Back in April of this year, The Starr Conspiracy and Ocho welcomed four new members to the Media Team. As one of these new members, I am pleased to make the blogging debut for our group and initiate a series of posts discussing what each of us will contribute to TSC. As a team, we bridge the gap between advertising and technology and we plan to keep our perspective well aligned with Ocho. If you are not familiar with our eight-armed mascot, Ocho is a loved and valuable inveterate invertebrate advocating our value of veracity. (Sorry, got on a roll inspired by a scene in V for Vendetta.)

Over the past decade, employee engagement has hovered right around 30 percent. So, it’s not surprising that there’s widespread cynicism about the ability of SaaS technology to improve engagement — it hasn’t so far, so why should it now? That said, over the last few years we’ve seen many innovative companies making great strides to define and develop an employee engagement solution, and each has been approaching the problem in its own unique way.

After a couple of weeks in the wild, The Starr Conspiracy’s Employee Engagement Brandscape Report™ has prompted lots of questions. Probably the most frequently asked is this one: “Seventy-four billion dollars? Really? That number seems way too big and impossibly huge.”