After years of mulling concepts like attentiveness, involvement, and engagement as a means of measuring the impact media buys have on advertising effectiveness, Madison Avenue is officially embracing
"engagement," as its new media planning metric - one that could replace the vaunted concept of "frequency" as the multiplier in most media plans. But a panel of advertisers and agency executives
discussing the move Wednesday during a closing panel session at the Association of National Advertisers' 2005 Marketing Accountability Forum in New York had a difficult time defining exactly what the
new metric would be, how it would be applied, or whether it would be done so consistently across all media.
"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.
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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."