• by October 28, 2005

AN ENGAGEMENT YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS -- We don't like Mondays, but we have two reasons to look forward to the start of the next business week. First of all, it's Halloween, and we just love dressing up - not to mention the treats, and the tricks. Second of all, it's a day when some of the industry's brightest research minds will tackle something equally scary, or depending on your perspective, fun: Engagement. What's that you say? There's already been too much spin and not enough substance on this topic? And quite frankly you're feeling disengaged? Well, that's precisely why you'll want to pop by the Yale Club around lunchtime to hear, "The Rules Of Engagement." That's the title of this month's Radio TV Research Council luncheon in New York, and it's got a pretty spooky lineup: ZenithOptimedia's Bruce Goerlich, Court TV's Debbie Reichig, The Weather Channel's Ned Greenberg, Mindshare's - er IAG's - David Marans, and of course, Erwin Ephron.

If that's not engaging enough for you, the subject matter should be. The panel will try and move past the buzzword and give some real meat and definition to the whole engagement thing, and will give some real examples of things they're really doing to make engagement a real media metric - possibly even, the new ROI. That's return on involvement, of course, which has become industry code for return on a media investment.

Actually, we'd like to take this opportunity to propose a very simple method of measuring engagement: Create a panel of comprised exclusively of DVR users. Fix it so that they can only watch TV on a near-live or recorded basis. If they watch the commercials, they're engaged. If they don't, well, then they are not.

RIFFIFICATION -- Thursday's column unfairly chided Nielsen Media Research for failing to take action on Nielsen's Independent Task Force For Television Measurement's report and recommendations on how Nielsen should fix its local people meter and minority audience measurement problems. We should have chided Nielsen on something else, because it has taken some actions, and has begun thinking about taking others. Those developments have been detailed in two separate progress reports. Click here to review the last one, issued in June.