
Definitely worth reading is a long, detailed, opinionated piece by the brilliant Martin Weigel, Head of Planning for Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam.
Called Engagement: Fashionable yet Bankrupt, it's split into the following sections:
- Calling bullshit on the bullshit
- Assuming engagement is a metric
- Claiming engagement is something entirely new
- Failing to recognise that engagement is an intermediate measure
- Assuming that interruption is dead
- Assuming that engagement is the route to more loyalty
- Overestimating people's appetite for participation
- Treating engagement as if it had intrinsic value
- Assuming that people care deeply about brands
- Staring down the wrong end of the telescope
- Calling an end to talk of engagement
With charts, citations, and even examples from the UK, it's a stonking read.
So read it.
(ht @will_humphrey)