• by Ross Fadner , September 19, 2008

“We’ve bastardized this world called engagement” and confused it with interactivity, Eyeblaster’s Dean Donaldson proclaimed during an OMMA Global Metrics panel. A consumer interacting with an ad is not necessarily engaging with a brand, he said. “Branding is about changing shifts of mindset, shifts of behavior; telling a story, making an emotional connection. Engagement is about intention.”

 

How in the world do you measure that? For Steve Weinswig, president of BlowTorch Entertainment, “engagement is probably too big of a word,” because it means so many different things to marketers, many of which cannot be measured. He pointed out that, “intent, influence and brand affinity” are a mixture of CPM based things make marketers comfortable and action-based things that can’t be measured. What happens if I see a Nike ad that inspires me to make my own video? he asked. As Donaldson suggested, short of having chips installed in us, there may not be a way to measure that…