a promotion or a PR activity and more about building trust and community, and creating a dialogue with your customer that shares real knowledge. All disciplines must work together to engage the consumer.

The focus should be on getting your customers actively involved with your brand. How can you get them to participate with your brand? What would persuade them to commit their time and attention and energy to interacting with our brand?

Q: What are a few examples of engagement marketing programs that you admire?
There are some that I really like. I like to cook, and for people like me who spend a lot of time in the kitchen and looking at “dream kitchens,” the Viking range is pretty cool.

A few years ago, Viking opened a luxury boutique hotel called The Alluvian in a little town in Mississippi, which is the home of Viking. In just a couple of years, that little town has become what the New York Times described as a “cooking capital.”

That’s because Viking targets what it calls “stove groupies” and brings in world-famous guest chefs from around the world to lead an entire curriculum of cooking classes that promote the “Viking Lifestyle.” That’s engagement at its finest.

Another example is Range Rover, which launched an interactive website where users can explore exotic locations. It’s this global community where people share there adventures and experiences about travel and food and art and food. Users post their own photos and create their own content.

It’s a wonderful site that brings the user into the experience by providing this intriguing brand-driven content that consumers seek out. It’s pulling them in rather than pushing a message at them. That’s engagement.

I think AT&T is doing a nice job with engagement. AT&T is evolving from a phone service provider to an entertainment provider. Last year, it created a web portal featuring exclusive content from music, sports, and gaming. It features live webcasts, streaming concerts, previews, and all sorts of celebrity interviews, while showcasing AT&T’s products and services. It’s all free. It’s all exclusive.

And, they’ve taken the blue room on the road to various concerts and festivals where fans can come to check their email, recharge their cell phones, watch broadband TV, and play online games. So they’re taking engagement to a new level.

And, they’re working to interact even more intensely with consumers.

Leveraging the passion for college football, they’ve created a feature at the website that provides fans with exclusive team video footage, the official school fight songs, and official team logos. Fans then take these elements, mix in their own personal digital photos, and “mash” it all together to create customized team videos.

Again, it’s the consumer creating the content. To extend it, AT&T has taken it on the road with its AT&T College Football Experience tour where it can engage fans on-campus, just outside the stadium, before during and after the game.

It’s a good example of a huge brand going out – both online and offline – and interacting with its customer in a way that’s meaningful and interesting and relevant.

You may have read recently that the brand managers at Dorito’s are turning over control of their Super Bowl ad to consumers, who can create and submit their own Super Bowl ad for the brand that celebrates their love of Dorito’s.

So people are looking to help shape and personalize what’s important to them.

There’s one more example that comes to mind: Nike partnered with Google during the World Cup to create “Joga Bonito,” which is this community for people with a passion for soccer.

The content is designed to be authentic and credible – two of Nike’s brand values. More importantly, the Nike brand is not intrusive on the site. Nike understands the importance of staying connected and staying relevant.

I’ve go on too long here, but again, it’s a significantly different mindset from marketers of the past.

Q: The big brands “get” engagement marketing? They understand its value?

More and more they do. The best marketers have always understood the importance of connecting more strongly and be more engaging. They understand that a two-way relationship is a better way to connect emotionally and in a deeper way with consumers.

Stephen Quinn, the senior VP of marketing at Wal-Mart, was quoted in a New York Times article a few months ago essentially talking about how the customer is absolutely in charge today, and the brands that do the best job of putting the customer in charge will succeed. That’s Wal-Mart talking.

In the same article, Yahoo’s CMO said that marketers need to allow consumers to help shape the brand experience.

Yahoo and Wal-Mart -- those are two great brands. And they’re on-board with engagement.