Ben Moorsom
Every message you send competes for a mind that has never been more selective.
Not ignored. Never admitted.
That decision can be designed for.
Ben Moorsom
Speaker · Author · Researcher · Founder, Debut Group
Ben Moorsom brings thirty years of evidence on what audiences admit, and what makes them act. For leaders who need more than attention.
Ben Moorsom
Thirty years of evidence on what audiences admit, and what makes them act. For leaders who need more than attention.
See your audience differently
Every message competes for a limited amount of attention, and there is more competing for it than ever. The mind copes by narrowing what it lets in, and most of what organizations say does not make the cut. Engagement that works starts with understanding what does, and why, and with charting the route from attention to action before spending on either.
A company answers a disengaged workforce with more communication: more town halls, more email, more screens in the lobby. Attention falls anyway, because each added message spends a little more of the attention the important ones needed, until nothing gets through. The lever is selection, and it has to be pulled on purpose.
Loud pre-show music that makes an audience compete with the room. Environments so stimulating they spend people's cognitive currency before the message arrives. Trade show floors with nowhere to recover, so attendees leave early to find it. A brand on every surface, teaching a room to stop looking. None of these are failures of effort. The effort is aimed at the wrong target.
The communication that works is rarely the loudest or the most frequent. It is the message the mind is ready to admit, delivered when and where it can be held. Thirty years of live audits have shown what that looks like in practice, and where the usual instincts go wrong. Leaders who work from that evidence cut the risk of missing the mind altogether. It is the difference between guessing at the route and knowing it.
The kind of engagement that counts
Affecting engagement is the kind that leads to the behavior your communication and experiences exist for. Not the open rate, the applause or the survey score, but what people did afterward. It is the only kind worth designing for.
From hundreds of live audits
None of this is intuition. It is what the audits, run alongside behavioral researchers, keep showing.
Customers, employees, stakeholders
A customer at an expo, an employee in a town hall and a board member reading a report all decide the same way. What differs is what stands between your message and each of them. Ben's work maps that route for each audience, so what you send arrives, and leads somewhere.
Customers and markets
Expo floors, congresses, launches, campaigns and media placements compete in the most crowded space a customer moves through. Ben's audits show what makes a customer stop and decide, and why so many of the tactics built to draw them in send them elsewhere.
Expos · Congresses · Launches · Campaigns · Media
Employees and teams
Town halls, internal summits, change programs and the daily stream of messages most people have learned to tune out. The evidence explains why more communication has not produced more engagement, and how to reach a workforce without adding to the noise it already lives in.
Town halls · Summits · Change programs · Internal communications
Stakeholders and decision makers
Boards, investors, partners, regulators and communities: the audiences with the least time and the highest stakes. Here the question is how to get a message admitted by people who are paid to be selective, and how to turn a hearing into a decision.
Boards · Investors · Partners · Communities · Advocacy
Wherever the audience is, the route from attention to action runs through the same place: the mind. That is where Ben starts.
For event planners and bureaus
For the people who book speakers, and the committees they answer to. Everything here is written to be forwarded.
Why audiences have become more selective, and what it takes to reach them now. Ben has studied real audiences alongside behavioral researchers for thirty years. He speaks about what that evidence shows: why more communication does not lead to change, why many of the practices we call engaging produce the opposite effect, and how to design communications, events, environments and experiences the mind will admit. Leaders leave seeing their audiences differently and knowing what to do about it.
Because he brings evidence, and evidence changes decisions. Ben founded Debut Group in 1997. Since then he has studied how real audiences engage through hundreds of live audits and a dedicated research team, and built his frameworks from what they found. He does not bring a theory of attention. He brings what the audiences themselves revealed, told so that a room can act on it.
He starts from the mind rather than the message. Most speakers on engagement talk about what to say and how often. Ben talks about what the audience's mind is doing while you say it, and why so much of what we believed to be engaging works against us. His examples come from the field, and rooms recognize their own practices in them. He covers the whole of it: customers, employees and the stakeholders you need to move. He does not leave an audience with a diagnosis, either. He shows them how to change course, and the evidence that justifies the change.
When your audience is responsible for reaching people and the usual signals are not telling them the truth. Marketing and brand leaders, communications and HR teams, event and experience owners, and executive groups about to spend real money on being heard. Skeptical rooms suit him. What he shows them is recognizable, because they have watched their own efforts fade, and by the end they know why and what to change.
Attendees leave with:
What a committee needs in one place.
Short bio. Ben Moorsom is a keynote speaker, researcher and the founder of Debut Group and AffectCX. For thirty years he has studied why audiences engage and why they do not, through hundreds of live audits with behavioral researchers. He is the author of Engagement: Decoded, now in its second edition, and he speaks to leaders who need customers, employees and stakeholders to do more than pay attention.
