Engagement By Engagement

Engagement Not Dead, But In Remission

2007-07-24T18:13:00.001-07:00

Obviously, I haven’t updated this blog in nearly six months. This blog is not dead, but it’s in extended remission. Perhaps I’ll rejuvenate it sometime, when there’s much more to report. I’m sure another wave of discussion and advancement around advertising engagement is inevitable, though I feel we’re in an in-between period. I’d love your thoughts and suggestions about how we might rekindle coverage in the future.

In the meantime, I’m still very active over at AttentionMax.

At The End Of The Day, Is Engagement A Buzzword?

2007-01-05T14:31:00.000-08:00

Philip Tiongson at Organized Chaos says "engagement" should be added to the list of most overused words in the creative profession:

"Engagement" - Engagement, engagement, engagement - the holy grail of media planners. What exactly is it? What does it mean? Erwin Ephron has given us some thoughts about - but what do we do with it? Is it measurable? Is it observable? Is it real? Is it like Schrodinger's cat - half alive, half dead?

Can anyone anwser Philip?

Consumer Empowerment Turns Your Message & Reputation Into the True Vehicle of Your Brand

2006-12-28T20:54:00.000-08:00

A lot of the industry discussion around Engagement has been a reaction to consumer empowerment. Even the Advertising Research Foundation’s news release – first paragraph, mind you – announcing its working definition of engagement signaled to it:

As the advertising industry grapples with the profound changes in media, marketing and the emerging empowerment of consumers, the concept of engagement has emerged as 'more of a demand creation' paradigm than the 'reach or awareness focused' paradigm of the past twenty five years.

But in all the hype of consumer empowerment, I think it’s very important not to fall into the trap of “consumer control,” a false paradigm which marketers too often embrace when rationalizing this period of great change.

The truth is that consumers now have a voice, they have more choice and can hold marketers accountable as never before. Consumers can quickly organize, mobilize, reward and punish. Their gestures and votes are far more impacting. The ANA is right in suggesting that “truly interactive dialogue” is imperative, and those who don’t “abandon their historic ‘command and control’ model of brand building” will suffer.

So are consumers in control? No. They are more empowered, but there are two sides to this relationship. One side is the marketer and the other the consumer. It takes two to tango, and the balance of power is equalizing, to be sure. Contrary to hype and alarm, marketers have tremendous control over the variables and customer touch points that matter most. The result is that marketers must revisit the fundamentals.

The fundamentals – which you can control – include customer respect, your own innovation and product, your storefronts and your customer service among others. In a world increasingly driven by word of mouth–where reach, awareness trial and loyalty must be earned, not paid for–these factors become the building blocks of your message and your reputation. Your message and your reputation then become the true vehicle of your brand–much more so than any traditional notion of media.

And this is the core issue the ARF seems to be alluding to in its aforementioned statement that engagement is becoming 'more of a demand creation' paradigm than the 'reach or awareness focused' paradigm.

What do you think?

(These were key themes in my recent MediaPost op-ed here.)

Yahoo Explains What’s Wrong With The Page-View Metric

2006-12-20T08:03:00.000-08:00

Peter Daboll, chief of insights at Yahoo, and former president of comScore Media Metrix, just dished up a very good articulation of why page-view Web metrics are so irrelevant. (Btw, I used to work with Peter when I was a marketing and analytics guy at comScore Media Metrix.) He says:

Page view counting has been a key measure for a decade but just because it was once the obvious solution, doesn’t mean it’s the best one now. A couple of reasons why:

PVs aren’t a good reflection of web activity in 2006 and beyond. It’s a broadband world and page views are irrelevant to some of the most frequently used Internet services like instant messenger, VoIP, or video, in addition to technologies such as Flash and Ajax. More page views might actually reward sites for poor site design in light of these new technologies.
PVs have never been consistently measured by third parties or by sites themselves. Everyone has a different definition of when and how a page is counted.
PVs don’t represent ad inventory. In the early days of the Internet, page views were used to represent available ad impressions, but the reality is that page views and ad impressions are actually counted in different ways and don’t correlate. PVs also have little to do with available inventory with the different types of ad units available today using text, audio, video, etc.

The bottom line is that the page view has outgrown its usefulness. The industry needs to embrace change and develop new metrics that measure this new world more accurately. We all need to help to wean the industry off the crutch of familiar metrics in favor of more accurate and representative ones. We all need to be smart about these new metrics — the measurement companies, major publishers, and advertisers.

But the problems with the page view reflect a more inherent problem that ties into the advertising Engagement discussion: what's the value for advertisers across higher- or lower-involvement media experiences, interactions and different contexts? The publisher business wheels and deals in the buying and selling of consumer attention captured by intrusion and disruption. Whatever the new metric becomes of that, you must also pursue the higher calling of determining actual outcome when marketers and publishers hold hands, and juxtapose commercial messaging with content. Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 points out a likely evolution of this conundrum: a fuzzy middle ground between direct response and brand advertising.

ANA's Top 2007 Transformation: 'Consumer in Control'

2006-12-18T14:21:00.000-08:00

Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), dishes up his top-ten list of the most important marketing transformations for 2007:

Consumer in Control: Marketers will abandon their historic ‘command and control’ model of brand building in favor of a truly interactive dialogue with consumers. Recognizing that consumers now have the power to control how, when and where they interact with advertisers, brand marketers will radically reinvent their approaches, putting the consumer in the driver’s seat and unleashing a tsunami of interactive campaigns across all media forms.

New Agenda for Agencies: Agencies will be turned on their heads, with their efforts increasingly tied to client brand performance. Marketers will expect them to integrate strategic brand management, creativity and innovative media management – and to deliver big, game-changing ideas.

Hail to the Chief: The chief marketing officer will rise in stature as a C-suite player, not only serving as chief brand architect and marketing discipline integrator, but also as the enterprise’s business system innovator, organizational teacher/ motivator and, most importantly, chief revenue builder.

Unconventional Outreach: Marketing will become increasingly unconventional – tapping into social networking, word-of-mouth, local events and more – to break through media clutter, consumer multi-tasking and the growing cacophony of marketplace noise. With the use of the internet, mobile and other new media forms, combined with the innovative use of traditional media, marketers will find ways to reach and engage reluctant consumers and customers.

Media Buying Metamorphosis: Media buying and selling will be transformed. The old, antiquated ways of doing business will give way to new, automated, highly transparent processes, as demonstrated by the growth of online media buying exchanges.

Let the Fighting End: Government policymakers, consumer advocacy groups and brand marketers will begin to find common ground, aligning business goals with public policy needs. Marketers will increasingly embrace their role in helping to advance national priorities in such areas as diversity, education and health – proactively addressing such societal ills as illegal drug usage, obesity, underage smoking, alcohol abuse and others.

Organizational Overhaul: The marketing organization will undergo a top-to-bottom reinvention, providing better professional education and skill-building, with a focus on enhancing creativity, strategic alignment and, ultimately, brand stewardship.

Research Renewal: Research will become the next frontier in the accountability equation. Marketers will insist that macro measurements (Nielsen, Arbitron, ABC), marketing mix modeling and brand performance research become far more relevant to and aligned with critical brand accountability goals. Marketers will be especially vocal in their desire for granular, brand-specific commercial ratings.

Blow up the Back Room: Archaic business systems and back office operations will be overhauled to lower costs, increase efficiencies and redeploy non-working dollars to hard-working, productive investments.

Continuous Marketing Reinvention: Continuous marketing reinvention will become the mantra of marketing executives and the cornerstone philosophy for successful brand building, integrated marketing communications, marketing accountability and the marketing organization.

Brands for the Chattering Masses

2006-12-17T20:46:00.000-08:00

Keith Schneider penned a nice story today in the Sunday NYTimes business section on Nielsen BuzzMetrics (the company I work for) and the overall emerging industry we call consumer-generated media (CGM) measurement. He asks a key question:

As consumers eagerly post word-of-mouth commentary in online communities, message boards and Web logs, a straightforward question confronts brandmeisters: Who wins and who loses as time-tested practices of mass production and mass marketing are undermined by the informed and often cranky voices of the knowledge age?

That very question should be applied to evolving definitions and models of engagement. Why? Because CGM offers massive clues into engagement, including the media context, the brand, the commercial message and the resulting magic that happens (or doesn’t) when the aforementioned pieces come together. CGM represents not predetermined transactions, nor potential units of media consumption. Rather, CGM is an untainted, rich reflection of the passion and significance of human experiences, conditions and intentions. CGM is not intelligence structured according to the agenda of brands or mass marketers; rather, CGM represents perpetual digital residue which offers an unbiased, ongoing and open-source record of how brands exist in people’s lives. It’s such a simple and powerful idea -- a moment of truth -- yet so contrary to so many approaches which place focus on other ancillary responses.

Read the entire NYTimes story here.

To Market To People, You Also Must Market To Algorithims

2006-12-15T11:03:00.000-08:00

We market to people. Wrong! We market to people, as well as emerging intermediates, called algorithms. And that's the subject of my next MediaPost column.

Engagement models must incorporate algorithms, because algorithms could be the most influential force destroying linear decision-making processes among consumers. But it's rare to find an engagement enthusiast (who are mostly mass brand and media types) get far past linear decision models.

You Must Market To Algorithms, Not Just People

by Max Kalehoff, December 15, 2006

The most elegant insight at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s annual confab in Washington, D.C. earlier this week came from Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL. He noted that “Marketing isn’t just to people anymore. You have to market to algorithms.” He backed this up with a few examples of algorithms that have significantly influenced his own purchase and life decisions: Google, blog search, car diagnostic systems and Amazon recommendation engines.

Leonsis’ comment underscores a growing and inextricable link among algorithms, their interactions with people, and influence on broader information flow among people (a good topic for a conference on word-of-mouth marketing). As more human behaviors emit trails of digital residue, the more opportunities reside for algorithms to harness those human-induced data and become information intermediaries, often delivering order, additional value or influence. Many so-called Web 2.0 services fall into this realm, but the essence of algorithms and their interactions with humans extends far beyond conventional notions of Web browser-based services. They are becoming embedded and central to a variety of smart products and services that impact our lives in both subtle and blatant ways, from phones to GPS mapping services to medical devices to RFID tagging systems.

This concept is terribly important to marketers that must now rebuild their consumer decision-making models. The old linear decision models are becoming irrelevant, and must be replaced with new ones that incorporate not only overt word-of-mouth behaviors, such as face-to-face discussions or online consumer discussions, but all behaviors that create halos of metadata, which algorithms process, mediate and disperse to others.

The bottom line is that algorithms now are entrenched in our lives and influence what information we search, discover, share, communicate, receive and believe. Algorithms are increasingly defining our perceptions and reality, and we often don’t realize when this process is going on. The impact can be subtle or massive, immediate or lagging, narrow or broad. Consequences can be intended or calculated, but are often chance.

Search is among the most obvious marketing discipline to embrace algorithms, but their application most often is focused on short-term, direct-response tactics modeled around rational decision-making. But the fact is that algorithms are having a massive, macro impact that marketers must embrace deeper and more holistically–even on emotional and psychological levels. Yes, even the mass-market brand advertisers’ singing engagement must tackle algorithms in order to adapt to changing consumer mental models.

The subject of algorithms is far too broad to tackle further in this short opinion column, but I’ll sign off by presenting some obvious algorithms tapping into my metadata, along with others’, to impact my purchases, media-consumptions habits and other life decisions:

The Zagat restaurant guidebook, through its member surveys, database and search algorithms, helped me choose more than four dozen restaurants to visit this year.
Download.com, a software-download and review service from CNET, helped me choose almost a dozen PC software titles through its search function, user reviews, ratings and, especially, the total-download stats.
The New York Times real-estate database listened to my criteria and recommended houses to suit my needs. I’m now in contract to purchase one of the houses it introduced me to.
My stay at the Helix hotel in Washington, D.C. this week was completely the result of Expedia’s algorithms, including criteria for search, price, coolness, user ratings and proximity to the WOMMA conference.
My wife and I are researching nannies and related services based on search results and testimonials displayed on parenting boards.
Music playlists help me discover new music, to sample and purchase.
GPS mapping services in cars help me decide which roads to take, which towns to pass through and which stores to stop in.
Social-media filters and recommendation engines–like Digg and Tailrank–help me decide which news and information is most resonant or important, or which photos and videos are most interesting.
EZPass highway tags record and notify me every month how much I pass over toll roads and bridges, and how much money I dish out to our public transportation authorities. Becoming conscious of those aggregate fees has influenced me to sometimes take alternative side routes.
My credit-card company’s algorithms identified fraud and notified me about it, so we could work together to chase down criminals. Another credit-card company didn’t, and now I don’t do business with them.

Which algorithms do you notice impacting your purchase and other life decisions? Which are most noticeable? Which are invisible or subtle, yet sweeping? Better yet, are you marketing to them?

When Reporting Media Engagement Rankings, One Must Define Engagement

2006-12-03T08:18:00.000-08:00

Andrew Hampp at AdAge praises National Geographic Channel for its engagement leadership, based on two studies released last week:

If you're looking for viewers who are engaged with what they're watching, then Rich Goldfarb, senior VP-media sales at National Geographic Channel, should be on your list of people to call. Mr. Goldfarb's 5-year-old cable channel leads the pack of specialized cable, print and online media that scored high in a pair of studies on consumer engagement released yesterday.

In a commissioned study of the cable industry with the Gallup Organization, National Geographic Channel had the largest portion of engaged viewers, 45%, when compared to 16 competitors such as A&E, Discovery Channel and TLC. The National Geographic brand also scored high in nearly all the major engagement categories in Monroe Mendelsohn Research's third annual PReSS Survey, which added websites and cable networks to its list for the first time this year.

But two outstanding questions are left unanswered:

How is engagement being defined in both the aforementioned reports?
Is there any evidence that advertising or sponsorships with the most engaged media titles behave differently from the least?

This is one of the challenges of the advertising industry’s engagement initiative. The buzzword is too often accepted at face value as a scorecard metric, with no industry-wide agreement on a definition. Until there is acceptance of a common definition, everyone in the media, marketing and advertising industries must define exactly how the term is being used, whenever it is cited. This goes for research vendors, research buyers, trade associations and trade reporters who cover the space among others. Providing case-by-case definitions is as important as explaining research methodology.

Triumph Is Edutainment & Engagement, Not Interruption

2006-12-01T05:38:00.000-08:00

The NYTimes reports today about Genmar Industries’ use of online product demonstrations for its line of Triumph power and fishing boats. The catch? These videos double as entertainment:

The campaign, by an agency in Durham, N.C., known as the Republik, is centered on efforts to demonstrate that Triumph boats are “the world’s toughest…Up first is what is titled the bubba test: a good ol’ boy, considering buying a Triumph boat, hitches it to the back of his pickup, without a trailer, and drives it at high speeds on dry land, bashing and bumping the boat innumerable times until it fishtails into a lake…“I’ll take it,” he tells the dealer, who replies with a nonchalant “O.K.”…The bubba test is available for viewing on a special Web site (toughboats.com), along with similar video clips showing Triumph boats dropping from helicopters and being pounded by sledgehammers.

Triumph executives [note] its model of engagement rather than interruption: people watching the bubba test online choose to be there, making it likely that more than a few of them are in the market for a boat…“We can start a conversation with the consumer,” said Doug Andersen, president of Triumph Boats in Durham…“And it’s measurable,” he added, referring to the ability to gather data like how long people remain on the Web site to watch the video clips and whether they click on a link to the regular Triumph Web site (triumphboats.com).

Advertising that people really want to watch? Advertising that entices prospects to assimilate with the brand? Advertising that is measurable in its ability to pull people into the sales pipeline? With a campaign budget of $250,000, it seems that Genmar Industries could have a good campaign on its hands.

But one must not omit two factors in this equation: the creative and the perceived integrity of the product plays a major role, in a high-consideration product category. While certainly not a rule, this case underscores how good creative and product, combined, can be effective with little or less paid media.

