"I actually came here to hear the answer to that," quipped Bob DeSena, managing director-Mars Direct at packaged goods marketers Masterfoods USA, and a member of a task force organized by the ANA, the Advertising Research Foundation and the American Association of Advertising Agencies to lead an industry-wide initiative that would adopt "consumer engagement" as a media metric that would complement traditional measures of media exposure.

But while the panelists agreed that engagement would likely be used as a complement for one core media planning measure - audience reach - they implied that engagement would supplant the concept of frequency, or the number of time a consumer is exposed to an ad. "This is the effectiveness index now," said DeSena.

Beyond that, there seemed no consensus among the panelists, which also included Procter & Gamble Manager of Information Technology Research Organization Ted McDonnell, Grey Interactive Managing Director Norman Lehoullier, and Starcom MediaVest Group Executive Vice President-Global Research Director Kate Sirkin, about how to define it as a common currency, or whether it even could be.

They all agreed, however, that the move was being driven by two factors: The clutter of advertising media that is making simple exposure to an advertising message irrelevant; and the emergence of digital, interactive media capable of demonstrating consumer engagement. The big question, said Grey Interactive's Lehoullier, is whether all media should be treated on the same basis in terms of engagement, something he said the industry has been doing to the detriment of media that are more engaging.

"We have the ability to measure the depth of engagement with the media we have available today," he asserted, "but we treat them all the same."

"It's a real challenge to find the right metric that works across all these things," added SMG's Sirkin, noting that her agency has been working closely with the magazine industry, with online media outlets and with branded entertainment developers to develop measures of engagement that are unique to each of their businesses. While she implied it was unlikely that a single, common denominator of engagement could be applied equally to all media, she said it should not impede any medium from moving forward with the metric as a basis of advertising effectiveness. In fact, she noted that SMG already has negotiated two of its 2005-06 network TV upfront advertising deals with audience guarantees that are somehow tied to measures of engagement. Those deals she pointed out were not done with the biggest players, like ABC, CBS and NBC, but with two more entrepreneurial TV networks: Court TV and The Weather Channel.

The one common thing about the concept of "engagement," concluded Grey Interactive's Lehoullier, is that "everyone likes it. "The problem," he added, "is when you try to define it."

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