Can we finally define engagement?

Watching the television has somehow become a thing of the past for me.  I don’t have cable television and I am not usually interested in watching anything on TV unless its the talk of the town.

For instance, the Oscars.  I watch the oscars mainly because the rest of the North American world does and I will not be able to keep conversations for at least a week thereafter.  So I watched it this year…but on the internet on some not very legal site.  That is not the interesting part however.  Before I found the live broadcasted show, I ran into an interesting website that was based around the oscars and all people did was post twitter like comments about the oscars.  It was great for me because I hadn’t found the live televised site yet and I was hearing all about the winners, the clothing, the jokes and even the facial expressions.  The part that blew me away was that I even received comments about the ads that were being served.  In some cases, in a given time frame there was more then one ad since the web has no national boundaries and I was likely listening to an American and a Canadian ad being served.

I normally don’t find myself so interested in a particular forum but this was LIVE and it was exactly about the topic I was searching for.   It kept me occupied for at least the better part of an hour and I was so amused that people were in front of her television sets, fully engaged in what they were watching and they felt the need to share.   That was the first moment where I felt that advertising is about to change and in a big way.   We have been hearing all about it, in all the new media events and all the upcoming advertising trends…but this was the first time I truly saw it.

So what is advertising become and what is this change I speak about?  Well for one thing, the meaning of engagement can once and for all be defined.  Those people on that forum were truly engaged with the ads.  In fact so engaged, they felt the need to share it with others.  This is were we are headed and the growth of the mobile smartphone industry is going to take us there even faster.  Twitter-like applications will allow people to share their views about everything and ads will be there and will be ready to be discussed.  Only one challenge comes to mind and its not a  new one but with these trends the challenge is even greater.  The ability for the ads to be heard and to be discussed.  Advertisers will be more pressed to incorporate topics that will draw interest and discussions.  As difficult as this may seem, those that get the formula write will see numbers unparalleled.   Without national boundaries and without the limitations of time and space, an advertisers market becomes none other than the entire world.