Engagement: entertainment or utility?
One of the issues that came up in my panel Appointment Marketing, Consumers Check In was the advertising industry’s obsession with entertainment as the sole solution to the engagement problem.
IMO the problem with this is two-fold. The first is that entertainment is really not a core skill of marketers. In fact, it’s a pretty specialized skill which is why there’s a whole industry devoted to producing it. As with everything, the bar for great entertainment is rising all the time, this is why more and more money is required to make films and videogames. Right there this makes entertainment a risky strategy in my view.
The second problem is that even if you succeed in producing an entertaining piece of communication, you have simply invested a lot of effort into creating an engaging tool. Communications are supposed to exist in order to create, communicate and build value for businesses, not for themselves. However, great entertainment rarely asks you to do something else as a result. You may walk out of a film and decide to buy another film by the same director – but (unless you have kids) you aren’t typically walking out of films and going shopping for merchandise.
In the rush to create engaging communications, I think that business objectives are often lost. I also don’t believe brands are expected to be entertaining. They are, however, required to be useful. Obviously, this is another reason why I think that actually doing something of value is a far better way for brands to think about marketing.