The Great Engagement Debate

ARF has stirred up a useful debate about Engagement. In the previous post we gave our own notion of what Engagement is – it cuts across multiple levels of the ARF Model to include all of the work an ad has to do to accomplish its mission – gain attention, persuade, cause purchase behavior.

Others are tossing in very interesting and valuable insights to the pot. Mike Bloxham of Ball State University reports from the results of his Middletown studies that print appears to have higher Engagement than other media. By which he means: when print is being used, there is more of a tendency to focus on it exclusively. When non-print media are being used, they are more commonly being used two or more at a time.

We wonder what Erwin Ephron would say about this. In a recent paper Erwin points out that what we are striving for is the Engagement of the ad, not of the medium itself. He explains that a medium can have high Engagement and yet this could fail to rub off on higher ad Engagement, depending on the specific creative.

Echoing Erwin’s emphasis on the creative aspect of Engagement, Meg Blair and the ARS organization have compiled data which shows that “In the context of ROMI*, the power of the message (ad) is by far the larger contributing factor, explaining 51%, or 4 times the contribution of media/weight (explaining 13%).”

It is horrifying to contemplate the hidden implications when one compares Meg’s piechart to the one produced by most Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) exercises. Take a look and see if it strikes you the way it struck me.

Meg’s pie:

Typical Modeling pie today:

In Meg’s pie, TV gets credit for 64% of the brand share changes. In the typical modeling pie, TV gets credit for 8.7%. The only difference is that in today’s modeling, Engagement variance is assumed to be zero. The quality of the ads is assumed to be not a factor of any importance in driving brand sales. In Meg’s approach to modeling, ARS Persuasion scores are used to weight GRPs. In straight MMM, GRPs are used unweighted by creative persuasion. Meg’s approach to modeling using persuasion data seems to come close to delivering the Engagement metrics on which ARF has set their sights.

The part that horrifies me is that decisions about where to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars each year are being made on the basis of the modeling that says creative has zero impact.

Hopefully this intolerable state of affairs will start to change rapidly once ARF announces its definition of Engagement on March 21 as part of their Annual Convention in New York.

Stay tuned. In our next post, more on the Engagement debate, including a look at Durationism, and some educated guesses as to what ARF might announce next month.

Bill

*ROMI=Return On Marketing Investment