Also, the Triumph campaign has redneck and testosterone appeal. But its sensational affiliation with quality and toughness is not original for small watercraft. Credit is due to the Boston Whaler and its inventor, marketing and engineering guru Dick Fisher:

Boston Whaler was thrust into the national limelight on May 19, 1961, when Life magazine featured photographs of Fisher sitting in a boat as it was sawed in half. Subsequent photographs depicted Fisher casually driving away in only half a boat. Thus, the "Unsinkable Legend" was born.

(Time Life photo from Continuous Wave.)

Finally, here’s the buba video. Interestingly, the Toughboats site does not enable embedded video, but I found the spot on YouTube. I contacted Triumph customer service by email to tell them of this missed opportunity, and they responded in 15 minutes with this message: “THANKS YOU ARE CORRECT I WILL SEE IF THEY CAN CHANGE THAT.”

Industry Confuses Ad Effectiveness With Media Engagement

2006-11-30T15:41:00.000-08:00

One of the challenges with media- and publisher-side people is they so often state how engaging their media are, while failing to connect the dots to effectiveness, or some other predetermined business objective. In light of this, Abbey Klaassen at AdAge just reported on Scripps Networks’ argument that receptivity is what the industry should be focusing on:

Scripps Networks is the latest to peel back the layers on engagement, contending that ad receptivity is really what gets viewers to buy the products advertised on TV and asking how one could know whether a program would have a high ad-receptivity ranking.

Where the industry is stuck is they're confusing ad effectiveness and media engagement," said Mike Pardee, senior VP-research at Scripps Networks. Engagement, he says, is a factor of ad receptivity.

"We say you can't discount creative, so unless you have good creative and the existing perception of the brand is reasonable, it's hard to come up with ad effectiveness. What we can deliver is ad receptivity -- you attract the right viewers and offer the right program environment. ... We asked, 'Are there things about media that predict, statistically, the advertising characteristics of a channel?'"

While the brand, advertising creative and hosting media all play a role in the engagement equation, receptivity certainly is an interesting dimension that moves the media side, especially, closer to connecting all those scattered dots. The full AdAge story, with highlights of Scripps' supporting research, is here.

IAB Touts Engagement of Interactive Media

2006-11-29T06:16:00.000-08:00

I've been tied up with becoming a dad, but I'm getting back into the groove...
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (where I once consulted) launched a new campaign touting the viability of interactive media versus other. The anchor theme? Engagement, reports Joe Mandese from MediaPost:

At a time when print publishing trade associations representing newspapers, consumer magazines and trade magazines have embarked on big advertising campaigns to promote the vitality of their medium, a group representing online publishers is about to do the same. And like its print counterparts, the online group is leveraging the media theme du jour on Madison Avenue: engagement. Interestingly, that group, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, will be using a combination of print and online advertising buys to get its message out. The message: "Media More Engaging." The theme, which was crafted by Brand New World, is based on an extensive research study conducted among senior marketing and ad agency executives on how to best position interactive media, but its findings appear to be the same ones that could be applied to any medium.

Full story here.

Engagement & CGM Top 2007 Marketing Trends, Says Brand Keys

2006-11-17T14:30:00.000-08:00

Rob Passikoff offers seven marketing predictions for 2007, and the first two caught my eye:

1) An ongoing emphasis on “engagement.”

Continuing to insert itself between traditional marketing activities and an increasing demand for return-on-investment assessments, engagement will occupy a good deal of marketers’ and advertisers’ attentions. As we predicted last year, a joint task force from the Association of National Advertisers, the Advertising Research Foundation, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies offered up the following definition this year: “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.” While that’s a passable (and all-inclusive) first-step definition, watch closely for more-precise, category- and brand-based definitions and metrics.

2) More reliance on consumer-generated content.

Accompanying the search for real consumer engagement will be increased reliance by marketers such as Nissan, JetBlue, Chevrolet, and MasterCard on consumer-generated content. Consumer-generated content will awaken marketers to certain values or trends--but it will carry its share of drawbacks as well. The first will be a sudden and disturbing recognition that there is no standard between paid and nonpaid consumption, and that there are no norms when it comes to the extent to which the content is wholly created by consumers or assisted by marketers. This will have repercussions in regard to agency-marketer relationships. The second will be a tacit acknowledgement that just because content is “consumer generated” doesn’t mean that strategy, creativity, or engagement will be represented, let alone attained, which will add further import in creating authentic (and predictive) engagement metrics.

I’ve long argued that consumer-generated media is a huge deal, and that it should play a massive role in our understanding and modeling of engagement. While Rob didn’t overtly declare that in his two predictions above, he at least juxtaposed the two concepts as the number one and two trends. That priority speaks for itself.

What are Rob’s five remaining trends? You can read them right here.

Internal Communications & Advertising Engagement

2006-11-16T16:58:00.000-08:00

Why is employee engagement left out of the advertising engagement debate? Kevin Keohane and Mike Williams, experts in internal communications, offer a long overdue guest analysis on this important issue:

Can Marketers Learn Something About Engagement From (Good) Internal Communicators?

By Kevin Keohane and Mike Williams

There’s been a lot in the blogger community about consumer / brand engagement lately. The debate more or less centers on whether engagement is a “soft” or hard measure, and whether it can be linked to behavior change – e.g. sales activity, trial, or recommendation.

Max has been kind enough to ask for a contribution about employee engagement to add another ingredient to this most excellent engagement blog. The internal (employee/close stakeholder) engagement part of the equation is an important part of the conversation.

Two interesting points to begin the conversation with:

The rise in linking “employee engagement“ to business performance (as opposed to measuring smiley faces -- employee satisfaction), and
The “best practice” of a more democratized and participative model of employee engagement (as opposed to the delivery of internal corporate messages to captive employees and occasionally asking for their “feedback”).

The first element is that internal communication professionals have been under immense pressure to demonstrate their value to their organizations for a long time. People lose their budgets (at best) or their jobs (at worst) if they can’t point to the ROI of investment in employee engagement. There is a clear corollary to the ongoing marketing and advertising engagement dialogue.

Are there lessons, comparisons, or parallels that can be learned from the employee engagement space, where straight lines have been drawn between engagement efforts and the bottom line? Employee engagement folks have been able to link various communication efforts to explicit behavior change. While there is clearly a difference between an employee and a consumer, I suspect there are enough similarities to be worth discussing.

Internal communicators have developed an obsession for measurement (sometimes to the detriment of the creativity of their actual engagement efforts … which is another conversation). Probably the most compelling example of this is the service-profit chain. The first real case study of this appeared in 1997. In short, it’s a statistical model that allows you to track an increase in employee “engagement drivers” to correlated increases in customer satisfaction and loyalty, and to track this to increases in Total Shareholder Return (TSR), revenue and other financial performance measures. While of course employees are a captive population statistically, in the online environment that barrier is becoming less of an excuse to not create more robust approaches to marketing measurement.

Most of these “engagement drivers” being used internally are also very HR focused, and startlingly ignorant of the employee’s role in delivering the brand/customer experience as an element. Are they even measuring the right things? Interestingly, “Ten Mega Trends Transforming Marketing Measurements” applies just as well to measuring internal audiences (employees) as much as to external ones (consumers).

Since the service-profit chain emerged, it’s been developed, and criticized, but the general consensus is that employee engagement can contribute roughly 20% to an organization’s TSR. Many brand metrics put brand equity’s contribution to a company’s value in the same ballpark. Is there a link?

The second element is the relentless drive that (good) internal communication people have -- and few “traditional” communicators seem to appreciate -- toward interactivity, feedback and getting the employee (the consumer) involved as far upstream in the communication process as possible. This is where there are more visible correlations with the marketing community’s drive to get closer to the consumer and get the consumer engaged – in product development, message development and indeed in the marketing of the product or service itself.

In this area, digitally astute marketers and advertisers are perceived to be well ahead of their internal communication counterparts in many ways – then again, it can be pretty hard to launch a viral video inside the firewall. Or is it? Some speak of “MySpace for the office,” yet somehow there is a lot more to it than this in the world of the modern global organization. Simply transplanting MySpace functionality to the corporate environment seems quite clumsy and disingenuous.

It might be that ‘interactive’ inherently leaves a finger print that you can look at afterwards, particularly if it’s conversational. So the challenge is to help management realize that these things could be indicators of future revenue. Perhaps internal engagement is the space where we can prove that shared decision-making, community, feedback and “engagement” are predictive of success?

But more than this, management would really start to listen if, rather than being retrospective, we could start to use these ideas as real-time indicators to predict external marketing and advertising success.

Ten Mega Trends Transforming Marketing Measurements

2006-11-10T11:52:00.000-08:00

Here's my latest MediaPost column, tackling ten mega trends affecting marketing and media measurements. Here's the link to the MediaPost comment section. This post doesn't directly tackle engagement, but it's implied:

Ten Trends Transforming Marketing Measurements

by Max Kalehoff, November 10, 2006

Last week I presented a primer on consumer-marketing measurements to a diverse group of communications professionals looking to increase their digital and media savvy. Rather than dive into tactical minutiae, I presented 10 recent mega-trends that are collectively transforming media and marketing measurements as we know them.

1. Digital network adoption. Mass adoption of the Internet and digital networks is fundamental, if obvious. Their impact on how we share and manage information is now perhaps the most significant influence on the evolution of metrics, among all that follow.

2. Attention erosion. Our networked society has resulted in massive increases in consumer choice and, from a marketer perspective, an erosion of attention. Many economists postulate that we’re undergoing a transition away from an economy based on shelf space to one based on attention scarcity. From a measurements perspective, there are two major implications: first, there is a growing demand by marketers to tap into measurements to embrace this shift. Second, many data collection and measurement methodologies–such as surveys–are susceptible to the very same attention scarcity. In market research circles, this is often referred to as the “continuing drop in panel participation and response rates.”

3. Speed of measurement. The near-real-time intelligence delivery that characterized the Bloomberg terminal is permeating nearly all facets of marketing measurements. Even if measurements are not delivered instantaneously in a slick, colorful dashboard, the expectation of faster data and actionable insights is growing. Speed is a competitive advantage.

4. Democratization of data and analytics. There was once a time when access to vast piles of market-research data and processing power was contingent upon huge budgets. While that’s still true in many cases, digital networks have made more data more accessible–even sometimes to the point of open-source or free. An interesting manifestation is the growth of free metrics services like Alexa, Google Trends and BlogPulse to understand Web behaviors. These services are not heavy-duty market-intelligence tools, but nonetheless are valuable, directionally significant and influencing perceptions and decisions around the things they report. Don’t forget Google Analytics and Salesforce.com, which are offering low-cost marketing and CRM dashboards that any company can implement overnight. (Disclosure: BlogPulse is an R&D platform and demonstration tool from my employer.)

5. Observational measurements. In digital networks, people often passively emit both anonymous and identifiable gestures, whether it’s visiting a Web site, programming a TiVo, commenting in a public discussion forum or a host of other activities. Observational research techniques–sometimes called digital ethnography–are not a replacement for more overt data-collection methods, like face-to-face surveys, but they are an important addition when attempting to obtain natural, unprompted insights into the behavior of customers and prospects.

6. Unstructured data. Included with the arrival of observational measurement is analysis of unstructured data. From news stories to discussion forums to blogs to multimedia-sharing sites, people increasingly publish data abundant with insights and trends. People now have digital megaphones in which to share their facts, opinions and experiences, and this is forcing businesses into a new era of listening.

7. Beyond demographics. Traditional demographics–like gender and age–will always be important, but observational techniques are helping marketers to understand and segment their customers in new ways. For example, based on past behavior, what are their interests, psychographic traits, life stages, passions or emotional depth?

8. Customer-centric measurements and planning. The trends above have one thing in common: customers increasingly are at the center of the universe, versus companies, brands, products or media. This is causing big marketers to base their planning more around those people.

9. Data integration comes of age. With more customer and data touch points come the need for more data integration and better market modeling. In forecasting, planning, adjusting and evaluating, data integration is where myriad measurements will achieve clarity, dimension and action.

10. Reevaluating relationships with whom and what we measure. Finally, as consumers become more empowered, the disciplines of measurement and research will increasingly cater to them (just as marketers are doing in general). Top-down, “people-are-subjects” measurement approaches will need to evolve toward greater propositions of relationship, loyalty, value, trust and reciprocity.

Where do you think measurements are headed?

You can comment on the MediaPost blog here.

(Cross-post with AttentionMax.)

Engagement Forces Marketers To Assign Value To Soft Measures

2006-11-10T03:44:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I quoted a Coca-Cola exec asserting that sales are the bottom line, and any talk of engagement should reflect that. And then I asked, short of sales, can’t engagement also be hugely important if it ties to a pre-defined business outcome, like a changed attitude, preference or behavior?

Rob Fields at Marketing Pop Culture commented:

[T]he term tends to be misused by advertising people who are struggling to protect budgets by suggesting that advertising can be really effective at changing behavior. There’s a lot of thin ice if you subscribe to this path. Probably the safest course to chart is to make sure that the brand is clear about the objective for each campaign element. Why are we advertising? Why are we doing PR? Why do we have viral elements? So, while it’s unfair to judge every element on payback (how much do you get from PR, for example?), the ultimate objective is sales.

Fields pondered some more and concluded:

…I think the net positive with all of this focus on engagement is that marketers are now getting serious about how to place value on soft measures. What engagement ultimately speaks to is an attempt to develop an overall integrated measure. While that may be impossible, it’s also important to shift how marketers judge value for those perceptual and attitudinal measures that help create a holistic picture of how well a campaign is performing.

Are softer engagement-like measures ultimately incremental, componential scores that optimize the road to sales? Of course, this question applies to marketing and advertising initiatives oriented toward branding and awareness, versus direct response.

Coca-Cola And Engagement

2006-11-08T12:39:00.000-08:00

Wendy Davis at MediaPost captures some of Coca-Cola’s questions about “engagement”:

John Stichweh, director of global interactive marketing for The Coca-Cola Company, this morning cast doubt on whether the company thinks engagement is a goal worth pursuing. The measurement that really matters, he said, is sales. “How many more cases of Coke am I selling? I don’t know,” he said at the Ad:Tech conference in New York.

In fact, Stichweh proposed that the concept of “engagement,” as well as other metrics like “brand awareness” that serve as proxies for sales, fall far short of what marketers require. “What am I getting for the shareholder?” he asked, rhetorically. “I don’t know.”

At the end of the day, sales are what are important for a marketer. But short of sales, can’t engagement also be hugely important if it ties to a pre-defined business outcome, like a changed attitude, preference or behavior?

Why Is Word Of Mouth Missing From The Model?

2006-11-07T15:09:00.000-08:00

Tom Hespos, over at MediaPost Online Spin (where I also write a column), considers the utter absence of word of mouth in media and marketing models. He writes:

Messaging is messaging, and when prospects receive marketing messages, those messages may be successful at prompting consideration or altering specific perceptions of the brand or product. But that’s only part of the picture. Increasingly, people who are considering a purchase turn not to marketing messaging, but to one another. It’s that aspect of mix modeling that I believe comes up short…
Modeling might be able to provide some decent feedback on the overall media mix if opinions on products and services remained static, but the universe of online conversation rarely stays that way. It’s a dynamic organism that can turn on a dime if, for instance, customer service policies change, a person or small group of people discover a flaw, or someone discovers a new use or application of the product. Perceptions are constantly changing, and messaging can do only so much when people can tune in to their peers and get real information with the marketing-speak filtered out.

