Is the Engagement Metric Evolving?

Microsoft’s announcement of its new Engagement Mapping metric at the IAB conference this week created additional buzz around what was already one of the hottest online marketing topics of the moment. And not just this particular moment—it has been ongoing for awhile. Last summer ARF Chief Research Officer Joe Plummer defined it this way, "Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context." That’s an interesting concept, but it doesn’t give me any guidance as to how I could measure it.

Several marketers have proposed approaches to measuring brand engagement, especially online. Forrester has a concept that includes four factors--involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. That appears to combine attitudinal and behavioral measures, and that would be a strong approach. The public information makes it clear that it requires both online and offline data. That doesn’t make it cheap, but it makes it comprehensive, which is essential.

Brand Keys offers measures of engagement that are category-specific. Their measure relies heavily on customer expectations of brands in the category. They publish a list of highest-scoring brands in various categories each year.

Nielsen//NetRatings has changed its key measure of web traffic from page views to time spent on the site. They tout it as a better measure of engagement, and it certainly beats page views, which have well-known problems. However, that goes back to an old academic argument on the definition of brand loyalty (is engagement a precursor to loyalty--I think so). The argument is that loyalty is more than repeat purchase behavior—that can be just habit. True loyalty—and I suspect true engagement—requires understanding of attitudes as well as behavior.

Earlier this year Kevin Mannion wrote a three-part article (1, 2, 3) for MediaPost’s Metrics Insider Newsletter that gives an excellent summary of efforts to date. He references the work of Eric T. Peterson and Avinash Kaushik, both prolific writer/speakers on metrics issues. Mannion’s analysis of this body of work produces an engagement metric with six components. They are:
Loyalty: how often visitors return to a site over a long period of time.
Recency: how frequently visitors come to a site within a narrow time period.
Duration: how long visitors remain on the site.
Click Depth: the degree to which visitors view site content.
Interactivity: the kinds of actions visitors take with content (downloading content, viewing videos, attending webinars, posting content, etc.).
Subscription: the extent to which visitors register for services or content.
In the third installment he gives an example of how this metric would work. Note that it is all behavioral; to be specific it is all based on online metrics. That means it is based on data that online marketers currently can access.

That brings us full-circle to the Microsoft Engagement Mapping platform. According to Brian McAndrews of Microsoft, “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase. We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.” I can visualize what such a map would look like and how useful it would be, especially to the multichannel e-retailer.

It doesn’t solve the metrics issue, however. Engagement Mapping is all behavioral—more a measure of impact than engagement in my mind. If engagement is indeed an attitudinal state that is manifested in brand behavior of various types—both on and offline—we still don’t have a metric that truly captures the concept.
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Quarterlife--New Incubator For Programming?

Did you see the first episode of the new NBC series last night? If you’re anywhere close to my age, you probably didn’t unless you just stumbled upon it as I did. Actually, I knew that the first series to have originated on the web and move TO television was to be aired, so I stopped and took a look.

To me, while there was no obvious story line there was the usual navel-gazing andtwenty-something angst. It’s interesting, though, that the first episode prominently featured Dylan’s video blog as sort of a centerpiece of the social interaction.

For all of us who didn’t know, the webisode series debuted in November on MySpace. It got media attention because seasoned Hollywood producers were behind it. About the time it debuted on the Internet it was picked up by NBC for a broadcast series. The interplay between broadcast TV, Internet and the writers’ strike is interesting. The timing made the independent content attractive; how much pre-planning went into that I do not know.

The series had its own website, quarterlife.com. Here’s what it says about the series today. There’s lots of video, a community, and a dozen or so channels on which users can post UCG and discuss subjects ranging from art to love. The ones I looked at seemed to have active content.
With the debut of the TV series the show has a page on the NBC website where, among other things, you can watch full-length episodes.

The package has a clear target audience—young, creative professionals. It has interesting cross-promotion between web and television. What is says about the future of programming on both screens (until/unless they converge to become one) is less clear to me. It occurs to me that the Internet may prove to be a faster, lower-cost way to test story ideas. If television is first, will movies be far behind?

It’s an interesting new wrinkle in the already-chaotic new media world!
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Is Media Convergence Really Happening?

This video from AlwaysOn discusses disruptive change in media and looks at where media business models may be going. The kind of convergence they are talking about is the increasing media and marketing integration between traditional and online media. Or you could simply describe it as “survival”—see the newspaper headline in Friday’s post!
View the video here.

The venture capitalists at the AlwaysOn network survey media industry leaders and what they found is not hugely new but backs up the contention that new media is on the move. It doesn’t illustrate the fact that old media is behind much of the growth in new media, but it (necessarily) is. News of venture funding for Glam and British network Adicon makes the connection.

