The Chairman’s pre-conference research

Chairman Terry Prue (HPI) introduced the conference by saying that there are many theories of how advertising works, lots of them credible. (My gloss on this is that the chances of there being only one, to cover all contingencies, are slim indeed).

He had done a piece of pre-conference research by emailing delegates, generating some interesting paired comparisons: positive engagement was favoured over low- attention processing; emotions over reason; brand experience over USPs. Opinion about awareness/recall was split.

Engagement and emotion revisited, again

Dave Penn (Conquest research) and Antony Tasgal, aka ‘Taz’ (POV) set the scene, in distinctly contrasting ways, by establishing the primacy of emotion in how consumers process and respond to marketing communications and the brands they promote.

Penn circled round the ARF definition of engagement, avoiding the issue of media as too large a topic for this conference, ending by the reformulation of engagement as activating