Engagement games.

I find it lands somewhere between sad and mildly amusing. The notion that in our "post-marketing" schema so many people are proffering creative ideas built on "engagement." If I won't spend 30 seconds hearing your message, why would I spend ten minutes "liking" something, uploading a photo, passing it along to my friends, etc.

Most of the work I see these days is demanding. It requires participation from people who on a scale of one to ten, with ten being as lazy as a slug, are 11s.

Maybe my age is showing.

I do not look for fun, affirmation or activity from brands. Basically, I want brands to deliver what they promise then leave me the fuck alone.

This morning I saw an augmented reality bus-shelter ad for Tic Tac breath mints. It's hard for me to believe that anyone in their right mind would do what the jackass neo-hipster in this video is doing, that there's any value to the Tic Tac brand derived from downloaded apps, or that any of this has any impact whatsoever on Tic Tacs sales. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzfzQU52Z34

As it stands, the You Tube video I've pasted here has 67 views.

Seriously, when my kids had a lemonade stand they got more traffic than that.

All this is to say that in this new era of marketing, where everything you're NOT doing is hereby declared dead, there is a complete and utter lack of grown-up-ness.

I've worked on some of the most important brands with some of the biggest budgets in the world. Not one of those brands has ever felt that they had all the money to do what they needed to do. They had to make choices.

Choice is about getting the most good to the greatest number.

It's not playing games.