With that in mind respondents to this survey forecast that the move to new media would continue unabated. They believe that neither advertisers nor their traditional agencies have a good grasp on how to take advantage of changes like social networking or how to get a satisfactory ROI on their expenditures in new media. Other posts on this site discuss the need for better mobile standards, but nonetheless respondents see the mobile web assuming greater prominence in the near future. See all the survey results here.

Convergence is one description of what is going on. It’s not hardware convergence—everything available on a single device. The variety of content has probably outgrown that type of convergence. But media are coming closer to a seamless ecosystem in which users can get the content of their choice on the device of their choice at the location of their choice. Is that the ultimate goal or a milestone on the way to an even more disruptive innovation?
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Dove Does It Again!

Did you catch the Dove body wash commercial on the Oscar last night? The finalists were announced by actress Amy Brenneman, viewers could text their votes, and the winner was played late in the broadcast.

Assuming there was interest in the contest, there are two winners here. The Dove brand, surely, because it continues its “Real Beauty” theme. Also the Oscar telecast; this may have helped Jon Stewart draw younger, hipper viewers to the program.View the winning video here

But what also struck me is that I hadn’t heard of the contest until the broadcast last night, and I think I keep an eye on this stuff. So I went on a journey to see how it was promoted. Here’s what I found:
•The usual press release, which gives the basics but isn’t going to be read by Dove customers
•A dedicated website http://dovecreamoil.msn.com/; again this is necessary but it’s not going to draw viewers on its own
•Grey’s Anatomy actress Sara Ramirez was selected to promote the contest, and she did so actively. Thanks to ClickZ for a good summary of the promotion. And now I remember; I did see the initial video, so it was clearly out there.
•The contest was heavily promoted on AOL. Sara Ramirez appeared on Good Morning America and the video was posted on AOL and YouTube.
•The final voting was heavily promoted in the run-up to the Oscars.

The Campaign for Real Beauty has its own website and I didn’t find mention of the contest there. However, it’s the focus of the Dove homepage today with the $2.00 coupon offer that’s also on the contest site, so the follow-up is there also.

The point is simply this: success with this kind of marketing program doesn’t come automatically—or cheaply. There is, in fact, a carefully-planned IMC program behind it. Even though every opportunity is taken to make it viral (“send the video to your friends”), heavy promotion is necessary and I don’t see that changing. In fact, it may get more demanding as more companies solicit UGC with contests and anything else they can think of.

It reminds me of a comment I quoted in an eBrandMarketing post last week. Talking about adding social media to branding efforts the CEO of a Havas Media unit says, “To do it right costs money. . .It’s just allocated in different ways.”

So true!
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The New Media Drumbeat Continues

Buzz throughout the industry yesterday was about the ANA/Forrester study that shows marketers increasingly skeptical about the impact of television advertising on their brands. What caught my eye was the top three headlines in Marketing Charts. Each is significant, but their presence, one after the other on a single day, was powerful.
According to Advertising Age:

Sixty-two percent of marketers believe traditional TV ads have become less effective during the last two years. Given that belief, it's no surprise that close to half of them already have experimented with other ad formats that work with digital video recorders or video-on-demand programs. And more than 50% of marketers reported that when half of all TV households use DVRs, they will cut spending on TV advertising by 12%.

Looking at the report on purchase influence by BIGresearch (available for download on their Top Line Findings page) we see clear evidence of continuing gains by new media over traditional between December 2006 and 2007.

In the electronics category:

•Instant messaging and blogging showed the greatest increase for all adults 18 and over. The increase in purchase influence was greatest among African-American adults and least among Hispanics.
•Broadcast TV and cable TV were the biggest losers. That was true across Caucasians and Hispanics with African Americans reporting the greatest decline in purchase influence from TV. Hispanics showed an inexplicably large decrease in decline of purchase influence from direct mail.

Ditto for media influence on car and truck purchases. The same pattern of decrease in the impact of television and increase in new media applies. Instant messaging and blogging are gaining influence among all 3 groups. Web radio shows a huge increase in impact among African-Americans, with video on cell phones showing a decrease among Caucasians. One assumes that the sample sizes were relatively small for both web radio and video on cell phones. Newspaper continues its slow but seemingly inexorable slide among all groups but actually showed an increase in influence on car and truck purchases among Hispanics and African-Americans. The third headline speaks to the growth of newspaper websites at the expense of their print parents.

The theme doesn’t change—new media continue their growth trajectory. The details are fascinating in the study that looks at ethnic groups, just as it is in studies that look at other segments.

The message for marketers is also unchanged but increasingly urgent. They must learn to reach consumers by new media, and there aren’t yet many rules of the road. Experimenting with better ways to reach your own target audiences is the only way to go.
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