Let's get engaged

Engagement is hot. Everyone wants a piece of it. Or better yet, to own it. It isn't helping matters that everyone is trying to define the term in ways that advantage their particular medium or product or role in the advertising industry supply chain. So what’s this new beast we are all talking about?

Somewhere all this reminds me of the story of the five blind men who tried explaining what an elephant was …therefore lets not get into the usual dictionary definitions. That’s better left for the researchers and the academics to argue upon.

Nor am I going to lead in with a comprehensive set of suggested techniques. I am not that bold. Rather, I am going to present some of my thoughts on what I believe it is, what it is not, and what it should mean for the media and marketing community.

What is it?
Engagement in marketing terms relates to the consumption of an ad or specific messages by an audience. A sandwich not delivered is not a sandwich; neither is an ad that was never seen, nor an ad that was seen but not absorbed. If it didn't register with the person's brain, it was a wasted exposure. Be it the TVC that you missed while making a cup of coffee or the building wrap on the Sheikh Zayed road that you been driving past but can’t recollect.

Engagement is about capturing the consumers’ attention, engrossing them and ensuring they absorb the message.

What isn't it?
It is not exactly about the media or the media content. It is about the ad message and the audience and what happens between them. Nothing else. Many factors can affect engagement. Some include the media itself and its content, the ad creative execution, the ad message, the targeting, and the circumstances of the moment.

Many traditional communication metrics don’t truly touch upon engagement. Reach & frequency, Gross Rating Points (GRPs), magazine circulations and TV rating points are all typical metrics we focus on to assert whether a campaign was successful or not. But if we were to agree that consumer engagement is important then what metrics do we have?

Why should we care?
Understanding what engagement is and how to measure it is essential if we as marketers are going to be able to move past our often outdated, traditional metrics for measuring advertising effectiveness.

We need measurements that are more precise and relevant than media distribution or ad distribution or ad consumption based on passive recall surveys or remembered diaries. It has to move far beyond the current conventions that we have been adopting to make some sense out of the millions of dollars that we spend every day to get the consumers to listen to us.

We need metrics that speak to whether the consumer actually saw or heard the ad and whether they actually internalized it; whether they were actually impacted by it in any way. Circulation, readership, and reach and frequency are all overstated and irrelevant when considered in that light.

In the digital media space we have the same challenges. Some of the likely metrics that could be considered for measuring digital media engagement could be measuring overall behaviour of the user vis-à-vis the creative messaging. Right from the click through rate (CTR) to the site measurement points tracked by web analytics suites such as session time (amount of overall time the visitors’ spent on the brand website or within the brand environment), hot spots, onsite search queries, pathways analysis, access to the “more info” page along with downloads of branded content on the website such as screensavers, wallpapers, viewing’s of TVC’s, submission of content, number of emails received (with both positive and negative views).

Key factors such as the number of search engine queries that has been made on a brand name, number of blog entries made on the brand/campaign, as well as response to consumer generated media campaigns (CGM) are becoming the new order of engagement measurement.

So if we look it seriously enough there are points of measurement out there which could give us a much better picture than what we have right now.

How will we do it?
The key to engagement will be creating and delivering 'ads that people want”. Hmm sounds quite simple? That will be the driver. It will be about them and what they want, not what the advertiser or the media wants. That will be the only way to actually get them to accept ads rather than blocking them, to notice and digest them, rather than ignoring them.

It does not mean that the media and its content and its brands will become irrelevant. Quite the contrary. The environment in which a consumer receives an ad is very important. Not only is it an essential enabler for delivering ads to the right person, but it can make a big difference. The same ad delivered in different media and different ad units will impact audiences differently. They will engage with them differently. That difference will be the unique and special value that each media and each media channel will bring to the table. Those differences will be very important when it comes to media selections and price.

However, those differences will no longer be the center of the universe in the process of planning, buying, and measuring effective advertising. They will become planets in that universe, and the audience and the ads will become the new sun.