Stage introduction. Our next speaker has spent thirty years asking one question: why does so much engagement miss? Ben Moorsom founded Debut Group in 1997 and went on to assemble the first PhD team dedicated to the neuroscience of engagement. The frameworks that came out of that work, Neuroscaping and the Behavioral Experience Audit among them, are used by some of the largest companies in the world to reach audiences that grow more selective every year. He is the author of Engagement: Decoded and the founder of AffectCX. He is here to show us what the mind admits, what it discards, and what to change so that what we say leads to what we need people to do. Please welcome Ben Moorsom.
Tell him about the audience, what they are responsible for, and what you need them to think, feel or do differently afterward. He will give you a straight answer on fit. Then, on a pre-event call, he will learn what your audience is up against in their own engagement efforts and what stands in their way. The session is shaped to exactly that.
Keynotes and leadership sessions
What the mind admits, what it discards, and the design decisions that decide which. The room leaves with a different picture of its own audiences, and a reason to stop competing for attention.
Ideal for leadership conferences, marketing, brand and communications summits, and any audience about to spend real money on being heard.
The evidence behind the book. The myths of engagement, the barriers hiding inside an organization's own efforts, and the route from attention to the behavior those efforts exist for.
Ideal for executive offsites, HR and internal communications teams, event and experience owners, and skeptical rooms.
Keynote, 45 to 60 minutes. Leadership session, 90 minutes to a half day.
Keynote with working session for the teams who own the outcome.
Pre-event call on your audience. Q&A. In person or virtual.
Beyond the stage, Ben advises leadership teams directly at behavioralengage.com and through Debut Group, the consultancy he founded in 1997.
Proof
Ben doubled attendance and time spent by attracting attention instead of competing for it. Competitors copied the approach.
Eight years investigating and affecting behavioral design factors for event systems.
Ben led audience diversity work across Google's event systems.
What leaders say
Engagement is key to business success. But now more than ever, companies are struggling to define it. Ben Moorsom dives into the science of engagement and presents revolutionary, effective, and highly-applicable strategies to drive meaningful engagement across your organization. An indispensable resource for any senior leader or entrepreneur.
Ben Moorsom is an expert in engagement. He's opened my eyes to possibilities that lie on the other side of traditional practices; the places we can go when we start putting ourselves in our customer's shoes. The Debut Group team has helped us transform conference experiences throughout our organization and we've seen highly improved customer engagement after implementing Ben's design insights.
On the journey that Ben and I have been on, I've seen his relentless quest for finding novel ways to enhance the human experience, whether live, online, or even interpersonal interactions. Over the years, my companies, brands, and teams have benefited from Debut Group's amazing thought leadership and execution.
Behavioral change-makers
Ben Moorsom
Most of what organizations spend to be heard never reaches the mind. Ben set out to change that.
Ben founded Debut Group in 1997 and saw early, before the industry had language for it, that most engagement work was not changing behavior. Applause was not action. He went looking for the reason and found it in the mind. Attention is finite, the competition for it is relentless, and most efforts lose without ever knowing it.
He has spent every year since turning that discovery into evidence leaders can act on. He assembled the first PhD team dedicated to the neuroscience of engagement, created Neuroscaping® and the Behavioral Experience Audit™, and built AffectCX™ to read affect at scale. Every framework carries the same intent: change the trajectory of how organizations engage, and reduce the risk of missing the mind. The cost of missing is real: wasted budget, wasted hours, and audiences asked to attend and given nothing they can hold.
He still runs the audits himself, and works directly with leadership teams through his advisory practice at behavioralengage.com.
The method
More than fifteen years ago Ben assembled the first PhD team dedicated to the neuroscience of engagement. The frameworks below came out of that work. Each one exists to inform engagement with evidence, and to move an audience from adverse engagement to affecting engagement: from attention that fades to behavior that lasts.
The book
Second Edition
Why Disengagement Is Accelerating and the Behavioral Design Leaders Need to Reverse It
Ben's account of why audiences disengage faster every year, and the behavioral design that turns it around. Written for the leaders who own the outcome.
Before you write
No. Events are where the work started and where the effect on behavior is easiest to see. The same understanding applies to communications, environments, customer experience and internal change.
Every one. The pre-session call exists to learn what your audience is up against in their own engagement efforts, and the session is built around it.
Agencies report interaction. Ben brings evidence of why people engage, why they do not, and what to change so that they do, drawn from decades of studying real audiences.
It depends on format, audience and location. Start a conversation and you will have a clear answer within a day.
Start a conversation
One short note. Ben reads every one.
Or email info@benmoorsom.com
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