MediaPost Publications New Media Join 'Engagement' Bash, Confront Elephant In Room 11/03/2006

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New Media Join 'Engagement' Bash, Confront Elephant In Room

by Max Kalehoff, Friday, November 3, 2006, 10:57 AM

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As the social-media and Web 2.0 revolution continues, I've been convinced the traditional advertising and media establishment was alone in the debate over engagement. The old institution is nothing less than frenzied over the eroding reach-and-frequency model. Well, I was dead wrong.

Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 last week pointed out that some major Web 2.0 and new-media insiders--whose religion usually seems galaxies apart from the traditional sect--are facing similar challenges and stumbling into the same engagement conundrum. Among these new-media stars include rising video bloggers Ze Frank (of the show with zefrank) and Michael Barron (of Rocketboom). They simply can't agree on the relative size and importance of their audiences.

Perhaps most notable is Robert Scoble, the influential blogger and former Microsoft staffer famed for building a friendlier, human face for his employer. Scoble, now working at a podcasting media company called Podtech.net, recently underscored how all media experiences are not equal and therefore result in different outcomes: "There's another stat out there called 'engagement.' No one is measuring it that I know of. What do I mean? Well, I've compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see. Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you'll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don't just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too."

Scott Karp correctly noted how new-media people "may be ahead of the curve on formats and hip notions like 'conversation,' but they're actually playing catch-up on the deep, intractable problems of media-- like how to prove the value." Scoble validated this, but, to my delight, he also tackled the monumental elephant in the room. Yes, the one that so many avoid: the connection among engagement, action and sales.

Scoble wrote: "So, why should engagement matter to an advertiser? Well, as an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who'll actually DO something. Yeah, I'm hoping to get a sale. Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400. My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today['s], but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention. How could we measure audience engagement?"

There is no be-all solution to measuring engagement; heck, the advertising and media industry is having a hard enough time agreeing on a definition! But the lack of action, sales or a defined business outcome in all the pondering is a problem. I'm not omitting the value of captivating media or brand experiences, nor am I suggesting a narrow world of direct response. But there's got to be a closer link to the desired business result. That's largely why Erwin Ephron, a media planning guru, has declared the debate nothing more than Abbot and Costello. For addressing this issue, and even representing the media-publisher side of the equation, I present Scoble with a platinum medal of honor.

So what's next? The fact is that few understand the relationship among media content, the involvement of audiences with said media, and the business outcome that results when advertisers join the party. To make matters worse, that relationship is getting more complex in a world undergoing media-choice proliferation, attention aversion and trust erosion. And there are other emerging variables in the engagement quandary: brands are increasingly becoming media experiences themselves, without mediators, and audiences are playing a more prominent role in forming and becoming part of such experiences.

Looking ahead, measuring engagement will probably manifest in a hybrid approach, rooted in sophisticated data integration, and resembling something closer to direct-relationship marketing. It also will require closer collaboration among media, advertisers and especially customers, with methods unique to each circumstance (versus spending all our time trying to reach a broad-sweeping model). But however we get there, engagement must stay channeled toward business outcome. Without that focus, all this engagement could prove ephemeral.

This commentary is insightful. I recommend it to others.

5 comments on "New Media Join 'Engagement' Bash, Confront Elephant In Room"

James Nail from Cymfony, Inc

commented on: November 06, 2006 at 6:14 PM

You've hit the reason we need the engagement metric the ARF is trying to develop. It is relatively easy to measure these actions, but just because there is no action doesn't mean the medium isn't effective. It has been well-proven that banner ads have impact at least twice the click-through rate. Market mix modeling has shown that advertising can be more cost-effective at moving CPG products than couponing or trade promotions. Without something like engagement, advertisers may throw out everything that doesn't generate an immediate action -- much to their detriment.
Marc Bodner from Seven-Zero-Eight-Five

commented on: November 03, 2006 at 1:03 PM

As a Nielsen buzz guy you may not like this comment. If you need to measure engagement then you are not receiving a measurable business outcome. I remember selling local TV in the last century (should make the Web 2.0 guys feel better). Those clients could care less about audience measurement, who did what to whom, when they did it and how they did it. They only cared about how much business they could get from an invested dollar. And they all had pretty solid ways to take that measurement. The further up the food chain in regional and national, the less they cared about outcome and the more they cared about audience size, press mentions about the creative, how the audience was segmented, who was talking around the water cooler about their ad, etc. And the clients they represented had very little ACCURATE measurement in the results per dollar invested. As we move further into Web 2.0 this is starting to come true again. The more creative we try to get with the medium the less we can measure the business outcome. But thankfully we can measure BUZZ. And something tells me that A.J. Lafley will not want to let go as much if the measurement he finds most accurate is BUZZ and not business outcome.
bonnie Larner from Barber Martin advertiisng

commented on: November 03, 2006 at 12:47 PM

Soon, message effectiveness will be measured using a very simple formula : the number of sales and/or action generated by the target. Zounds! What a novel idea. Why should marketers provide a service and get paid if they don't provide the service? The other "stuff" we do is but part of the real service we provide -- to help generate sales/action by the consumer. I wouldn't pay for a meal in a restaurant if I never got served the meal. No matter how long it took to prepare or how delicious fellow diners tell me it is. No meal. No pay. Marketers should have started charging by effectiveness 25 years ago. It's not too late.
Tim Germer from Dotster

commented on: November 03, 2006 at 12:12 PM

Excellent post! I have also seen the low-click/visit outcome when published in a newspaper, as opposed to being talked about in a blog.
Mike Mescolotto from HRP

commented on: November 03, 2006 at 11:52 AM

I can't see a way to ever measure engagement. This is an intangible that can really only be estimtated. It's about content and every person will exhibit different behavior, every person will weigh the relevance of an advertiserment differently. If there are a million people "hanging out" and no one clicks an ad it does not mean that the level of engagement is low. It means that there is some bad creative or the ad is not relevant to the people whi are there. Obviously content that one must select and download will generate a higher level of engagement that other types but trying to apply a metric to that is like trying to measure beauty with a number or rank the best paintings of all time. I think we need to stop trying to come with answers to questions like this one and measure the value and effectiveness of advertising by evaluating SALES GENERATED.

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	MAX KALEHOFF
	Max Kalehoff is vice president of marketing for Clickable, a search-marketing solution for small and mid-size businesses. He also writes AttentionMax.com

AUTHORS

» Kendall Allen (Monday)
» Joe Marchese (Tuesday)
» Cory Treffiletti (Wednesday)
» Dave Morgan (Thursday)
» Max Kalehoff (Friday)
» Seana Mulcahy
» Mark Naples
» Shelly Palmer
» Tom Hespos

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