I responded in the comments:

I’m glad to see a media guy thinking along these lines. It’s amazing that so many media and marketing people have left out of the equation the most influential information source: word of mouth. Rest assured, there is some innovative, experimental work being done by inputting consumer-generated media into a variety of market models. We even were able to predict the peaks of low-carb and Atkins diets several quarters before the actual drops. With word of mouth increasingly potent versus eroding (though still very important) paid media, CGM serves as a powerful proxy to understand the contribution AND inextricable influence of word of mouth in larger behavioral and sales trends and forecasts. It is an amazing, early indicator of actual and potential trends. But there are both quantitative and qualitative variables, and they can be complex. Moreover, social-influence mapping doesn’t always fit neatly alongside rigid reach-and-exposure metrics, which often form the basis of market models. But there’s great opportunity here.

New Media Stumble Into "Engagement" Bash, Confront Elephant In Room

2006-11-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

I polished up an old post about new-media guys and engagement, to become this week’s MediaPost OnlineSpin column. What do you think?

New Media Stumble Into "Engagement" Bash, Confront Elephant In Room

by Max Kalehoff, November 3, 2006

As the social-media and Web 2.0 revolution continues, I’ve been convinced the traditional advertising and media establishment was alone in the debate over engagement. The old institution is nothing less than frenzied over the eroding reach-and-frequency model. Well, I was dead wrong.

Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 last week pointed out that some major Web 2.0 and new-media insiders–whose religion usually seems galaxies apart from the traditional sect–are facing similar challenges and stumbling into the same engagement conundrum. Among these new-media stars include rising video bloggers Ze Frank (of the show with zefrank) and Michael Barron (of Rocketboom). They simply can’t agree on the relative size and importance of their audiences.

Perhaps most notable is Robert Scoble, the influential blogger and former Microsoft staffer famed for building a friendlier, human face for his employer. Scoble, now working at a podcasting media company called Podtech.net, recently underscored how all media experiences are not equal and therefore result in different outcomes: “There’s another stat out there called ‘engagement.’ No one is measuring it that I know of. What do I mean? Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see. Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too.”

Scott Karp correctly noted how new-media people “may be ahead of the curve on formats and hip notions like ‘conversation,’ but they’re actually playing catch-up on the deep, intractable problems of media– like how to prove the value.” Scoble validated this, but, to my delight, he also tackled the monumental elephant in the room. Yes, the one that so many avoid: the connection among engagement, action and sales.

Scoble wrote: “So, why should engagement matter to an advertiser? Well, as an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who’ll actually DO something. Yeah, I’m hoping to get a sale. Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400. My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today[’s], but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention. How could we measure audience engagement?”

There is no be-all solution to measuring engagement; heck, the advertising and media industry is having a hard enough time agreeing on a definition! But the lack of action, sales or a defined business outcome in all the pondering is a problem. I’m not omitting the value of captivating media or brand experiences, nor am I suggesting a narrow world of direct response. But there’s got to be a closer link to the desired business result. That’s largely why Erwin Ephron, a media planning guru, has declared the debate nothing more than Abbot and Costello. For addressing this issue, and even representing the media-publisher side of the equation, I present Scoble with a platinum medal of honor.

So what’s next? The fact is that few understand the relationship among media content, the involvement of audiences with said media, and the business outcome that results when advertisers join the party. To make matters worse, that relationship is getting more complex in a world undergoing media-choice proliferation, attention aversion and trust erosion. And there are other emerging variables in the engagement quandary: brands are increasingly becoming media experiences themselves, without mediators, and audiences are playing a more prominent role in forming and becoming part of such experiences.

Looking ahead, measuring engagement will probably manifest in a hybrid approach, rooted in sophisticated data integration, and resembling something closer to direct-relationship marketing. It also will require closer collaboration among media, advertisers and especially customers, with methods unique to each circumstance (versus spending all our time trying to reach a broad-sweeping model). But however we get there, engagement must stay channeled toward business outcome. Without that focus, all this engagement could prove ephemeral.

Comment on the MediaPost blog here.

(Cross-post with AttentionMax.)

Falling Diet Coke & Mentos Dominos End At Coke

2006-10-31T13:46:00.000-08:00

You might recall the video interview I did with Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of Eeepybird.com, famous for the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment (viewed millions of times!), and Steven Starr, CEO and co-founder of Revver.

Well, Fritz Grobe just forwarded me his new Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment II video. Interestingly, Coke finally gave in and partnered with EepyBird for this new video. It is part of the Poetry In Motion video challenge over at Coke.

What’s interesting about this Coke-EepyBird relationship is that it is a marketing-advertising-media-creative initiative which seems to have bypassed any traditional agencies (or could easily have). Are grassroots, up-and-coming Internet content creators the new competition to traditional agencies? As I wrote earlier on my personal blog, the verdict appears to be yes.

Press play below and check it out!

Dove Evolution Video Campaign as Engagement?

2006-10-31T02:15:00.000-08:00

Today I wrote an article in ClickZ (Real Beauty, Real Breakthrough in Consumer-Fortified Media) suggesting that the much-discussed Dove Evolution spot nicely captures the essence of engagement.

"Success by viewer engagement. In many respects, this spot perfectly puts the concept of viewer engagement in perspective. A key goal of the engagement initiative is to explore and qualify new metrics and measures that push well beyond the overly simplified reach and frequency metrics. In Dove's case, there were views, comments, blog entries, links to blog entries, forum entries, board mentions, video responses, tell a friend, and even video mashups and manipulation that took the message in different, yet mostly reinforcing, directions. Each of these metrics informs perspective on ad effectiveness."

The other important point I underscore is that co-creation is a complete cycle not just a collaboration from the beginning. Along these lines I introduce the concept of "Consumer Fortified Media" (CFM). " Unlike the vast majority of viral videos out there," I note, this ad was 100 percent brand or agency created. But it was fortified by intense consumer commentary, conversation, and dialogue. Put another way, co-creation was an end result but not the starting point. Looking ahead, expect CFM to become a key success criteria for brands looking for tangible evidence of consumer appeal, involvement, and engagement. Every Super Bowl ad, for instance, has latent potential as CFM, but it's not a guarantee."

Does HDTV Solve The Engagement Condundrum?

2006-10-30T11:11:00.000-08:00

In a story about advertisers' slow adoption of high-definition television, TVWeek.com observed:

Conventional wisdom holds that HD spots lead to increased viewer engagement, something advertisers hunger for in the DVR age of commercial-skipping. Sony Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer said at an industry event that there are people "who would rather watch grass grow in HD than tune in to a football game in standard definition." In that vein, advertisers think compelling ads that take advantage of the superior sound capabilities, pristine picture and wider screen of HD stand a better chance of cutting through the clutter than traditional spots.

HD is awesome, without a doubt. But there still are a few other outstanding issues: relative clutter (regardless of definition) is increasing, attention is eroding and owners of HDTV are almost certain to have a DVR. Is HDTV an answer to a problem, or is it simply a nice quality standard that inevitably will become ubiquitous?

(Photo Credit: FLC)

Advertisements Don't Have To Be Boring

2006-10-30T10:56:00.000-08:00

Neil Patel at Pronet Advertising notes that:

Advertisements usually have a negative connotation associated with them and because of this most people don't like taking the time look at and even read advertisements. The good news is, not all advertisements are bad and some companies have taken the time to design some very clever advertising campaigns.

He then offers an awesome montage from his Flickr photo blog (via Digg):

Engagement Is Meaningless Without Sales

2006-10-28T06:03:00.000-07:00

Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 observes a number of Web 2.0, new media and blogger insiders getting sucked into the engagement conundrum (including: Robert Scoble, the super blogger famous for bringing face and personality to Microsoft, and now an exec at a podcast media startup; video blogger Ze Frank; and Rocketboom video blogger Michael Barron). He writes:

What’s more amusing? Scoble and New Media folks discover “engagement,” a term that the old advertising establishment has been “engaged” with for quite some time. Or, that hot and utterly hip video blogging has been caught up in a he said, he said spat over audience measurement. Welcome to media! These guys sound like a bunch of stuffy old TV networks.

It’s so entertaining to watch technology-driven New Media stumble over the same problems that have long been a struggle for Old Media. Technology has empowered people to create media, but it hasn’t really made them all that innovative on the business side. Ze Frank and Rocketboom are like the Mini Mes of Television, squabbling over ratings…

Scoble is right that we DESPERATELY need some new media metrics. New Media folks may be ahead of the curve on formats and hip notions like “conversation,” but they’re actually playing catch-up on the deep, intractable problems of media — like how to prove the value.

Scoble, noted above, cites an interesting and intense example of engagement:

So, why should engagement matter to an advertiser?

Well, as an advertiser I want to talk to an audience who’ll actually DO something. Yeah, I’m hoping to get a sale.

Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400.

My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today, but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention.

How could we measure audience engagement?

Is this something that Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab could do? If he could, that’d be a valuable company that advertisers would die to buy stuff from.

These examples above underscore the massive silos separating New Media from the Old. Why don’t they talk when there’s so much commonality? Just like the Old, New Media people want ad revenues. Second, the New now realize that some media experiences cause more impact versus others. In other words, all impressions are not created equal.

But if Scoble is at all representative, here’s where the New and Old digress: Scoble underscores the connection among engagement, action and sales. The absence of this connection in most engagement discussions is precisely why Erwin Ephron, one of the godfathers of media planning, has declared the engagement debate nothing more than Abbot and Costello.

What makes Scoble’s connection to a sale so unique is that he represents the media side of the equation. You almost never hear media people talk about engagement and sales in the same sentence – rarely, if ever! The reality is that few of them have any understanding of the relationship between their media content, their advertisers and the sale of goods to their audiences. Surely, in an increasingly ad-averse world, they must be scared it’s low, lowering and sometimes near nonexistent.

Conversely, Scoble and others in New Media, with far less to lose and much to gain, are beginning to ask those same questions because they are dependent on the same limited pool of advertising dollars. They also recognize their inherent competitive advantage in the engagement-to-action realm.

So how do we measure engagement? Whatever the solution, and it should depend on the unique circumstance, the connection to sales is imperative. That’s why, as a media company, Google is doing so well. But in most cases, especially Old Media, that’s the elephant in the room that so many are content to dance around.

(This is a cross-post with AttentionMax.)

How To Think Like Virgin Mobile?

2006-10-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to think like Virgin? Think like your customers! I attended day two of the ARF’s What’s Next (warning: PDF link) workshops and offer below my on-the-fly notes from the keynote presentation by Howard Handler, CMO of Virgin Mobile, USA. This is a very late post, but better late than never, I hope. Also see Taddy Hall’s analysis of the event and Grant McCracken’s disagreement with Gerald Zaltman’s customer-mental model.

ARF Keynote Presentation: How to Think Like Virgin Mobile
Howard Handler, Chief Marketing Officer, Virgin Mobile USA

Consumer, Consumer, Consumer! Virgin Mobile is a company that puts the needs and desires of its consumers first. This keynote presentation opened with a bold, yet enticing Virgin Mobile commercial of a naked man in NYC’s meat-packing district using his cell phone as a cover up, which helped launch the business in 2002. The rest of the presentation covered company background, roots and insights related to clients. The presentation clearly linked the success of Virgin Mobile as a consequence of the company’s enthusiasm to listen to and engage its consumers.

Virgin Mobile has numerous partnerships, but what is most important to this company is the Virgin Mobile/Customer relationship with customers. Customer experience is extremely important. In fact, it is the “essence of what it is to be Virgin”. Technology is viewed by this company as a commodity.

Richard Branson, entrepreneur best known for the Virgin brand as well as his prolific, outrageous launches, is always about being a challenger AND consumer champion. Richard was reflecting on what he saw in the US with regard to the wireless telephone market: Confusing payment plans, not much flexibility, big brand carriers, COLD brands. He looked at wireless brands as utility, not consumer oriented brands. He also noticed that youth penetration was very low compared to other countries. Richard thought he could do better. And so he did.

During summer 2002, the Virgin Mobile brand was powerful and vibrant. The entire company was built around insights they had on youth market. 4 years later – 4 million customers. This success was a result of:

Pre-paid luster, new positioning – a way that you pay to a way that you use wireless service.
A service that was easy to use - PAY AS YOU GO
Control and flexibility was shifted from carrier to customer.
Customer Point of view was key – highest composition among teens and young adults compared to others in the category.
High customer satisfaction.
Staying in touch with consumers
Finding out who their consumers are, what they are feeling, what they need

To find out more about their audience, Virgin Mobile surveyed 2000 trendsetting, super-connecting, social butterflies, which the company classified as “The Insiders”. These customers opted-in to provide insights to the brand. Some of the findings are as follows:

Top responses of how teens view themselves

65% responsible
55% confident
50% logical
63% open-minded
61% caring
59% creative

I want to be…

Entrepreneur
Singer of musician
Doctor
Professional athlete
Teacher
Actor/actress
Artist
Engineer
Fashion designer
Lawyer
President/CEO of Major Corporation

Virgin Mobile also learned:

These teens recognize that education is a priority.
They embrace a college education and slant toward the desire of being an entrepreneur.
Mobile phones are an integral part of there lifestyles – make a connection to friends first.
Will not give up their mobile phone. Commitment and priority to cell phones
They have friends and/or family members who are also Virgin Mobile users.

As noted earlier, understanding the minds of your target audience is crucial to a successful marketing campaign. Virgin Mobile found that the following captivated the minds of its consumers and planned marketing efforts to relate to them:

Job
School
Parent’s health
War
Terror
Economy
Environment
Homelessness
Find someone to love

Virgin Mobile gets involved with its consumer, a 15-24 year old male or female involved with good-will organizations such as Youthnoise.org and Stand up for kids.org, who love to listen to music, in the following ways:

5% of profits donated from all downloadable content.
“text 2 deduct” $1 for donation. Virgin matches each dollar
Texting novella-opt in to read a story on text
Global charm contest around regeneration and tossed out to user community to create. Each winner got to see artwork come to life and went on a wake up trip to sub Sahara Africa with Richard Branson. “Struck a cord to engage kids”
V-Festival, traditional summer music festival

We give them what they want NOW.

Games
Cool texting features
No handsets
Unlimited primetime
Text tones
Plans on their terms
Flexibility. Choice
More technology in the future
Rewarded for their time
Control

“Content and business in general is valued because we do focus on the customer,” said Howard Handler, Chief Marketing Officer, Virgin Mobile USA. Here is proof that the Virgin brand is successful because of consumer insight:

Recently awarded JD Power as #1 overall in customer satisfaction
PC Magazine reader’s choice for best pre-paid cell phone services

The presentation closed with this Q&A: “How to think like Virgin? Think like our customers.”

“NBC 2.0” Is All About “Engagement”

2006-10-23T05:07:00.000-07:00

Continued digital disruption and seeming nonstop erosion of “broadcast” must have had something to do with the recently announced NBC 2.0. The initiative includes plans to slash expenses by $750 million and cut 5% of its workforce, to help the TV and movie giant with its transition from traditional analog media to digital.

But is “engagement” the real rationale behind NBC 2.0, or at least a huge part of it? AdAge this morning quotes one insider off the record:

"It's more that people in the $75,000-income households are working late, and reality and game shows attract lower-income households," one high-level media consultant cited as being behind the rationale. NBC said as part of its strategy it will look to develop advertising metrics beyond simple ratings, which may highlight household income as well as engagement.

In hindsight, the Consumer Engagement Conference speech from Alan Wurtzel, president, Research and Media Development, NBC, now makes a lot more sense. My colleague Sandra Parrelli paraphrased this quote during Wurtzel’s keynote in September:

Media executives have no choice but to adapt to changes now. Why wait? With the endless list of new technologies to consider – digital downloads, digital video, etc., industry executives must try to listen to customers while addressing accountability and must find a way to measure it. The media industry today is exciting and scary, because we are truly redefining the rules of measurement - not because they want to, but because they have to…If we don’t change direction soon we’ll end up where we are going.

I heard some interesting NPR commentary over the weekend, connecting NBC’s bold moves to the management culture of its parent, GE. That culture and its expectations must be very different from ABC, CBS and Fox.

(Photo credit: tenkai2002 via Flickr's Web 2.0 Oh No gallery.)

