I was unexpectedly engaged by a presentation at the recent Event Marketing Summit.  And, although it was a presentation that I had been involved in creating, it was no less of a surprise to me.  A marketer’s work revolves around targeting audiences, crafting a message and finding the right creative wizardry to make it sparkle. We focus so deeply on how we control the "Wow" and "Sizzle" that we forget that Authenticity is a critical ingredient when capturing imaginations.

Our client, Cisco, markets some of the coolest technologies for linking people across vast distances: TelePresence, ūmi, Musion, virtual events, hybrid events.  On this day, Marilyn Mersereau, Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Cisco, was giving the first Virtual Keynote ever at the Event Marketing Summit. She, at Cisco in San Jose, was being projected onto a stage and speaking live to an audience in Chicago. Using this virtual presentation technology, she appears head-to-toe, life-size on a screen and looks remarkably close to the way she’d appear if she were standing on stage. In fact, thanks to Cisco technology, she can not only be seen by the audience, she can also see the audience in real time, zero latency.

When we were conceiving the presentation, we thought of all the "Wow" and "Sizzle" we could inject to make it exciting and capture the audience’s imagination. But in the end, all our craft work did not achieve the impact of a single, unscripted human gesture.

Marilyn wanted to take questions, live, from the audience in Chicago and we had set up a microphone where people could queue-up. A woman waited at the microphone while Marilyn answered the preceding question. Before Marilyn could get to her, the woman unexpectedly turned and began to walk away from the microphone. In a breath, Marilyn stopped, turned to the woman and said “Don’t go. I’m almost finished.”

It was a gesture so human and immediate that the entire audience reacted – laughter, chatter, applause – as if they’d been looking at a portrait and the picture had winked at them. They became believers at that moment. The wall dropped between the stage and the audience. And when the presentation was over and the lights came up, there was an energy in the room from people in animated discussions.

I wish I could claim I had conceived that moment. But the truth is, Marilyn Mersereau’s unscripted reaction was powerful because it was authentic in the way it showcased the magic of the technology. It was a reminder to me, as we look for new  ways to capture and retain the interest of our audience, that authenticity is the most powerful ingredient of engagement.