The Age of Engagement

The most valuable consumers - from the marketing point of view - no longer simply consume. We have come to understand them as producing, as well as consuming: their participation in both the determination and the creation - and in some instances the distribution - of value, is now well recognised among marketers, and already in clear and controversial evidence in music and media. People in developed markets continue to consume goods with vigour of course. But their engagement with media - remembering that their very experience of life is now largely mediated - is no longer one of one-way consumption. They have taken control of not just information, but of access to their own precious attention, of what they see as meaningful, as significant, as acceptable, as desirable.

Culture is no longer simply received by them, it's created by them, and it lives most vibrantly on networks, as an infinity of highly fluid, fickle, taste cultures. This "citizen-consumer" subscribes - without being constantly aware of doing so - to perhaps hundreds of these taste cultures at any time. And this new kind of mediated cultural relationship changes, in real time, within the endless torrent of information.

Brands, and the messaging and images they seek to distribute and embed amongst younger consumers, are filtered, judged, embraced or far more often rejected, thrown back ... via entirely mediated tribal communities, whose constant shape-shifting is perhaps only matched by their discomfort with interruption and invasion.

So we have here a highly empowered promiscuous consumer, within a ring of spinning taste cultures, within yet another ring of torrential data. Far from providing another useful channel between brand or media owner and the market, digital technologies and networks are posing the most demanding questions ever asked of the discipline of marketing.

How can we follow citizen-consumers, as they pursue their rich, multi-faceted mediated lives, when their dependence on mainstream media - and therefore the advertisers that largely enable its delivery - is crucially diminished by an overwhelming abundance of entertainment, and a fickle channel-surfing mentality that extends far beyond TV to their entire existence?

The game, clearly, for both media and marketers, is one of engagement. The key currency here is the terribly scarce and elusive one of human attention.

This "Age of Engagement" could equally be named The Age of Meaning. In order to extract commercial benefit from such a punishing attention-based marketplace, brands, rights owners, producers and channels, are obliged to create fresh, tangible, on-my-terms added-meaning and added-value. This value no longer merely resides in the mere consumption of a product or service, but in every formal and informal brand communication, including those with peers and within communities, that don't involve the brand at all.

The Rights Marketing Company brings together the team, the experience and expertise, the methods and most of all, the very necessary philosophies of Challenge, Education and Innovation, to enable businesses on both sides of "Media 2.0" to survive, adapt and evolve in The Age of Engagement.