McCracken: Zaltman Model Wrongly Omits Culture

2006-10-18T17:45:00.000-07:00

Grant McCracken, one of my favorite bloggers and anthropologists, was a panelist at today’s ARF Advertising: What’s Next workshop. I wasn’t there, but afterward he blogged passionately about his friendship, respect and firm disagreement with Gerald Zaltman (see earlier Zaltman video interview here) and his view of how customers think. What’s missing? Culture. Read Grant's post here.

Highlights From ARF "What's Next" Workshops

2006-10-18T17:20:00.000-07:00

Taddy Hall, chief strategy officer at the Advertising Research Foundation, just sent over some highlights of Day One at the New York session of "Advertising: What's Next" workshop series.

I'm dissapointed I missed this year's workshop because last year's was awesome. Fortunately, my colleague Sandra Parrelli is going to make it over tomorrow morning to blog the early morning panels.

Here are idea highlights and key quotes from this gathering of serious thinkers and leaders on Day One, courtesy of Taddy:

If you accept the principles of co-creation, all advertising is interacitve.

Companies need to think of themselves less as a monolith and more as a hub of a network of related interest-holders, united in the purpose of co-creation of meaning.

There is a big difference between exchanging information with customers and dialog. Many more companies stop at the former.

Insight has many definitions but two basic functions: 1)create a new category (starbucks, Kodak funsaver) and 2)change the rules of an existing category (wal-mart, schwabb).

Innovation focused on functional benefits is a race to the bottom that rarely delivers enduring growth.

Inverting the traditional innovation process -- starting with core human values and then addressing the desired customer experience and only in the final stages focusing on product attributes -- can be extraordinarily powerful.

Larry Lubin: Two-thirds of what we see is behind our eyes.

Grant McCracken: Culture serves to organize the world's content into meaningful segments. Culture takes the form of shared frames that are employed, often subconsciously, to explain and make meaning.

John Forsyth of McKinsey on interviews with CMOs: A shocking two-thirds do not own innovation (then what do they own??). Marketing ROI is a fool's errand. High performance marketing and market research firms measure performance with business metrics, such as EPS and profit impact, rather than departmental metrics like productivity or return on research.

Jerry Olsen: "Deep Metaphors and Human Insights"

Marketing has taken greater interest in differences rather than explore for unifying universals.

Universals can be understood as "deep metaphors" that are unconsciously held and shared by all mankind.

Metaphors are central to making meaning. Each of us use about 5 per minute of speech.

Thought works in images.

95% of what the brain does is subconscious

Levels of metaphors:

surface metaphors -- figures of speech
thematic metaphors -- cultural frames
deep metaphors -- universals

Deep Metaphors:

universal frames
unconscious
foundational: they structure our thinking

Deep Metaphors can be used as Design Criteria:

architecture
design criteria
advertising brief

The day's program concluded with Jeff Hermann announcing the news that Nielsen is launching a Video Game Ratings Service.

John Bell On Co-Creation & Engagement

2006-10-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

Johh Bell at Ogilvy's 360 Degree Digital Influence practice (who Pete Blackshaw interviewed here) commented and pointed us to his recent post:

Co-creation is the process of inviting your customers in to help create products and services. Interestingly, there has been some discussion about the meaning behind the term "engagement" in relation to companies getting involved in social media. Some say the term is meaningless and that users/consumers/peopel don't want to get involved with companies. I don't buy that.

I believe that co-creation is the ultimate form of customer engagement. Inviting the customer or constituent in to help make a product or make a service better allows you to achieve three things:

Involve your customer in the brand at an "ownership" level
Introduce innovation to your company from the outside-in
Prove internally and externally that you really value your fans/customers and are willing to walk-the-walk of openness (yes, it takes more that a co-creation "stunt" but it's a start.

I posted before on 3 kinds of co-creation:

Co-creation of marketing: inviting customers in to creat ads or marketing materials
Co-creation of brand: that is like saying a dog wags his tail as brands are defined, ultimately, by the customer
Co-creation of products and services: actually asking customers to help create the next "something"

John then offers a nice roundup of co-creation in practice.

I Saw An Engagement

2006-10-13T05:57:00.000-07:00

Chris Thilk of MWW disagrees with both the ANA’s Michael Palmer and Micropersuasion’s Steve Rubel about the validity and mythology of engagement:

But what neither Palmer nor Rubel talk about is the squishy middle that exists between "creating the right programs" and "measuring the results." That's an important omission since that's where the possibility for true engagement lies...

Engagement to me means when a company or marketer reaches out to the participants of the conversation and gives them a pat on the back, follows up with more information or updates, writes in to correct something that's wrong or otherwise makes themselves available as a resource. There's very little that gets me more excited than getting contacted by someone I've written about. That shows me they're monitoring and want to engage in a dialogue. Building those relationships is beneficial to everyone since the company can be more certain of an accurate message being communicated and the writer gets a whole new stream of good information to draw from.

Chris makes some good points. But will advertisers be able to scale such interactivity from mass down to micro? The spirit is one thing, but the practicality is another.

The ANA also has more on this debate here.

Jim Nail Breaks Down Engagement

2006-10-13T05:28:00.000-07:00

Jim Nail at Cymfony penned a nice piece on engagement for iMedia. He describes four dimensions of engagement, which he synthesized from discussions at the Consumer Engagement conference:

Media engagement. Ad-selling media organizations have pounced on engagement like a pride of lions on a wounded wildebeest. They aim to prove that their audience is more engaged with their media property than their competitors. But they typically fall back on old-school metrics like traffic or time spent with the medium. The ARF is trying to move beyond these metrics.

Ad engagement. Advertisers and agencies have begun to talk about how engaging their ads are but, again, typically relying on old communication metrics like attention or recall. These fall short of the ARF's new definition because they only capture whether the audience saw the ad, while the ARF is aiming for a more subtle measure of whether the consumer reacted to the ad.

Engagement marketing. An approach that plans a sequence of activities to draw the consumer through the purchasing process, e.g., running an ad that drives the consumer to a website where they sign up for email that delivers additional information over time until the consumer buys. This sequence actually comes after the more emotional engagement the ARF is focused on.

Brand engagement. This sounds closer to the ARF's idea, but also often defaults to old-school metrics like customer loyalty or the more recent Net Promoter score. Important metrics to be sure, but the ARF is looking to identify when the earliest beginnings of this consumer relationship happen so it can be nurtured and grown.

Coincidentally, Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ presentation and contribution to the ARF’s “meaning of engagement” white paper last March specifically detailed engagement in context of media, advertising and the brand. (Why isn’t this white paper freely downloadable somewhere? I have a few highlights of our contribution here.) In hindsight, the shortfall of these dimensions of engagement, on their own, is that they are centric to everyone in the marketing equation except for the customer. This is a catastrophic omission in a world where consumer response to commercial messages is falling and aversion is skyrocketing. Seriously! What good are media, advertising and brands without the consumer agenda represented? There is strong lip service paid to engagement, but left out is the consumer, the party that enables all the others to exist in the first place.

Reflecting this fact, Jim offers three ideas for advertisers:

Everything we know about advertising is wrong. Well, maybe not everything, but Dr. Plummer did effectively shoot down the "AIDA" model of advertising, in which the sequence of communication is assumed to start with getting the consumer's Attention, giving them reasons that will stimulate Interest, which turns into Desire, and eventually results in Action (i.e. purchase). "Recent research shows this model is wrong," Plummer said. I know that as a direct marketer, I was raised on this model and I suspect direct and interactive marketers still are.

Engagement is a new mental model for advertising. Instead, consumers process a lot of new information, including ads, on a subconscious, emotional level first, and later engage their rational mind to lead to action. He noted that research has shown that measures of "brand feeling" are much more highly correlated to purchase intent than ad recall. So instead of a "Think then Feel then Do" process, Plummer stated that consumers Feel, then Think, then Do. In this model, an ad's job is not to provide compelling, fact-based features and benefits of a product, but to seduce the consumer into beginning that subconscious processing of the brand. "Storytelling is more powerful than argumentation," Plummer concluded.

The concept of co-creation exposes this non-rational process. When the consumer "engages" in this subconscious processing, he or she creates associations, affixes symbols, imagines metaphors and imbues experiences into the ad message to give it personal relevance. It all sounds rather obscure, but Gerald Zaltman, a member of Harvard University's Mind, Brain and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, and originator of "brand co-creation" has a technique to delve into the process. At the Engagement Conference, he showed the results of drawing out these subconscious elements from a Heineken beer ad.

Jim offers in his piece a few explanations of how different parts of the media mix should now fit together. But I think his three ideas beg one bigger question: Are the agendas of media, advertising and brands precisely what are keeping companies from engaging with their customers in the first place? Maybe it is the selfish legacies of these silos which are prohibiting the evolution of more meaningful relationships between companies and their customers? What do you think?

Check out Jim’s full story here.

(This is a cross-post with AttentionMax.)

Product Placement — You Can't Escape It!

2006-10-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

Laura Petrecca at USA Today penned a nice story today on the ad-clutter wasteland and consumers fighting back. (OK, I contributed a few zingers for this one.) Here are some notable quotes and passages:

"I've never seen things changing as much as they are now," says Rance Crain, editor-in-chief of trade magazine Advertising Age and a 40-plus-year observer of marketing. "Advertisers will not be satisfied until they put their mark on every blade of grass." Ad-zapping devices — and a decrease in consumer attention spans — have created doubts about the effectiveness of traditional TV, radio and print ads. In response, marketers have become increasingly invasive..."Advertising is so ubiquitous that it's turning people off," Crain says. "It's desensitizing people to the message."
Most marketing executives know they have a problem. Many of the firms that buy ads are the same ones that put out research reports on the dangers of deluging and angering consumers. "Advertisers love to talk about advertising clutter," says [James Twitchell, consumer culture expert and author of Branded Nation and Adcult USA]. "That's like the doctor shooting a patient up with amphetamines and then saying that the patient is acting really frenetic."

In its search for salvation, the marketing industry has glommed onto the concept of "engagement" — a quality-over-quantity idea. The basic theory: Instead of, for example, running dozens of radio ads, create messages that the consumer seeks out, such as an entertaining Web video, and perhaps even passes on to friends. "Message clutter is not going to go away. If anything, it's going to proliferate," says Mike Donahue, executive vice president, American Association of Advertising Agencies. "If you're looking at 10 messages and two of them really involve you, engage you and connect with you, those ads will be less annoying and a lot more effective."

BuzzMetric's Kalehoff says marketers have to stop pitching so hard, fast, loudly and frequently. Kalehoff says they need to understand — and respond to — gripes from frustrated consumers such as Hertz. Only then will they be able to produce marketing that sells, he says. "If you want to make friends with your customers, you have to stop hitting them over the head."

This story raises a key point: When will the advertising industry start to become, foremost, a champion of the consumer – one that respects consumers above all else? Right now, in aggregate, advertisers are acting more like blood-thirsty mosquitoes versus friends of the consumer.

(This is a cross-post with AttentionMax.)

Most Consumer-Generated Media Are Not Engaging?

2006-10-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

Rob Passikoff of Brand Keys writes:

The thing is that a lot of consumer-generated content is, well, terrible, not particularly on strategy, and not engaging, which are areas that even the most unskilled marketers can still maintain some control over. Consumer-generated content may awaken marketers to certain values or trends, so marketers should pay attention, but “let go”? We think not.

Consumer-generated content analysts have pointed out that there is no standard between paid and non-paid consumption, and that there is no norm when it comes to the extent to which the content is wholly created by consumers or assisted by marketers. But that is not entirely true. Just because content is “consumer-generated” provides no guarantee that strategy or creativity or engagement will be represented, let along attained.

Even back in the old days (1975) when advertisers still controlled the advertising and persuasion, there was a tacit acknowledged difference between “creativity” and “disciplined creativity.” So just because it’s “consumer-generated” doesn’t mean it’s good, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be effective, and it doesn’t mean anyone is going to be engaged by it!

Rob makes excellent points, but I think his focus on consumers as content creators versus marketers as content creators distracts us from the core of the issue. The best way to sum up my argument is to take you back to a debate that Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown and I had a few months ago. Nigel said:

The problem with consumer-generated media is just that, the consumer generates the media. They are in control, not you. The example of Chevy Tahoe should give all marketers a pause for thought. If you are not a brand that is universally loved, can you afford to give control to people that may not have your best interests at heart?

I responded:

When have customers and the people ever not been in control of brands? It would seem to me that they always have, at least to a terrific extent. People go around every day passionately communicating to others about which brands are awesome and which ones suck. For example, my frequent, positive references to JetBlue are not spawned by any blatant attempt by those companies to engage in so-called consumer-generated media; they didn’t consciously afford me control of their brands. Rather, these creations of consumer-generated media are expressions of my deep, personal experiences with the respective brands. It just happened organically – without the brand’s active or conscious participation.

While some marketers think they’re in charge, the reality is:

we all have encounters with brands
our brains process and reflect on those brand encounters
if those brand encounters ignite passions, we often express those experiences in the form of consumer-generated media – sometimes in the form of face to face conversations, telephone discussions, online diaries, letters-to-editors and friends, and elsewhere.

People now have more control to speak out, and more control over brand dispersion, integrity and mutation. There now is a digital trail of raw consumer discussion – expression and evidence of experience – that forever lives on Internet servers, and, most importantly, in the indexes of Google, YouTube and the like, where active influencers and others stakeholders will discover it. Now – like never before – there is unavoidable evidence that consumers do talk about and control the brand once it’s in their hands. It is increasingly impossible for brand managers to deny this.

Listening & Pulling to Engage: The Harley Davidson Way

2006-10-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

Laurent Flores of CRMMetrix writes in:

Yesterday, I proudly reported that I finally entered the Harley Davidson Legend... and as I was surfing the web and the Harley Davidson website specifically I really felt "engaged" by the Harley initiative on the Harley website (again note that engagement happens on the brand website, the place I consider the best place to engage with consumers because then they do want to engage with your brand!).

Harley uploaded a new video on their website called "Live by it" (www.livingbyit.com). The video does a great job at explaining the Harley-Davidson "Creed" outlining what the company believes in. The video also made it on to YouTube, further extending its reach.

Rather than talking and pushing messages to consumers the video really does a great job at pulling people in. The brand hosts a space where customers can get into the conversation and share their own "Creed".

What a great way to Listen, Empower Customers and make them further engaged to drive positive WOM and make your brand remarkable no?

Again, it all starts by Listening and Pulling consumers in from the brand website...OK, not everyone has a brand like Harley but come on, all brands have a website and at least some engaged consumers that are ready to further push the brand. So brands what are you waiting for?

I don't believe the brand Web site is the start to all Engagement, but Laurent is right in pointing out the strong role the brand Web site can and often does play. Similarly, Nielsen BuzzMetrics has routinely found that brand Web sites are among the most trusted forms of marketing in the eyes of consumers.

Is Engagement A Myth?

2006-10-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

As posted earlier, Steve Rubel thinks Engagement is a myth; he said so in AdAge as well as on his blog. Conversely, the ANA, one of the leading trade organizations behind the Engagement initiative, has since joined the conversation and stronly disagrees.

As a marketing model, I think Engagement is in its earliest stages and needs to be cultivated and given a chance to blossom. At the least, it's a good thing because it's spurring discussion and bringing attention to many aspects of marketing we all know are broken or eroding. Sure, much of the Engagement discussion is blather, as Steve emphasizes, and misguided. But it has aligned a lot of smart thinking as well. It's much too early to write it off.

Engagement Video Series: Rex Briggs of Marketing Evolution

2006-10-09T07:11:00.000-07:00

How much of your advertising sticks (or sucks)?

