• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, April 3, 2006

Last year TV and marketers talked about consumers involved with brands under the term called "engagement." Now, the discussion has moved on to "transference."

What's next? A wedding?

Though a new in-house study, MTV analyzed advertising in relation to all its new and old platforms --cable, Internet, mobile, DVR--and came up with a new term "transference."

"In a multi-platform world, the brand is a signpost to guide consumers," Colleen Fahey Rush, executive vice president of MTVN Research told Mediaweek. "That consumers are more likely to transfer the positive feelings they have for these signposts to the client validates what we've been doing with our non-linear platforms."

In old psychology-speak, transference to the layman is when someone takes an experience from his or her youth and "transfers" it to another person or situation.

Typically, it's not a good thing--since it generally refers to someone responding the same way to a new situation or person from a previous experience. That "transfer" doesn't typically allow new information from the new situation.

But this is just the thing marketers want. They'd rather consumers not do too much digging. Just remember all those good feelings--even though a product might actually be worse now then years ago.

If you have good memories about Ivory soap as a kid, you probably will have good feelings about it now. If you saw an Ivory soap commercial on "TRL" or "Laguna Beach," then you'll probably have good feelings for Ivory when it sponsors a Foo Fighters concert that is airing exclusively on MTV's VOD service.

Last year's big new proposed TV metric focused on "engagement." Court TV and The Weather Channel, two big proponents, developed models and guarantees with media agencies during last year's upfront. They have yet to disclose how it all works.

What does it all mean? That's just the point. Definitions are needed. It took the Advertising Research Foundation a long time in coming up with one for engagement. They settled on "turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context."

Exactly... I guess. ARF executives now say the industry needs to develop a "robust measurement of when consumers are strongly engaged in brands and their surrounding environments."

So we're not even sure about how to measure "engagement" and along comes "transference." Further confusing things, media agency research executives say each marketer can have his own "engagement" or "transference" research metric.

My head spins. Sigmund Freud should be here to help out during the upfront so we could figure out a new rating guarantee. With "engagement" and "transference," marketers should ask for a pre-nup.