George Benckenstein Digital Media & Social Marketing Strategist – Flat World Evangelist

Interruption vs Engagement Marketing

It is said that a typical American is exposed to 30,000 advertising messages a day.  I found that hard to believe when I first heard this but then I just looked around and thought about this for a moment.  Why don’t you think about this for a moment.  Imagine your drive to work – billboards, commercials on the radio, how about logos on cars and trucks.  Now think about your day at work – banner ads, logos on shirts, your computer, your telephone.  Now that you think about it, you can start to imagine this notion of 30,000 ad messages a day.  Now how many did you notice?  How many can you remember?  How many of these ad messages influenced you in any way?  This is called “ad blindness” and we are getting very good at filtering this stuff out as consumers.

Interruption Marketing

Interruption marketing is the process of finding a prospect engaged in something else, like reading a magazine, watching television, watching a game, driving to work and interrupting him/her with a commercial message. To do that “creativity” in its conventional form is a huge asset albeit rare.  In citing the example above, if you are not influenced or affected any one of the 30,000 ad messages a day, how is it that companies keep doing the same thing hoping for a different result.  That’s insanity.  It’s also a crap-shoot.  It’s a matter of broadcasting loud to as many people as possible and hope it trickles down to a potential buyer.

As you can see, it’s not very effective.  For many companies, their solution is to fight clutter with even more clutter.  Target audiences, no matter how well segmented, have learned to filter out and ignore the noise.  This is a fact.

Engagement Marketing

The digital space is about engaging in a conversation with peers, customers and staff, innovating with them and constantly improving your value proposition in an authentic way. Customers have the power, the information, the advice and the resources to make their own decisions, in the digital world its about entering the conversation.  It’s about transparency and allowing consumers to participate and shape your brand based on authentic interactions between your employees, product or service and your customers.  It also turns the traditional marketing paradigm on its head — using the interaction with one to spread “affect and influence” thru their personal network.

It’s about becoming involved.  It’s about allowing your customers to shape your brand and shape the future experiences you deliver to your customers.  It’s about human connection and relationships again — not a manufactured identity of the traditional brand.

Shaping Our Conversation

These are the types of subjects I will continue to explore with you as this blog evolves.  We will look at how our connected society has turned traditional notions of marketing, supply chains, and the economy at large on it’s head; and we’re just beginning on this quest.  This quest is a gloabal one that will affect us all in both positive and negative ways.