I left the ANA Masters of Marketing conference to return home to NewYork. Unfortunately, I missed the “What Sticks” presentation by Rex Briggs, CEO of Marketing Evolution, and Greg Stuart, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, who’s wrapping up a successful six-year run there. Rex and Greg recently co-authored What Sticks, a book about advertising measurement and effectiveness. Fortunately, I was able to pull Rex aside for a video interview, to be cross-posted here and on AttentionMax. Click Play below to view our discussion about the state of advertising, measurement, Engagement and the future.

The Great Engagement Debate: "Hot Air" or Meaningful Conversation?

2006-10-09T06:35:00.000-07:00

Today in Ad Age, respected blogger Steve Rubel takes a few pot shots at the "engagement" movement ("You Might as Well Be Looking for BigFoot" p. 17). He uses terms like "hot air" and "blather." He's right on a few levels, and Max and I have often joked around the office about some of the silly directions and detours the "engagement" discussion is taking, or the near impossible lack of conscensus on such a "big tent" concept. But on another level I think Rubel misses the point. And he's not putting this "conversation" in its proper perspective. The ad research community has been stuck in the mud on traditional "reach and frequency" metrics longer than I've been alive, and the engagement discussion is finally pouring some fresh thinking and innovative measurement models into the mix. And of course there isn't consensus -- it's an early conversation, and a quite meaningful one (maybe even, dare I say, a raw and "naked conversation") involving a very diverse mix of smart and passionate people. The discussion is also unusually consumer (people, user, citizen...take your pick) centric -- e.g. how do we manage in a world of consumer-control -- and I think we all benefit by letting any conversation along those lines just flow and develop. Sure, the engagement conversation is flowing in from a different direction -- this time from the "paid media" crowd versus the early-mover Web 2.0 crowd (of which PR firms have been commendable leaders and "conversational catalysts") -- but more voices the better. How else do you truly move the needle!

Jargon as Barrier to Commonality: As a CGM evangelist, it's hard to disagree with Steve's final point that "we should focus on how we get people connected with one another and measure the number of times we helped them do so" or that we "should empower them to connect, and then get out of the way." But to be clear -- that is, in fact, a central building block of the engagement conversation, and it's a growing theme. Moreover, the notion of "co-creation" is not a bad starting point for moving this debate along. At the end of the day, we're all dancing around closely related concepts but with different reference points and jargon.

Too Early To Disengage! Which leads me to my very last point. This entire "engagement" debate is a major validation of much of what Rubel has been passionately and persuasively writing about for the past few years: conversation, blogging, community, and "participating" in the conversation. It's way to early to "disengage" brands and the very conservative research community from that promise, or lofty ideal. What's really needed at this point is an even more ambitious convergence of all stakeholder groups, and especially the PR leaders (recall my post re: PR & marketing), on this engaging topic. Let's stay engaged

(This is a cross post from consumergeneratedmedia.com)

Engagement Video Series: Joe Mandese of MediaPost

2006-10-06T21:34:00.000-07:00

At the ANA Masters of Marketing conference, I met up with the humble but very smart Joe Mandese, editor-in-chief of MediaPost, one of the more innovative publishers in the new-media space. I write a weekly op-ed column for MediaPost, but I rarely get to interact with Joe. So I took this opportunity not only to catch up, but to conduct a video interview. Press the Play button below to view our chat. (This is a cross-post with my personal blog, AttentionMax blog.)

Are Engagement Believers In Denial?

2006-10-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

After a week of pondering, here's my conclusion, delivered via my MediaPost Spin column. The advertising Engagement initiative is making good progress -- I'm a believer! But it's being held back by denial of fundamental questions. What do you think? Comment here on the Spin Blog.

MediaPost Spin: Are Engagement Believers In Denial?

by Max Kalehoff, October 6, 2006

Engagement is “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.” That’s the Advertising Research Foundation’s definition of the hotly debated buzzword, as well as the focus of last week’s Consumer Engagement conference, led by the ARF and the American Association of Advertising Agencies. The impressive gathering of senior media, marketing and research execs fostered smart discussion about incorporating engagement measures into our advertising models. But I believe progress is tempered in part by denial and avoidance of some tough and fundamental questions.
Why? If last week’s conference was an indication, the discussion too often gravitates toward packaged, controlled contexts, with as much attention directed to paid media and television brand advertising as ever before. There’s nothing wrong with these traditional tactics in the marketing communications mix, but their failure to perform in a more cluttered, complex, consumer-empowered, Google-juiced world is precisely why we’re having this engagement discussion to begin with–isn’t it?
If we presume marketing communications’ ultimate aspiration is to drive and sustain sales–whether directly or indirectly through brand loyalty, awareness, involvement or direct response–then we need to thrust this engagement discussion further. It needs to go way beyond the margins of the traditional paid-for and interruptive attention models that we all seem to agree are broken or eroding.
Where do we start? I’d like to propose six new dimensions that advertisers need to inject into this engagement discussion right away:
1. Uncontrolled context. How should marketers approach turning on a mind when the context is uncontrollable and unpredictable, like social networks where word of mouth propagates? Ignoring context in these circumstances won’t cancel out reality. What happens when context is not orchestrated, but stumbled upon? Consider a brand being discussed in a gathering of friends, an increasingly important channel in a wasteland of clutter. Who’s in control then? The brand now exists not on the marketer’s terms, but the consumer’s terms.
2. Unfavorable context. How does context change when conditions become unfavorable for a brand? Similarly, what happens to brands when consumers become so annoyed by advertising context that they truly go out their way to avoid you? Why is it that TiVo users tend to skip you and record what we call programming? Why can’t you improve your context and messages so TiVo users actually record and time-shift your advertising as relevant content?
3. Product as context. What is the role of the product itself in creating context? Surprisingly, advertising still serves as life support for products that are mediocre, undifferentiated or simply don’t work (, i.e., the gel that takes scratches out of eyeglasses; trust me, it never worked!). In a Google world–where search engines connect passionate information seekers with passionate information speakers, truth and relevance–that crutch tumbles. Conversely, good products frequently sell themselves. Perhaps, sometimes, the problem of engagement has nothing to do with media and messaging and everything to do with product.
4. Customer service manifesting in media. What about customer service? With consumers in control–and empowered to self-publish and spit back–customer service and experience is increasingly manifesting in the most prolific kind of media: consumer-generated media. As people express themselves through democratized publishing, positive and negative experiences with your brand equate to positive and negative GRPs, or brand credits and debits. CGM ultimately competes against the traditional cadre of media that advertisers think they control. But the world just works more holistically than that. Customer service, in essence, is becoming a media department.

5. Consumer Control. What about control? Are we looking at consumer empowerment as an opportunity, or something to stubbornly fight? One major publisher at the Consumer Engagement conference talked to me about the importance of keeping users engaged within his walled garden. As a consumer, I consider that an attempt to hold me hostage, not empower me. If this publisher really wanted to be a relevant, useful entity to me, it should seek to empower me–not try to monetize me by keeping me inside of its cell. That’s not engagement!

6. Respect of consumer’s attention metadata. Finally, media are going digital, and consumer attention and behavioral metadata will become the lifeblood of advertising research, profiling and relationship management–arguably the new core building blocks of engagement. This is especially true considering massive audience fragmentation and serious declines in traditional research panel response rates. As we move more to a direct model, any discussion of engagement must embrace a newfound respect for the fact that: 1) consumers’ attention is a valuable commodity to them, 2) consumers own their attention data, and 3) consumers are becoming more aware of how precious it really is.

Now can we talk about engagement?

Join the debate on the MediaPost blog here.

Engagement A "Flexible" Term

2006-10-05T20:27:00.000-07:00

Rob Passikoff, who offered some nice commentary in the Video Engagement series, writes:

I spent a lot of time at engagement discussions during Advertising Week 2007, and one of the key come-aways was that the definition of “engagement” remains a relatively, shall we say, “flexible” term.

To a large degree the difficulty arises from the fact that very few marketers have the courage to demand ROI metrics from their agencies and media providers. “Attention paid” – while eschewed when framed as “awareness” – seems perfectly acceptable if you can point and say, “well, the consumers seemed to have been paying attention.” Take for example, Katie Couric’s move to the top new spot for CBS.

Katie Couric's initial appearance on the evening news resulted in a big jump in viewership. But between opening night and last Friday, the newscast has lost nearly half its audience. Preliminary Nielsen ratings show The CBS Evening News with 7.5 million viewers, behind NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams (8.2 million) and ABC's World News With Charles Gibson (7.6 million).

Historically, incoming network anchors have delivered a ratings boost in their first week, but who among you would be surprised to hear that? But after one month. . . wait for it. . . their average ratings declined, the technical term when things like that transpire being, “Well, duh!”

Perhaps someone should point out to anyone who will listen that there is a big difference between consumer curiosity and profitable engagement and that both can be measured!

Consumer curiosity and profitable engagement? What shocks me is how much passive, forgettable television viewing still dominates this Engagement discussion.

Engagement Video Series: Dr. Anca Cristina Micu of Sacred Heart University

2006-10-04T21:01:00.000-07:00

I’m a little late publishing this final video interview from the Consumer Engagement conference: Dr. Anca Cristina Micu, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Sacred Heart University. Anca’s research is in the areas of persuasion, news and advertising synergies, consumer processing of electronic communication, targeting in the online environment, and permission-based e-mail marketing. Press Play below to here her thoughts on Engagement.

Engagement Is a Euphemism For Measuring the ROI of Brand Advertising

2006-10-04T06:20:00.000-07:00

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 attended the Consumer Engagement conference and offers smart feedback. (Btw, see the Engagement video interview with Scott right here.) He says Engagement is a euphemism for measuring the ROI of brand advertising:

Last week I attended the Consumer Engagement Conference, put on by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), where I discovered that the word “engagement” — which is being proffered as a new “output” metric for advertising to replace outdated “input” metrics like Gross Rating Points and Impressions — is merely a euphemism for figuring out the return on investment for brand advertising.

Several factors have combined to put pressure on the billions of dollars spend on traditional brand advertising — TV above all — to demonstrate “engagement” (i.e. what’s the ROI of all that money we’re spending?):

1. Mass advertising of mass brands is dying
2. Audiences are fragmenting at an exponential rate
3. The share of media time spend online is rapidly growing
4. Online video has arrived
5. Google has made billions on direct response advertising, finally realizing the promise of the Web to revolutionize advertising ROI measurement

The advertising industry has realized it’s only a matter of time before the pressure to demonstrate the return on invest for TV advertising threatens to collapse the whole system. That’s what drove NBC to negotiate what may be the first pay-for-performance deals in the history of TV advertising (Alan Wurtzel, President of NBC’s Research and Media Development, who spoke at the conference, wouldn’t confirm or deny, but it was pretty clear that’s where they are headed.)

So the problem I have with the working definition of “engagement” — “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context” — is that it obfuscates the real issue:

How much so companies profit in the short term and/or the long term from the billions they spend on brand advertising? In other words, show it to me on the P&L statement!

The coming showdown over brand advertising is only going to intensify as Google comes at it from the other end. At the conference, Patrick Keane, Director of Field Marketing & Sales Strategy at Google, presented the results of — get this — an eye tracking study to show that consumers were more likely to look at an ad in a relevant context. Not click on the ad — just look.

Welcome to the wild, wooly, squishy word of brand advertising, Google!

Google is opening a 300,000 square foot New York office where “newer initiatives into print and audio advertising are being done,” but we all know that TV advertising is the real prize.

Between Google, with its algorithms, oceans of data, and direct response measurements (click!), and TV brand advertising, with its outdated input metrics that are useless for measuring real return on investment in dollars and cents, is the “fuzzy middle” where the battle for the future of advertising will be fought.

Whoever figures out how to bridge the chasm between brands and dollars will win the prize.

My response to Scott on his blog was:

Profit in short or long term is key; but so is competitive differentiation and relative performance within a category. But where does loyalty or preference come into play? Those are factors often determined by brand advertising. I guess it is that squishy middle.

Then Scott commented:

Max, competitive differentiation, relative performance within a category, loyalty and preference are all drivers of financial performance. I’m not suggesting these measures are not a necessary stepping stones. But reach and frequency dominated for so many years because advertising was not held accountable for the final destination. If we lose sight of the destination, we won’t be able to connect the dots, and again will confuse a midpoint along the way with the destination.

I suppose so.

Masters Of Marketing

2006-10-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

Orlando, Florida: Here I come! I’ll be attending the Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing Annual Conference this Thursday through Saturday, and I plan to continue the Engagement blog coverage while I’m down there. Rumor has it that consumer-generated media will be a HUGE topic of discussion – in the keynotes, panels and hallway discussion. I’m looking forward to participating.

Speaking of the ANA, I refer you to the interview I conducted a few weeks ago with Barbara Bacci Mirque, EVP at the ANA. Her interview has been one of the most popular video views on the Engagement By Engagement blog. Check her out!

Finally, let me know if you’ll be at the conference and would like to do a video interview, or just shake hands. I’ve already got a few interesting folks lined up.

Joseph Jaffe: Desperate Times Call for Desperate Housewives

2006-10-03T15:03:00.000-07:00

"New-marketing" Joseph Jaffe breaks down this week’s AdAge cover story. (I wouldn’t know because I don’t subscribe to print; only RSS.) The stories, titled, “Comeback trail” and “cancel the funeral: broadcast TV is alive and kicking harder than it has in years” are, of course, bullish on broadcast television. But Jaffe counters:

The article highlights strong season premiere numbers, with Grey's Anatomy for example boasting numbers which would have put it in the top 5, 10 years ago.

That said, it also shows a side-by-side comparison of the 2006 season versus 2005-2006, 2000-2001 and 1994-1995 and it doesn't take a genius to infer that all is not as rosy as the article suggests. One just has to look at exactly a year ago to see sharp drops across the board.

But moving beyond reach, Joe comments:

Where's the engagement factor? Where's the proof of view? Where's the ROI activation component which proves that consumers are watching, remembering, internalizing AND acting on said communication?

My fear is that the marginal (read: mediocre) marketers out there and the incremental (read: lazy) agencies are going to take this article as a huge sigh of relief that all is well in TV Land.

But it's not. Not by a long shot.

What we need to see is proof that TV as an advertising medium (interruptive commercials, product placement and brand entertainment), is worth its weight in increased CPM's (efficiency) and total dollar investment. We need to see proof that advertising still works (effectiveness) against marketing and business objectives.

Where's the research (not commissioned by an agency or broadcast/cable network) to prove and demonstrate that more (or enough) people are watching advertising, as opposed to CONTENT, AND that there is clear follow-through (cognition, investigate, intent, action) as a result?

Amen.

Don't Talk To Me In Advertising!

2006-09-30T04:40:00.000-07:00

Cartoonist Hugh McLeod's message is dead on. Need I say more?...

Critical Questions For Engagement Believers

2006-09-29T08:19:00.000-07:00

Here are my immediate thoughts on the ARF/AAAA’s Consumer Engagement conference, as we near its end. First, the conference was awesome and included much thoughtful discussion! I really enjoyed soaking it all in, meeting smart people, as well as serving as one of three Engagement bloggers, providing live coverage. To stimulate further debate and contribute to progress, I offer the following observations and questions:

Media Entrapment. There’s been a lot of talk about engagement and turning on a mind within surrounding context. That’s great, but it seems the vast majority of discussion is about context within highly packaged, controlled contexts, such as 30-second spots and other traditional media. There’s nothing wrong with that, but isn’t consumer control turning those packaged contexts upside down? That’s why we’re having this darn conference in the first place! I understand the audience is comprised of a lot of media planners, buyers and researchers, but what about addressing the many other contexts beyond one-way media that impact context?

Uncontrolled Context. Considering point one above, what about uncontrolled contexts, like social networks, which panelist CNET hosts so many of. How should researchers and brand managers approach turning on minds when it’s not co-creation between a brand and a consumer, but co-creation among thousands of consumers and only one brand, a brand essentially at the mercy of the conversation within the crowd?

