What Will Be The Impact of ARF’s Decisions on Engagement?

On March 21, at its Annual Conference, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) will announce its new official definition of Engagement and how it is to be validated and measured. In the ARF program for that conference, the first line about the opening session says: “Engagement is being defined as the new currency for advertising ROI.”

The word “currency” made me think about the numbers that media buyers and sellers use, and so I asked about this. Joe Plummer, Chief Research Officer of ARF, and leader of the Joint ANA, AAAA, and ARF Task Force on Engagement (which had been codenamed MI4 before it was unveiled), corrected me. Joe said: “The MI4 project has never set as its goal a new single measure of currency that will apply to all consumer touchpoints. Our goal has been to get people thinking in new ways beyond exposure or ‘reach’ in this new world of media and consumer behavior and encourage the search for new metrics that can be useful for both planning and tracking/evaluating performance. We have not focused on buying or currency measures. Thus, at the Annual conference we will announce a framework and a definition of engagement.”

I think that what Joe is saying to me is that Engagement will be a new metric for post-evaluation but not necessarily for buying.

Combining this with other public statements ARF has made, there might be three Engagement metrics announced that day, one for media Engagement, one for ad Engagement, and one for brand Engagement.

The measure of brand Engagement might be the ultimate ROI surrogate in the post-evaluation of a media campaign. Depending on how ARF advises us to measure it, that measure might or might not be something that can be broken out by individual media contribution. Of course, it would be most useful to be able to break it out by media, because otherwise brand Engagement would be useful for creative improvement but not for media improvement.

If the ad Engagement tracking is designed to explain the overall level of brand Engagement effect, then we will learn about individual media contribution by using these two metrics together.

And, if media Engagement turns out to be predictive of ad Engagement, then all three types of Engagement metrics would need to be applied together in a cohesive system.

In any case, it seems likely that what we learn in post-evaluation using Engagement metrics will feed back to changing the way we buy media. Although as Joe says, the intent is not to create a buying currency, this does not mean that there will be no impact on buying.

Because I enjoy speculating, here are some of the things I would expect to occur as the Engagement metrics percolate through the industry.

• The new Engagement metric may turn out to be similar to certain existing metrics e.g. Jan Hofmeyr’s “Brand As Friend” measurement which reflects consumer bonding with a brand and plays an important role in Jan’s seminal Conversion Theory of how advertising works.
• I would bet that sponsorship approaches will tend to increase post-evaluation scores of that “emotional bonding” type. Thirty studies Next Century Media has conducted show that Internet sponsorships average seven times the Persuasion effect of average TV commercials. There is what I hypothesize is a Gratitude Effect in sponsorships when they are done right. (This is a big subject so I’ll save more of it for the next posting.) Thus the buying could tend to shift toward sponsorship as a category, and this would affect what we call media planning more than what we call media buying, in that the buyer would not be doing anything differently in picking spots and books with that part of the budget that is not sponsorship.
• On the other hand, I can imagine that we might discover that certain people in the broader target audience might turn out to be more susceptible to becoming Engaged than others. Going back to Hofmyer for example what he calls a brand’s “Convertibles” and “Availables” (non-purchasers of the brand who have a latent liking for the brand) might be much more likely to become Engaged with that brand than those who are not interested in that brand at all. If that happens then Engagement could affect buying. Buyers would be given target audience definitions which either directly or through a surrogate target, aim at not just purchasers, but purchasers susceptible to brand Engagement.
• Finally, if media Engagement scores turn out to be predictive of ad Engagement which cumulates in brand Engagement, then buying will involve weighting the number of susceptible targets reached, by the media Engagement score, and spending the budget to minimize the Cost Per Thousand of that.

If these speculations bear fruit, this paradigm shift will do more to shake up the media world than all of the technology changes which have already whipped the advertising/media industries into a bubbling froth. Not intended to be buying currency, Engagement could cause the application of straight audience data (today’s buying currency) to mutate into having only, say, a third of its current weight in the eventual buying currency.

In the next posting: some thoughts about the three drivers of Engagement put forth by ARF’s Joe Plummer, and how they help explain the unusually high Persuasion scores achieved by “brought to you by” Internet sponsorships and the remarkable phenomenon of Internet Behavioral Targeting often out-engaging Contextual Targeting when everything we’ve always believed says that this is impossible.

PS – I see here that I promised to talk about Durationism. That’s the idea that one can measure Engagement by measuring how long people on average stay tuned to a program (or how often they watch its telecasts, or both). This needs its own blog posting because it gets into the many ways that Engagement can be measured. I’ll work on that for the posting after next .