Presence Got Valuable. Now We're About to Ruin It.

Where the Measuring Starts

We spend months on a room. Every decision in it is aimed at one moment, the point where somebody walks in and feels something they weren't expecting to feel. That's the whole job. And somewhere in the process, the question of how to measure it always arrives. Not usually from us, and not always from any one person, but from all the different people inside a company who each need the room to prove something different.

I understand the question. A client wants a return on what they spent, and they should. The trouble is what measuring does to the feeling, because the feeling is the part that takes the longest to prove, and it's usually the first thing cut to make the numbers work sooner.

The world has figured out that a room like that is worth something. The reports all say it now. Presence builds loyalty, and the returns are real enough to put on a slide. I'll leave the credit alone, because the next move everybody's about to make is the wrong one. I've seen where it goes, and it wrecks the exact thing they just figured out was valuable.

Retail learned presence works, and its first instinct is to wire it for data. The same reports cheering the return of the physical store also cheer that the screens now going into those stores are about to drive most of the growth in retail advertising. Put those next to each other and you can see what's coming. They'll hang a number on the room, and the place you went to feel something becomes one more funnel. The second you do that, you take out the reason anybody wanted to be there.

What You Had to Show Up For

Presence got valuable for a reason the reports keep missing. It's the one thing a screen can't copy. A screen can reproduce almost anything now, instantly and at no cost, so the only thing left worth paying for is what happens once and can't be saved. Ask around and most people will tell you online shopping is missing something, that finding something in person felt better. That's a polite way of saying the screen hands you everything and lets you keep none of it.

There is something underneath that, in us. Convenience trained us to expect nothing to ever get in the way. And somewhere in there we also learned that easy tends to mean forgettable. A person who lives on their phone will still get on a plane to stand in an actual store, and the reason is that the effort was the point. You had to go. You were there. The body keeps what it paid to be present for and drops what came free. The real stuff stays with us because being there cost us something.

How the Emotion Gets Cut

I can't point to one room where this happened, because they all tend to follow the same story. A client wants a return on their investment, and that's fair. But everybody inside that company has a different return they have to hit, and each of them brings their own criteria for what the project has to prove. Every one of those criteria is reasonable on its own. Put them all in the same room and they start crowding out the one thing that actually moves an audience, which is emotion.

Emotion is the most effective tool we have, and it's also the slowest to show up in a report. That's the whole problem. It's felt immediately, in the room, on the night. But it's hard to track, and it may not turn up in the numbers for months, until somebody asks an attendee what they remember about that event and finds out the feeling stuck.

When you optimize too hard for the metrics you can read right away, you cut the room for the one that takes longer to prove. You strip out the emotion because it doesn't report fast enough, and emotion was the reason any of it was going to work.

That's the part that's really hard, and I won't pretend I've always got the argument to win it. Believing in presence means putting money into a moment you can't measure on the timeline everybody wants it measured on. Every finance conversation I've ever been in pushes against that. The creative work has two halves now. One is making the moment. The other is harder. It's protecting the emotion in it from all the reasonable people who need it to prove itself faster than it can.

I've seen plenty of versions of what comes next. Somebody sets out to buy presence, and what they end up with is a lobby with a logo. They bought the surface and missed the reason. You can feel it the second you walk in. Everything is technically there, and none of it does anything to you.

What can't be copied is a moment you had to be there for. That's the whole premium, and it's fragile. It dies the second you try to save it. When it works, a room full of people walk out carrying something none of them can replay, and they keep it exactly because nobody tried to wire it to be saved.