Unfavorable Context. Considering point one above, how does context change when conditions become unfavorable for a brand, i.e., what is the nature of context when you’re battling a TiVo? What is the nature of context when consumers are annoyed as hell by an advertiser's disruptive, interceptive or coercive presence?

Product As Context. Considering point one above, how about the role of product itself in creating context? Advertising used to serve as life-support for products that are mediocre, suck or simply don’t work, i.e., the gel that takes scratches out of eyeglasses (never worked). In a Google world – where search engines connect passionate information seekers with passionate information speakers – that life support dies. Conversely, good products often can sell themselves. Advertisers must consider the product more often when thinking about context and marketing communications that follow around. Maybe, sometimes, advertisers needs to forget about the media, and even the content of the message, and make recommendations more central to the product. Similarly, Greg Andersen of BBH suggested inverting the ratios: very much investment on the content, and very little on the media vehicles. Make content (or product) so good that consumers will want to help you market.

Customer Service Manifesting In Media. What about customer service? With consumers in control – and empowered to self-publish and spit back – customer service is increasingly manifesting in the most prolific kind of media: consumer-generated media. Positive or negative recommendations; or, positive or negative GRPs, or brand credits or debits. CGM then competes against the traditional, limited cadre of media that advertisers think they can control. But the world just works more holistically than that. Customer service, in essence, is becoming a media department. (Similarly, in a world where consumers participate, so does the legal department, which has been reluctant to embrace consumer participation and control over the brand.)

Embracing Consumer Control. Which leads to the most important question: What about control? I heard very little about advertisers ceasing control, until the Axe case study by BBH. The discussion much reflected denial of a need to give up control in an open-networked, digital media universe. This was suggested with one major online publisher at the conference, who emphasized the importance of keeping users within its walled gardens. As a consumer, I consider that an attempt to hold me hostage, not empower me. If this major online publisher was truly a friend to me, it would want to empower me – not monetize me by keeping me inside of its universe.

In addition, here are some specific areas where I think we could’ve invested more time:

Consumer Attention Data and Privacy. Media are going digital, and consumer metadata will become the lifeblood of advertising research, targeting and relationship management. The big issue with this today is that marketers are approaching this idea with the presumption that consumers don’t value their meta-data. I would agree, because it’s the incremental data that matter, and that’s hard for consumers to notice. But there will be increasing media flops where consumers do begin to realize the importance of their meta-data; that their attention belongs to them! Consider AOL’s recent release of consumer search-queries. The surface here has only begun to be scratched, and I guarantee you this will become a HUGE issue over the next one to three years. We should be talking about this now.

Humanizing This Whole Advertiser Business. What would happen if you asked a man on the street his point of view on engagement? He probably would answer you in context of his own cultural beliefs around the courting period prior to marriage, or his own experience. We should stop talking about media and consumers in such artificial, removed contexts and get some of them in here to give their feedback on how we marketing people are strategizing on how to manipulate and make more and more money off of them! Do advertisers really have meaningful relationships with consumers, or are we just deliberate around a nice idea, a reality we wish were true?

What do you think?

Victims of the "Depth Deficit"

2006-09-29T07:55:00.000-07:00

The following are on-the-fly notes from the Consumer Engagement conference: Gerald Zaltman, Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration Emeritus, Harvard Business School.

Zaltman opened his presentation by asking, “How do we make engagement a reality for us?”

The challenge is that new ways of thinking about engagement are essential. Engagement is not a new concept as advertising has always been concerned with engagement. Still, some things have to change as a result of advances made in how the mind works and communication being more complex and diverse as ever.

Zaltman went on to describe what he refers to as the “depth avoidance” on thinking differently. There are so many fears: fear of new and unfamiliar thoughts, fear of change, etc. In interviews Zaltman conducted with key executives, acknowledgement of this “depth avoidance” seemed to naturally surface. From these interviews, executives revealed among teams a lack of courage, lack of consumer insight, vacuums of real thinking, research not viewed as creative input for developing the much desired “a-ha!” Some executives admitted that research in their organizations is viewed as dead weight rather than a springboard, that their teams are not proficient at nurturing new demand, but only harvesting existing demand- an obstacle for many organizations. Zaltman concluded that growing the top line is truly a task for the courageous and the imaginative.

The "depth deficit" in thinking can be characterized by the following:

An absence of deep thinking about research questions and what managers most need to know.
Failure to go beyond the surface thinking of customers.
Failure to use insights from different disciplines to structure research issues or other knowledge to interpret data.
Absence of bold, imaginative thinking about what turns on, or engages customers.

How do we as organizational leaders tackle this "depth deficit?" Zaltman proposes two solutions involving process and an attitude. Apply the process to challenge assumption and what could be present that isn’t there, then figure out how to introduce that thought to existing frames. Lastly, possess the right attitude. Many times in Zaltman's interviews with executives, time was mentioned as a major hurdle facilitating the "depth deficit" to go untreated. Zaltman encourages all of us to commit the time. Commit to the process of getting to an idea.

Engagement is winning!

2006-09-29T07:31:00.000-07:00

The following are on-the-fly notes from the Consumer Engagement conference: Taddy Hall, Chief Strategy Officer of the ARF

Welcome to day two at the Consumer Engagemet conference. Taddy Hall, Chief Strategy Officer of the ARF opened today's session by recapping a few (of many) important highlights from yesterday’s session. Cleary, Hall said, “Engagement is winning.”

Some of the definitions that he found provocative were as follows:

The conceptualization of engagement itself, not a measurement, but a mental model or frame of how we approach brand demand or growth.
The mind is what the brain does.
Important clarification of “a turn on,” which means to occupy the mind with a particular concept or thought.
Frames. So much attention gets paid to context, but that is only a tip of the iceberg.

Some new models that emerged from yesterday’s discussion:

From “interrupt and repeat” to a model of co-creation.
Thinking not about what ads do to people, but what people do to ads.
Inversion of the linear model from "think, feel, do" to "feel, think, do" or "do, think, feel."
Marketing is a service to the consumer.
Media is a critical piece of the brand.
We are in an engage- based world where the “big idea” has to be front and center.
Advertising must give consumers “something.”
The brand is no longer a passenger, rather, it can be a content generator and an audience aggregator.

Hall ended by reiterating that advertising changes our memory and research should take this into consideration. Our industry is at a crossroads in many ways. As Peter Drucker once said, “If you want to do something new, you have to stop doing something old.”

Measuring the Turn-On

2006-09-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

These are on-the-fly notes from the Consumer Engagement Conference; Panel Discussion Including Marianne Foley of Harris Interactive, Robert Passikoff of Brand Keys, Amy Shea Hall of Ameritest, Bob Shullman of Monroe Mendelsohn Research, Barbara Zach of IAG Research, moderated by Barbara Bacci-Mirque of ANA.

The audience was reminded of the definition of engagement, which is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context. We were told that it took months to come up with the exact definition of this highly publicized, much talked about media term. The engagement model of Engagement + Trust x Targeted Contacts = Brand Impact will hopefully help marketers determine just how engaged consumers really are with a given product, service or television program.

Some questions to keep in mind when trying to determine consumer engagement of a given program:

How would someone behave if they were engaged with a program?
For how long did a person watch a television program?
Did they watch alone or with someone else?

Scale emotion as positive or negative to determine emotional involvement. Scale it on a range from most engaged to least engaged. A highly engaged consumer equals high recall thanks to strong content. Creativity plays a major role here, and majority rules when making the point of “creative matters”.

How do we incorporate predicting market success in engagement? The answer links back to Professor Wilson’s presentation given earlier in the day – you need to understand the mind and must be able to read a mind. You want to be able to factor in the difference between driving behavior and real engagement. It is agreed that change needs to happen…if you want to do something new, you have to stop doing something old.

Let the truth be told – no one likes change. We are all creatures of habit. The slightest modification in your daily routine scares the heck out of you. So it’s not surprising that adjusting to the rapidly changing media landscape is challenging. It is important to build a connection between a brand and a consumer. You also need an emotional connection – how do you feel about something? Does a product fit you? Since people wear multiple hats – a career person, a mother/father, a wife/husband, etc., it’s important to determine which “me” you are engaging and how you’re planning to do it.

Time to Disengage from Engagement

2006-09-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

Jim Nail, CMO of Cymfony, offers interesting reflection on the Engagement panel at Mediapost Forecast 2007 conference. He says:

It was clear from the panel on engagement metrics at the Mediapost Forecast 2007 conference that the industry's attempts to use "consumer engagement" as a tool have gotten ahead of the Advertising Research Foundation's process of defining and codifying the concept.

The panel was billed as a debate, and it delivered. Representing the media buying community were the well-known and always colorful Erwin Ephron, along with Dave Smith, president of Mediasmith. Representing the group championing and developing the concept were Joe Plummer Chief Research Officer of the ARF and Bob DeSena Director of Active Engagement at Mediaedge:cia.

The debate boiled down to this: the media buyers want to operationalize the engagement concept with the kinds of specific metrics and processes that have guided the reach/frequency/GRP model of ad buying. But the initiative was only announced last July and the work is ongoing.

Dave Smith noted that every presentation by media companies includes a pitch that their property is more "engaging" than others while media research companies like Simmons are pitching engagement metrics that don't fit into the current process. To top it off, Dave noted pressure from clients asking what his company is doing about engagement.

It is to these media sellers, researchers and clients that my title is directed: they should disengage the hype machines.

Joe Plummer readily admitted "we have a long way to go and we need to hurry up" and noted that there are five research initiatives in process to explore and validate different approaches that could be taken. Joe continued, "We are changing the way the industry thinks about advertising about advertising from one mental model to another. There is a lot of trial and error to evaluate the role of ideas like Net Promoter, co-creation of meaning and others."

This kind of change takes time, experimentation, and a lot of creative thought. Everyone should engage in the process to get the best thinking and ideas into the mix to be tested and validated.

Engagement Video Series: Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Business School

2006-09-29T06:19:00.000-07:00

Gerald Zaltman, according to Joe Plummer, is the spiritual leader of the Engagement movement. Oh yeah, he’s also the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. While he offered brilliant answers to my questions, he also offered a good response to what I think is going to become a hugely critical question: Is Engagement a finite commodity? He linked to limited attention and limited ability of consumers to process information. Amidst all the hype about advertisers trying to reach this realm of Engagement, I think these latter issues are fundamental. Too often advertisers are in denial about this fact. Click the Play button below to view our discussion.

Engagement Video Series: Ted Smith of CNET

2006-09-29T06:08:00.000-07:00

One of the more innovative, cutting-edge research execs in the digital media space is Ted Smith, Senior Vice President of Research and Intelligence at CNET. He describes his job and setting as sitting behind the dashboard of a nuclear powerplant, where their tapping into virtually every aspect of user behavior on their publisher network. Click the Play button below to view our discussion.

Engagement Video Series: Bruce Goerlich of ZenithOptimedia

2006-09-29T05:58:00.000-07:00

I was impressed with Bruce Goerlich, Executive Vice President at ZenithOptimedia, after teaming up with him at an ARF “What’s Next” executive workshop last year. I subsequently featured him in a MediaPost column (it's a good read!) I wrote about search and Google in the media and advertising mix. I caught up with Bruce at the Consumer Engagement conference and pried into his mind at this juncture in advertising. Click the Play button below to view our discussion.

Engagement Video Series: Ben Mendelson of the Interactive Television Alliance

2006-09-29T05:50:00.000-07:00

Our next installment in the Engagement video series features Ben Mendelson, President of the Interactive Television Alliance. Ben’s not a usual ARF presence, but offers great insight into a huge dimension entering the television and video landscape: direct marketing. Click the Play button below to view our entire discussion.

Engagement Video Series: Mike Donahue of the American Association of Advertising Agencies

2006-09-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

Our next installment in the Engagement video series features Mike Donahue, Executive Vice President of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. He describes an inflection point in his industry where advertisers and agencies must “stop throwing things at their users” and, and striving to really find out what’s important to customers. Click the Play button below to view our entire discussion.

Change is good. Isn't it?

2006-09-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

These are on-the-fly notes from the Consumer Engagement Conference; Alan Wurtzel – President, Research and Media Development, NBC: Media & Measurement: A Broken Marriage

Opening remarks included a “true-story” that went like this. A well-know TV executive died and found himself in front of St. Peter, who asked him if he preferred to go to heaven or to hell. The TV executive watched a short film clip on heaven and hell and decided he wanted to go to heaven. Curiosity got the best of him and he decided he wanted to check out hell as well. After all, the video clip showed that heaven and hell were equally beautiful. In fact, hell appeared to be the most beautiful thing he ever saw. So he tells St. Peter he wants to go to hell. He found himself greeted by sulfur. It was the most horrible place he had ever seen. He sees the devil and told him that hell looked nothing like the tape. The devil said of course not, that was the pilot.

The notion of one size fits all no longer applies to the constantly changing media platform the industry faces today. Wurtzel strongly believes that Nielsen ratings alone are no longer adequate as a metric to measure the evolving media landscape and I think he’s right. Media executives have no choice but to adapt to changes now. Why wait? With the endless list of new technologies to consider – digital downloads, digital video, etc., industry executives must try to listen to customers while addressing accountability and must find a way to measure it. The media industry today is exciting and scary, because we are truly redefining the rules of measurement - not because they want to, but because they have to.

Wurtzel summed up his thoughts with this simple quote “If we don’t change direction soon we’ll end up where we are going”.

"How Context Helps Turn on a Mind"

2006-09-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

The following are on-the-fly notes from the Consumer Engagement conference: Jane Clarke, Vice President, Insights & Innovation, Time Warner Global Marketing, Bob DeSena, Managing Partner, Director of Active Engagement, Mediaedge:cia, Mark McLaughlin, Regional Vice President, Yahoo!, Ted Smith, Senior Vice President of Research and Intelligence, CNET, Chris Weil, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Momentum Worldwide, and moderated by Mike Donahue, Executive VP, AAAA and Co-CEO, Ad-ID & e-Biz for Media.

This afternoon’s panel, “How Context Helps Turn on a Mind” gave interesting perspective from Jane Clarke, Vice President, Insights & Innovation, Time Warner Global Marketing, Bob DeSena, Managing Partner, Director of Active Engagement, Mediaedge:cia, Mark McLaughlin, Regional Vice President, Yahoo!, Ted Smith, Senior Vice President of Research and Intelligence, CNET, Chris Weil, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Momentum Worldwide, and moderated by Mike Donahue, Executive VP, AAAA and Co-CEO, Ad-ID & e-Biz for Media.

These individuals echoed sentiment similar to that of earlier presenters: the consumer is ultimately the one in control. McLaughlin acknowledged that having a great magazine or television show is a very powerful/artful thing, especially as the world becomes one of infinite choice and on demand. He said that consumers are the ones in control of turning on their minds and marketers have to get used to “leap frogging” the context and make sure they are reaching the right consumer, at the right time, with the right message. Smith emphasized the importance of keeping up with ever-changing consumer behavior, “Context is everything. The consumer is in control, which is the ‘nature of the beast.’ You can’t study or create a five-year plan.”

We learned that engagement is a challenge and the consumer is in control; what can be done to address the challenge and reach the consumer? Clarke emphasizes communicating research, “The advertiser has to do research they haven’t done before to create those links, which is where you’ll find case studies of how to turn on a mind.” DeSena suggests, “Surrounding context is a critical component of engaging: turning on a consumer to an idea, message enhanced in context.” Creating context to turn on a mind is certainly an ongoing challenge for these marketers. Panelists stressed the importance of getting full involvement from teams. At Time Warner for example, there are many people involved in meetings, collaboration with both creative and media agencies. Weil also supports the collaborative process saying, “The agency has to work as part of the overall. Companies must work with media, media buying, and creative agencies, to affect change: strong brands, strong cultures coming together for one client.” At Yahoo! McLaughlin says that working collectively, they need to improve upon explaining engagement as an essence of a brand and how it resonates with a consumer. In order to understand the user experience that drives engagement, as a company, Yahoo! has four pillars that they consider simultaneously: content, personalization, community, and search. He sized up the opportunity as “working towards finding out what message is resonating with what demographic and behavioral group.” At CNET, Smith says programming is built to encourage consumers to take action, an effort that is measured daily.

