• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 21, 2013

What is real-time marketing? According to the opening panel at the Brand Marketers Summit in Kohler, Wisc., this morning, it’s all about listening to the conversation and being able to react to it -- in real-time, or as close as you can get to it.

“Real-time marketing means marketing at the speed of culture and being plugged in and monitoring it real-time,” explained Scott Carlis, VP Digital and Social Media, AEG Global Partnerships.

He and the other panelists said culture is the key ingredient, as well as keeping a “human,” not technological, focus on it.

Consumers don’t want to feel like they are being marketed in real-time as part of “some kind of master plan that was months in the work,” added Tom O'Keefe, Founder/Chief Executive Officer, O'Keefe, Reinhard & Paul.

In other words, it need to be authentic, genuine, and well, kind of like the way human beings -- not corporations -- actually behave. To do that, O’Keefe suggested brands and the humans who manage them, need to be “vulnerable and spontaneous and part of a conversation that is happening today.”

He said, consumers don’t want to be engaged started by brands, so much as they want brands to react to the conversations they’re having about those brands -- in real-time.