• by November 1, 2005

ACTUALLY, IT PROVED TO BE A BIT UNRULY--Monday's Radio TV Research Council luncheon at the Yale Club in New York was supposed to help clarify the "Rules of Engagement," but from what we could tell, it seems like the industry might be better suited by circulating copies of "The Rules." That's the book that's supposed to help women find their significant others and get them to commit in a significant way. And it's not because the book happened to be written by a former Adweek editor. It's because when it comes to the subject of engagement--how to measure whether people are paying attention to media and advertising content--Madison Avenue is acting like it's still on its first date.

That would explain the awkward moments during the panel discussion when it became clear that different agendas might make it impossible to arrive at a consensus of what engagement is, how it should be measured, and how it should be applied in planning and buying media.

"The word itself is useless," declared Erwin Ephron, the ultimate playboy of the media planning world. And it's not because he doesn't want to make a commitment, he said, but because it's difficult to know what you're actually committing to. "Engagement isn't a single thing," he said, noting how it could relate to hard metrics such as the length of a commercial message and the amount of commercial clutter, or softer things like the "consumer's inner state." The latter is likely not something that would be practical for Madison Avenue--at least not its media practitioners--to focus on.

Oddly, that seemed to be just the sort of thing another respected panelist, ZenithOptimedia's Bruce Goerlich, thought the industry should focus on. "This is a social science, not a physical science," suggested Goerlich in response to a question from consultant and former NBC research czar Nicholas Schiavone, who asked the panelists why they seemed so far apart, and what they knew of another Madison Avenue initiative to nail the engagement thing down: the Advertising Research Foundation's so-called MI4 task force. But that task force, which was announced with some fanfare during the Association of National Advertisers' Accountability Forum in July, doesn't appear to be any closer to a consensus than the RTRC panel was. When Schiavone pointed out that ARF chief Bob Barocci has been on record as saying MI4 would take "10 years" to bear fruit, fuming, "We know nothing," the panelists all shook their heads in agreement, muttering things like, "We don't know" and "We haven't been asked to be involved." Not exactly engaging, is it?

As for the here and now, all the RTRC panelists agreed that engagement has become a new imperative, but they were split in terms of how to achieve it. Goerlich said ZenithOptimedia requires that it be "measurable, repeatable, syndicated," and perhaps most importantly, that it can be applied at a level that is relevant to specific brands.

The Weather Channel's Ned Greenberg indicated engagement is fraught with complications of both dependent variables (media) and independent variables (creative), but was happy to point out that research shows The Weather Channel to be highly engaging and unlikely to be zapped. "Nobody TiVos the weather," he smirked.

David Marans, the long-time champion of engagement-like research while working on Madison Avenue, but who has recently become an engaging research pitchman for IAG Research, all but resisted his urge to say IAG's recall research methods were a suitable proxy for engagement, but he did stick up for the concept, noting that years of research have proven that engaging program environments are more likely to deliver viewers who are engaged with the advertising that runs in those environments.

Court TV's Debbie Reichig, for one, tried to temper the debate, pointing out that it might be easier and far more practical to focus on things that can be measured and proven, such as research measuring the "propensity of a viewer to see" an ad. Reichig, who, along with Weather's Greenberg, represents one of the few TV networks to actually negotiate advertising deals tied to at least some form to engagement measures, said the way to do that isn't by focusing on big, grandiose concepts of ROI that ultimately may prove highly subjective and difficult if not impossible to measure, but on things everyone can agree on.

"I'm not sure there needs to be one definition of engagement," she recommended. "We really just need to bring ROI down to its subcomponents."

One way or another, someone had better figure out how to do that, because if Ephron is correct, than the industry has a much bigger problem waiting in the wings.

"Engagement is a cry for help," he noted, adding, "Advertising isn't working well any more."