It’s an information exchange. Study the consumer and apply context that is relevant.

Engaging Techniques by Google and the NFL

2006-09-28T20:51:00.000-07:00

The following are on-the-fly notes from the Consumer Engagement conference: Patrick Keane, Director of Field Marketing & Sales Strategy at Google Inc. and Lisa Baird, Senior Vice President of Consumer Products and Marketing Integration for the National Football League.

At one of our sessions this morning we heard from two individuals whose two companies' commitment to engagement is apparent in the way they have penetrated our every day lives: Patrick Keane, Director of Field Marketing & Sales Strategy at Google Inc. and Lisa Baird, Senior Vice President of Consumer Products and Marketing Integration for the National Football League.

Keane and Baird both demonstrated how each of their respective companies places a high importance on consumer engagement. Keane described how customers engage with Google and how these unique insights can help better serve consumers. For example, Google Trends—one of the company’s newer products—was used to illustrate that if an increasing number of consumers type “fuel efficiency” in the search query, it should prompt automotive OEM’s to consider packaging their advertising in a different way. Keane also showed a heat mapped eye tracking study done on a typical Google page. The dark shaded region in the upper left indicated an intense amount of usage. Likewise, the shaded region in the top right where ads were placed showed that ads have a lot of value when they are relevant to the consumer. “The new reality is really that consumers are the new brand managers,” Keane stated, “the consumer is constantly in control and making decisions on what is going to best perform from an ad perspective.”

He closed with a picture of his colleague’s young nephew, sitting in front of the computer, entitled “Online tenure-‘since birth,’” to stress that kids these days have a deep level of engagement with the web, which in increasingly becoming the case for brands as well.

Lisa Baird came on stage next to discuss “The formidable challenge of fan engagement at the NFL.” Lights dim and a video of (very engaged-looking) fans cheering, embracing players, etc. kicks in, set to the music of Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” and ending with the familiar NFL logo throbbing loudly like a heart beat. Lisa joked, “Ok, so my job may not be that hard.”

Despite the NFL’s good fortune of sustaining strong TV ratings and sponsors, Baird did say that one of the biggest challenges that they are faced with is that the world is changing… fast. Media dynamics affect how to look at a business/business model. Sports fans are now using platforms simultaneously: they want information when they want it, thus creating a challenge for the NFL to cater to these needs and continue to figure out how to serve up the offering.

Baird also pointed out that one of the driving principles to pay attention to is the changing relationship between brands and consumers: media dynamics, brand/customer relationships/America’s new demography. “The major trend over the past 10-15 years,” Baird says, “is the eroding trust between consumers and brands.” More than anything, this is what has given way to the growing importance of peer-to-peer. Peers are now engaging without brand or enterprise. Everybody wants their 15 “megabytes” of fame.

In closing, Baird shared with us—appropriately in football language—the wheel of how fan engagement should be considered:
“Scouting”- The who, what, where, how.
The NFL knows:
…that an avid fan engages more than 15 hours a week (the median is 32 hours a week!), that consumers are watching games on TV, listening to games on the radio, reading newspapers veraciously, downloading podcasts, playing video games, on websites checking stats.
…that the mainstream fans are TV loyalists, driven by team loyalty, driven by an emotional connection to their team.
…that the lifelong attachment of youth life begins in elementary school.
Essentially, consumers are the ones who taught the NFL, what it is, to be engaged in the NFL.
“The Draft”- Behind every draft is the war room, tight security with a wall where you can find what team is going to do what, where are their weaknesses, how to pull it together to make a great team.
The NFL uses this same course of action in going through every single piece of business to establish fan metrics to every single point of the NFL. Clean sheeted new product programs are targeted to increase engagement and custom content is created for external partners.
“Special Teams”- Just like special teams, the NFL makes sure of integrated execution, changes focus, and makes sure of integration over different parts.
“Training Camp”- They are similar to the way the NFL evangelizes their methods and sees how partners are handling the message. Since the fan is really in the care of ESPN or NBC, it is especially important to the NFL that the message is evangelized through summit meetings, etc. to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
“Playbook”- Otherwise known as the specific game plays orchestrating programs to get fans. The NFL employs activities such as league programs, club programs, sponsor applications, and broadcaster promotions.
“Weekly Stats”- The NFL monitors the products inside and out for every opportunity to improve the fan engagement experience. They have a pulse on everything from gate attendance and blackouts to the fantasy audience and retail.

The result? It doesn’t look like the NFL is going anywhere for awhile. In fact, it sounds like fan engagement is off to a strong season, which Baird attributes to the year of “hot” rookies (Reggie Bush, Vince Young) and the reopening of the Superdome, which Baird described as “the power of football changing a community.”

How can this information be used and taken to the next level? Baird suggests being committed to your fans/consumers who want to participate and to be a part of helping to shape the advertising platform.

Changing The Process: Greg Andersen of BBH

2006-09-28T14:49:00.000-07:00

The following are on-the-fly notes from the Consumer Engagement conference: Greg Andersen, Head of Engagement Planning, BBH:

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Digital media will all become mainstream, but all the debates about clutter, fragmentation, ROI, etc. will be mute if we can’t harness people’s attention.

Interruption to engagement…doesn’t work anymore. We have to earn attention. If we get people to want to consumer marketing, then they’ll want to consumer our brand and learn about our products. This is why BBH introduced Engagement Planning as a fundamental discipline.

Old versus new media. Channels won’t become irrelevant as long as content becomes relevant. People don’t engage with media, they engage with content. We think about brands as content providers. To be efficient in this environment, brands need to think about aggregating audiences on their own, versus buying them.

In a fragmented world of limitless choice, only the most original, imaginative and visible content will have any chance of commercial success.

Invert ratio: Instead of more on media and less on content, what about more on content and less on media? Example: Smirnoff Tea Party video [white guys doing hiphop video].

Millward Brown study on DVR Households: Best creative is 30X more likely to be stopped and watched than the worst. The worst tad is 5.5X more likely to be fast forwarded than the best.

We’re living in an increasingly screen-based society. More televisions now in homes versus people. Screens in homes, cars, stores. Even print is being delivered via screens now.

Communications is an idea-based discipline. Example: Axe Dry video [Game killers.] The brand had success because Axe thinks of itself as an entertainment brand. People wanted to consume the marketing. That to us is engagement.

What is the big idea? What is the platform? What is the narrative that can travel across platforms?

Changing the process can be very difficult. How do we engage ideas that are rich in content and experience – on an ongoing basis?

Four disciplines:

Account management
Creative
Account planning
Engagement planning

Collaboration is key, inside the agency and out. Changing the process freaks people out.

Why the need for constant evolution?
What is this Engagement Planning thing?
…and what’s this new way of working?
How might I need to approach things differently?

Rigor around content and channel choice. Get away from generalizations like objective setting and get down to specific tasks. What specifically is the role of communications? The more specific, the better we can get to measurement.

Ideas get better when you have a lot of people collaborating from the beginning with a sense of ownership.

Changing The Process: Jim Taylor of Mediaedge:cia

2006-09-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

The following are on-the-fly notes from the Consumer Engagement conference: Jim Taylor, Panning Partner, Central Planning Group, Mediaedge:cia:

What is communications planning?

Communications industry is in a period of structural and cultural turmoil.

- Post full-service agency, things ad started to calm down.

- Then came communications channel planning…holistic planning.

- Communications planning became very disruptive.

So what is communications planning? The process of developing a holistic plan, across marketing and trade marketing functions, that defines how a brand will perform. Known as:

- Engagement planning

- Integrated marketing communications

- Connections planning

- Channel planning

- 360 planning

- Media-neutral planning

Structurally, it precedes execution. It involves bridging the worlds of strategy and creativity.

What are benefits of communications planning for client?

Being true to your annual objectives.
Interlinking communications channels and encouraging better use of them.

Who does communications planning well at the moment?

- Individuals do, not agencies.

- UK and Asia are a little more advanced, but not much.

Do clients really understand communications planning?

- Not really.

- But there is a sense of momentum.

- Clients don’t know how to pay for it, or set a separate budget stream.

Then what do clients really want?

- Those with no real understanding value above the line creative, most.

Is it important to be independent of execution to do communications planning?

- You can get objectivity in executional agencies.

- It’s dangerous to be too removed from execution. Being objective and subjective is key.

Different agencies are scrabbling to adopt communications planning. But is it a decoy for integration?

- There are a few, because clients think it’s important.

Today if we’re honest, the agency world is utterly confused.

- The ROI from communications is really diminishing.

- Communications Planning may be a part-solution.

- BUT execution is what clients pay for.

Four Stages in Communications Planning

Wanting to Fly: 2000-2005: within all execution agencies, all forms of planning will merge into Communications Planning
Learning to Fly: 2005-2010: Within media agencies, media buying will relocate. A measurement device creates the tipping point.
Cutting Through The Earth’s Atmosphere: 2010-2020: companies that have historically understood econometrics will do well. Clients will want more control over their brands at an emotional level. Client environment will become more appealing to agency people. Ad agencies will struggle on three fronts: Communications Planning; Production; Ideas. Some agencies will gravitate to production; some will gravitate to production.
Weightlessness: 2020 onwards: Be able to tell the “return on idea” investment.

Making tomorrow happen today.

- Communications Planning and Creative is a core product.

- Neither dictating to the other or coming first.

- Working together but independently.

- Need equality between the two; results in account handling and management consultancy.

Why Not Create This Today?

Big Ideas Instead of Ads!

2006-09-28T11:53:00.000-07:00

HEY! What’s the Big Idea?

These are on-the-fly notes from the Consumer Engagement Conference; Panel Discussion on ‘Big Ideas Instead of Ads’: Valerie Graves of Vigilante, Mike Hughes of The Martin Agency, Andrew Keller of Crispin, Porter and Bogusky, Joyce King Thomas of McCann Erickson and Mark Tutssel of Leo Burnett, led by Randall Rothenberg of Booz Allen Hamilton:

Myth vs. Science - Which of the two provide for a Big Idea? Is it a combination of both? Does one have more impact over the other? The general consensus appeared to be that science plays a major role in coming up with a big idea, but advertising can not be turned into a science. Words like insight, self-expression, logic and creativity came up quite a bit, as did reward, intrigue, interest and inspire. What can really stimulate consumer engagement is offering them something that is inspiring, something that is intriguing, and in the end something that rewards them. Let’s be honest, everyone likes to be rewarded. If you offer me a product or service that I can benefit from, I will definitely think about this product even after I turn off the television set. I may even go out and purchase this product and maybe, just maybe, I’ll tell my friend about it. This is the key. To get people interested. Get people talking about your brand. Seems simple doesn’t it? The hard part is coming up with a campaign that will grasp the immediate attention of consumers and then executing it in a way that will keep them interested. Creativity plays a key role here as does bridging the gap between a product and the audience it’s trying to reach.

I think it’s safe to say that the key to a successful campaign for a particular brand is one that engages consumers. Determining how to take a product and make it appeal to consumers is crucial to giving them a reason to engage – a reason to remember – a reason to purchase. But what is interesting to a consumer? Almost anything can engage a consumer as long as the appeal is right.

Examples:
Geico Car Insurance – Surprising how engaged consumers were by the British speaking Getco.

Staples Easy Button – A simple concept grounded on the idea that life needs to be simple resonated with people. Nearly 1 million easy buttons were sold.

Burger King – Created a King who is believed to be a classic character of advertising that appealed to children and re-contextualized to a scary setting.

So what’s the moral of the story? You, the advertiser, must understand the consumer you are trying to reach and you must be interesting. If you provide an interesting message, you will find an interested, engaged consumer.

Advertisers Can Learn From Montessori School Teachers

2006-09-28T09:21:00.001-07:00

Angelo Fernando at Hoi Polloi left an interesting comment on my earlier notes on Gerald Zaltman’s keynote address today at the Consumer Engagement conference:

I believe there's a lot of work to be done on understanding mental engagement --as opposed to the physical kind. I like your reference to children and education. If you go back to the roots of the Montessori method, you'll find that it's all based on engaging the mind in the pre-computer age. They teach vocabulary, math, geography etc through a combination of interactive devices and socialization. (Full disclosure here: My wife is a Montessori teacher!)

The point is, when applying engagement to brands, we need to recognize that merely clicking on something or inviting consumer generated content is not going to create lasting experiences. The consumer needs to participate in the experience beyond clickthroughs. There may be no metrics for experiences --yet-- but it's time to stop measuring things just because we can measure them.

Interesting perspective! I went to Montessori school during the first years of my elementary education. It was a real, wholesome experience, something most advertiers don't understand with their hard-sell, cluttered, mass-marketing campaigns.

Gerald Zaltman Keynote at the Consumer Engagement Confernce

2006-09-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

These are on-the-fly notes at the Consumer Engagement Conference; Keynote: Gerald Zaltman, Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School:

What is a mind? The short hand answer, among cognitive psychologists: the mind is what the brain does. That makes the mind the most intensively used, versatile organ. It’s the most complex and least understood, although we do know a great deal about it. Turning it on is a challenge. But turning on a mind is central to engagement.

I stress a few basic qualities of mine, using devices that will engage more.When turning on a mind, I mean occupying it with a particular concept or thought.

Case studies:

Children in kindergarten or first or second grade, if you want to teach a unit of geography, the way you design that unit and its success depends on whether kids know the world is round or flat. Second graders think world is round, but if you prove further, you begin to learn that almost all of those children think the world is round like a pancake, not round like a tennis ball. It makes a big difference.
A simple riddle: There’s a man at home, and another man coming home. The man at home is wearing a mask. It takes a while before people come up with the answer, a ballgame. The primary thought that is triggered by home is a residence, a robbery. Riddles and games are based on assumption. Even ambiguous words… “prostitutes appeal to pope”…means different things in Enquirer versus Boston Globe.

The point is that frames are essential to how we process information. We always see something from somewhere, and it’s essential that we conduct necessary research to understand where the somewhere is when we’re thinking about brand ideas and context. It’s impossible to turn on a mind without activating a frame. Frames are deep, like emotions, they’re unconscious, automatic and very powerful. They are like metaphors. They’re co-equal in importance with emotions, play stage in which emotions act out their roles. The labels for common deep metaphors are: journey transformation, balance, control, and so fourth. They influence what we attend to, how information is internalized, how processed…what, if anything we do, its consequence.

Case study

Two groups of people exposed to identical film…two automobiles banging into each other. First group asked to list everything that occurred in accident just viewed. Second group is asked to list everything in crash they just witnessed. First group “accident” seldom mentioned broken glass; second group mentioned it far more. When there’s not glass broken, lots of “crash” people still report broken glass.

Advertising has the impact or potential to alter memories. Our memories are malleable. They’re constantly changing, adding and taking things away. When a mind is turned on, it becomes inventive, imaginative to the past events for which it uses to process current exposures.

Our minds are extremely inventive. Not just with respect to memory, but with respect to ongoing events. Minds are always imagining. The frames we use are very powerful in determining what we add and take away from and experience.

Deep metaphors (frames) are the somewhere from which we see or experience evenets. They influence how consumers re-present ad content to themselves. They shape imaginations.

We imagine or re-create the past by adding and subtracting .information.

We exercise imagination s we experienced present events, again by adding and subtracting information.

Our consumption visions concerning future product or service encounters are an imaginative conceptual blending of the past and present including advertising.

