Re:Think!

We’ll be off presenting our media engagement model at the Advertising Research Foundation conference today with our client Rainbow Media. We’re pretty happy with the working definition and the high correlations we’ve been getting with our metrics and actual, in-market sales.

Locating consumer targets isn’t, of course, the problem. Engaging them, however, is more complex. In response to the rapidly evolving ways consumers use media, “engagement” has become the Holy Grail for marketers.

Without actual “engagement,” advertising and marketing efforts are just that; forays of creative and communication attempts aimed at what brands have identified as being appropriate audiences. They do not, unfortunately, guarantee that the “target” will become into a “customer.”

Yesterday at the Advertising Research Foundation’s annual conference, the “official” ARF definition of “engagement” was introduced to the industry. By mid-day, Adrants Daily had issued the following observation:

After eight months, the Advertising Research Foundation task force charged with defining the new measurement metric "engagement" hasn't really done so. Well, it seems simple to us. It's all about how involved one becomes with a media vehicle and how that involvement affects the brand. Hmm. How 'bout Time Spent (with medium) + Response Rate (average CTR, letters to editor, subscription/renewal rates, number of comments left on a blog) + Average Ad/Content Recall Rates + Uptick in Measured Brand Metric? And that was only after five minutes of thinking. Come on guys. It can't really be that difficult can it?

Well, in fairness, it is a bit more difficult and complex than that. “Time Spent” with the medium, for example, will always favor TV and cable, and TV and cable are not necessarily going to be the most “engaging” media for a brand. And the Advertising Research Foundation has a number of constituencies that they have to satisfy, so things might appear a bit more general than would be desired, but those are minor niggles. The Adrant guys are, after all, not researchers. But they do have a point.

On the basis of developing engagement measures that do correlate with behavior, here are eight absolute certainties about predictive engagement metrics:

1. “Engagement” is more than “getting attention,” “being noticed,” “spending time with” or “breaking through the clutter” of the 21st Century media ecology in which all marketers currently compete.

2. Real “engagement” is the consequence of any marketing or communications effort that results in an increased level of “brand equity” for the brand.

3. “Brand equity” is the degree to which a brand is believed by the target audience as being able to meet or exceed consumer expectations they hold for the category in which the brand competes.

4. This means that “engagement” must be measured on a category-specific basis. Cross-category generalizations may help to locate targets (and even contribute to the development of creative executions), but it will reveal little about engagement.

5. Engagement is integrally linked with loyalty, and thus, positive consumer behavior toward the advertised brand. If you are measuring anything else, you are probably fooling yourself. You are not measuring “engagement.”

6. Engagement research – while applicable to any phase of market, brand, or communication planning – has to regard media planning as synergistic and NOT siloed – and must have real motivation tied directly to evaluation (See #5).

7. Where engagement is realized, targets pay greater attention to advertisers’ ad messages, think better of the brand, and – in an actual transformation from “target” to “customer” – will demonstrate higher propensities to buy the advertised product.

8. The consumption and mix of media that is used to communicate advertising messages has direct and consequential behavioral effects on the level of engagement attained by the advertised brand.


There are other “Engagement” actualities. For example, an increase in “brand equity” is another way of measuring “loyalty,” which is always predictive of positive consumer behavior and very-nearly always predictive of profitability.

Consumer expectations in every category are on the rise, faster than most brands are able to keep up. This is why real “engagement” necessarily involves understanding what consumers really want (as opposed to what they say they want).

Today, given the lack of meaningful brand differentiation for virtually every brand in every product and service category, 70% (maybe more) of the decision to become engaged with a brand, i.e., act positively toward a brand, is emotionally-based which is why rational, direct Q&A-derived assessments are lacking in their abilities to identify real engagement effects.

To have seen you, to know you, is not (necessarily) to be engaged with you.

History may be a wonderful thing because it allows you to identify a mistake when you make it again, but engagement assessments must be predictive.

Anything else is a crapshoot!