What are design principles to turn on a mind? Most of our ideas seldom reach conscious thought. They usually do so only after they’ve done their job. Here are key components:

Exposure
Distinctiveness
Personal Relevance and Active Involvement
Availability of Concepts
Story-Telling Capacity
Mood State congruence
Emotional Content

Joe Plummer Opening of Consumer Engagement Conference

2006-09-28T08:10:00.000-07:00

These are on-the-fly summary notes Consumer Engagement conference; Dr. Joe Plummer, Chief Research Officer of the Advertising Research Foundation:

My correlary to Murphy’s Law was that Murphy was an optimist. Let’s give a little framework on engagement before featuring Gerald Zaltman. One way to frame it is to contrast it to success that economists call the mass-media age, and where’s it going in the participant age? It’s a radical change.

Mass media --> Participant age

Ad Goal: Create brand awareness --> Create brand demand

Mental Model: Interrupt and repeat --> Co-creation and coownershop

Operating Construct: Reach --> Engagement

We’ve always asked what ads do to consumers, but now we must ask what do people do to advertising? We need to move beyond opportunity to se of hear the message to opportunity to engage in the brand idea. We must understand and measure the prospects. The true integrator is your customer. Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.

Turned On – Activating associations, symbols, metaphors and experience to co-create personalized experiences.
Old advertising process:
Think à Feel à Do…but it’s wrong…we don’t work that way as people.
Feel à Do à Think or Feel à Think à Do…is right!
Storytelling is more powerful than argumentation. But there’s a gap between common wisdom and common practice.
Spontaneous and reflective measures – both are needed.
We must shift our thinking from push by medium to a balance of push and pull across media.
Advertising should be focused on prime prospects, not just large audiences.
New engagement model:
Engagement + Trust x Targeted contacts + Brand Impact

Bob Barocci Opening of Consumer Engagement Conference

2006-09-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

These are on-the-fly summary notes of Welcoming Session:

Bob Barocci, president of the ARF, opens up the conference, following welcome by O. Burtch Drake of the AAAA.

“We’re honored to lead initiative called engagement. This may be the single most important initiative going on in our industry. Today and tomorrow will be different than other engagement events. No speechifying. People here today are believers and that is major criterion among all the presenters and panelists…they’re changing their practices to reflect their ideas about engagement. Here are some examples:

NBC will now begin to price television time based on engagement. First broadcast network to have courage to do that.
Seven blue-chip advertisers have agreed to lead engagement consortiua. P&G, USPS, P&G, Microsoft among others. They will overlay engagement theory over their own practices.
Experiental marketing council. Cisco, Frito-Lay, Microsoft, IBM, Coke, Oracle and ten others.
Major agencies, like Publicis, have started appointing directors of engagement.

It’s a scary proposition. Nielsen is about to offer commercial ratings, which many media companies are afraid of. They’re likely to find that commercial ratings will be lower than program ratings, and we can be sure that engagement ratings will be even lower.

Engagement Video Series: Paul Donato of Nielsen Media Research

2006-09-28T07:46:00.000-07:00

Paul Donato, Chief Research Officer of Nielsen Media Research, has a unique, important and sometimes controversial role at Nielsen Media Research. In the Engagement video series, Paul offers his thoughts on the state of measurement and advertising, the evolution of video, the meaning of Engagement and the future. Another must-see!

(Obvious disclosure: Nielsen Media Research is affiliated with my company, Nielsen BuzzMetrics. Nielsen Media Research is owned by VNU, which is a majority shareholder in Nielsen BuzzMetrics. I frequently collaborate with Paul Donato in the course of our business.

Engagement Audio Series: Joe Pilotta of BIGResearch

2006-09-28T07:29:00.000-07:00

I first met Joe Pilotta, VP of research at BIGResearch, several years ago, following an awesome presentation he made with Don Schultz on marketing silos and simultaneous media usage. I soon got to know Joe better as he got involved with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, which my company co-founded. Joe was not able to join me for a video interview (similar to Mark Green), so we did a Skype audio interview. Joe brings a contrarian and academic flare to the topic of advertising, research and engagement. He’s far from getting on the engagement bandwagon, but definitely offers constructive criticism for the larger discussion.

Click the Play button below to hear the audio interview. You can also subscribe to all Engagement By Engagement audio feeds (on your iPod or other player) here.

Engagement Video Series: Mainak Mazumdar of Nielsen//Netratings

2006-09-27T15:49:00.000-07:00

Mainak Mazumdar, chief of measurement science at Neilsen//Netratings, has been a good friend of mine since year 2000, when he joined the Media Metrix media measurement unit of Jupiter Media Metrix (dot-bomb days). A few years later, he’s now the stats guru at Netratings. He offered some interesting insight into how the big media and television companies are starting to drive and fund a lot of the development in the online audience measurement space. As most readers of this blog will know, the television upfronts were shaky this year, and advertisers demanded major integration and extension from traditional television to digital video channels. Online video is here (literally on this blog, and figuratively)! Click the Play button below to hear Mainak’s insights.

(Obvious disclosure: Nielsen//Netratings is loosely affiliated with my company, Nielsen BuzzMetrics. We share a majority shareholder: VNU.)

Past Interviews In The Engagement Series

Engagement Video Series: Drew Neisser of Renegade Marketing

2006-09-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

At the OMMA conference yesterday, I got a chance to hook up with one of my favorite digital and experiential marketing gurus: Drew Neisser, founder and CEO of Renegade Marketing, a unit of Dentsu. He doesn’t come from the media measurement school, but offers a refreshing perspective: focus on the overall, customer experience…period. His programs often include traditional media tactics, but they are not the core. The idea is. Click below to hear Drew’s insights.

Past Interviews In The Engagement Series

Engagement Video Series: John Bell of Ogilvy's 360 Digital Influence

2006-09-27T05:18:00.000-07:00

John Bell of Ogilvy's 360' Digital Influence, a divison of Ogilvy Worldwide Public Relations had this to say about the power of consumer engagement. I also caught up with him at a conference in Washington DC. John's firm is quite "engaged" on this topic, and earlier this week, his colleague, Rohit Bhargava, was on an "Engagement" panel I moderated at OMMA East. Here are my reflections on that session.

Past Interviews In The Engagement Series

Engagement Video Series: Virginia Miracle of Brains On Fire

2006-09-27T05:06:00.000-07:00

Virginia Miracle works on the frontier of consumer-engagement. At Dell, she really pushed the envelop on tapping into the power of consumer expression and recommendations, and she was one of the first individuals in corporate America to have the title of "Brand Manager, Word-of-Mouth Marketing." She since joined an East Coast firm entitled (get ready for this) Brains on Fire, a branding and identity agency with unique expertise in word-of-mouth. Virginia, a proud board member of the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), had this to say about "engagement" when I caught up with her at a conference in Washington DC last week.

Past Interviews In The Engagement Series

Engagement Video Series: Dr. Joseph Plummer of The Advertising Research Foundation

2006-09-27T04:34:00.000-07:00

After interviewing Bob Barocci, president of the Advertising Research Foundation, earlier this week, I convinced Joe Plummer, Chief Research Officer of the ARF, to face the camera for a chat with moi. Beyond a lifetime of contributions to advertising research, Joe Plummer is largely responsible for leading the framework for the Engagement initiative, including its working definition: “Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.” Here’s the AdAge story about the definition and framework, which was unveiled last March (Jonathan Carson and I actually contributed to the corresponding whitepaper).

One of the things I like about Joe's take is that he believes insights garnered from consumer-generated media should play a major role in the equation, along with other emerging human insights. Our video chat is a must-see, so I encourage you to press the Play button below.

Past Interviews In The Engagement Series

Engagement Video Series: Steven Starr of Revver, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of Eepybird.com

2006-09-26T19:51:00.000-07:00

Today I moderated a standing-room-only panel at the OMMA conference on social video, and I was joined by a few pioneers from the space: First, I had Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of Eeepybird.com, famous for the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment (seen over six million times as of today!). Second, Steven Starr, CEO and co-founder of Revver, joined as well; Revver is an video-sharing, syndication and ad-serving platform rolled into one. It’s like YouTube, but they split advertising profits with content creators, who can be just about anyone. I described here how I was using Revver to power the video on this Enagement blog.

I admire the folks from Eepybird as well as Revver, because of their grassroots passion, respectively, to create unique content and empower content creators to monetize. They originate far from the mainstream legacy of content creators and media folk; they’re true renegades and innovators, creating a totally new form of entertainment and media model. They’re also very nice guys.

I’ll stop rambling…here’s my interview with Steven Starr of Revver, and Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of Eepybird.com. Click Play to view. And below my interview is the famous Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment. Check it out. It’s hysterical! (At the OMMA conference, they also gave us a preview of their latest Mentos experiment, which has become an opening feature with the Blue Man Group.)

Steven Starr of Revver, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of Eepybird.com
Bob Barocci of The Advertising Research Foundation
Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0
Erwin Ephron
Dr. Robert Passikoff of Brand Keys
Jack Flanagan of comScore Media Metrix
Mark Green of ACNielsen
Barbara Bacci Mirque of Association of National Advertisers
Michelle de Montigny of Millward Brown
Michael Burgi of Mediaweek
Noah Brier of NoahBrier.com
David Berkowitz of 360i

Engagement Video Series: Bob Barocci of The Advertising Research Foundation

2006-09-26T13:03:00.000-07:00

When the ARF approached me about getting involved with the Consumer Engagement conference, I was interested in supporting the organization in a significant way, but really wanted to make a unique contribution to the programming and engagement of the event itself. And that’s how the Engagement By Engagement blog came to be. There were many supporters of this experiment from the onset, but Bob Barocci, president of the ARF, was a major champion and helped make it a go.

With that, I encourage you to press play below to view our chat about his views on the advertising, media and research business. I always have a lot of fun when chatting with Bob. This one’s a must-see.

Bob Barocci of The Advertising Research Foundation
Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0
Erwin Ephron
Dr. Robert Passikoff of Brand Keys
Jack Flanagan of comScore Media Metrix
Mark Green of ACNielsen
Barbara Bacci Mirque of Association of National Advertisers
Michelle de Montigny of Millward Brown
Michael Burgi of Mediaweek
Noah Brier of NoahBrier.com
David Berkowitz of 360i

Engagement Video Series: Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0

2006-09-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

Scott Karp is head of research and strategy at a niche publisher, but is perhaps best known for his blog, Publishing 2.0, which covers the convergence of media and technology. Scott is one of the most important sources of analysis in my news feed, because he provides the unvarnished truth about how media and advertising models are shifting, with no hindrances from fear or legacy. Which explains Scott’s attention to Rishad Tobaccowala at the OMMA conference today:

Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, gets my vote for most honest, “let’s cut out the bullshit” keynote speech. Speaking at the OMMA Conference in New York, Rishad admitted what most media and advertising stalwarts are deeply afraid of conceding: we’re just making this shit up (see his keynote here).

To hear Scott’s raw commentary on the state of media, advertising and Engagement, click the play button below. (By the way, you can come see Scott and I present to the Magazine Publishers of America on disintermediation occurring in publishing with the advent of consumer-generated media. Our workshop takes place on October 19 in New York.)

Engagement Video Series: Erwin Ephron

2006-09-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

Anyone in media planning knows Erwin Ephron – the “father of modern media planning.” So it is my pleasure to present my video interview with him. An articulate contrarian in the Engagement debate, Erwin suggests hope for the advertising business if it can get back to basics and focus on actual measurements that predict response.

During my visit, Erwin gave me a copy of his book, “Media Planning: From Recency To Engagement.” I’m very familiar with much of Erwin’s thinking and writing, but I’ve not read his book. I promise to eventually read it and offer a critique in the next couple months.

Click on the play button below to view my interview with Erwin.

Engagement Video Series: Dr. Robert Passikoff of Brand Keys

2006-09-25T22:12:00.000-07:00

I met up today with Rob Passikoff, founder of Brand Keys, a media and marketing modeling firm. (See Rob’s blog here.) We had a great talk about struggles advertisers are going through now, and all the things they’re doing right and wrong with respect to their marketing and communications. He also respectfully counters the direction the Engagement discussion is going, and responds to my blunt question: “Are advertisers amidst a tragedy of the commons?” Rob will be a featured speaker at the Engagement Conference this week. Click on the play button below to hear all he has to say.

Engagement Video Series: Jack Flanagan of comScore Media Metrix

2006-09-25T22:08:00.000-07:00

I ran into Jack Flanagan, executive vice president, comScore Media Metrix, at the OMMA show today. Jack and I have been good industry friends since the late nineties, when I worked with him in the early years of Media Metrix, before it was acquired by comScore, and even before its brief unification with Jupiter. Jack offers us his perspective on the state of digital media, Engagement and the future.

Jack Flanagan of comScore Media Metrix
Mark Green of ACNielsen
Barbara Bacci Mirque of Association of National Advertisers
Michelle de Montigny of Millward Brown
Michael Burgi of Mediaweek
Noah Brier of NoahBrier.com
David Berkowitz of 360i

Engagement Audio Series: Mark Green of ACNielsen On Engagement Versus Attention

2006-09-22T17:08:00.000-07:00

Mark Green, SVP at ACNielsen, is in Chicago and I’m in New York, so a video interview was impossible. However, we did a 30-minute Skype call and I bring it to you right here – minutes later. Mark is a twenty-year veteran in media and market research, and is one of the most forward-looking, big-picture guys I know. In addition to his innovation duties on the job, he writes a monthly column in Media magazine and frequently offers me quotes and feedback on my own writing. In our discussion, we talk about media, research, engagement, attention and the future. He gives us a preview into his upcoming Media magazine contribution on Attention Versus Engagement (more on this topic from me later).

Click on the Play button below to listen now! Click here to download the MP3 file, and you can subscribe (like in iTunes) through the feed in the sidebar. And be sure to drop a line if you'd like to participate in an interview. Everyody's doing it!

powered by ODEO

We’re Featured On Revver!

2006-09-22T14:55:00.000-07:00

In case you’re under a rock and haven’t noticed, one of the goals of Engagement By Engagement is to showcase how easy it is for average Joes – yes, I count myself as one – to publish interesting, interactive content for like-minded people. Among the simplest of media tools in my arsenal include text, audio, photos and video.

And speaking of video, I’m using Revver to power video on this blog. Revver is a video-sharing, syndication and ad-serving platform all in one – and it’s designed to help niche content creators make money. It's what many of the leading video bloggers are using, including Lonelygirl15, Eepybird and zefrank. Instead of letting YouTube take all the proceeds, Revver offers a great platform and splits the revenue. If you’d like to learn more about Revver, check out this recent Q&A I did with co-founder Oliver Luckett.

Finally, as suggested in the headline, Alex Black, community manager at Revver, informed me this afternoon that Engagement By Engagement is featured on the Revver blog – see here. This is exciting stuff!

Time to get buzzy!

2006-09-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

My name is Stephanie and I am an analyst at Nielsen BuzzMetrics (NBZM). Along with Max and Sandra, I’ll be buzzy covering the (one more) buzz at the upcoming Consumer Engagement Conference.

A recent graduate of Kettering University with a major in marketing, I focused on consumer generated media, taking a position with NBZM in the spring of 2005. I’ve been hooked ever since. My days are spent reading consumer opinions- whether the topic is the uproar or the backlash over the latest in cars, credit cards, sandwiches or software, it’s always a surprise. But, one thing is certain, the consumer voice is very much alive and (last one, I promise) buzzing!

At the conference, I look forward to learning about the latest in our field and engaging in dialogue with you, my fellow colleagues, about the state of our industry now and in the future.

Engagement Video Series: Barbara Bacci Mirque of Association of National Advertisers

2006-09-22T05:11:00.000-07:00

Immediately after videotaping Michelle de Montigny of Millward Brown, I received a call from Barbara Bacci Mirque, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers. I originally met Barbara last year at an ARF exec dinner featuring Stephen Levitt of Freakonomics. Since I was only a few blocks from ANA headquarters, she invited me over to chat and conduct our interview right there and then. (And thanks to Will Waugh for making all this happen!).

Click the Play button below to view. And be sure to drop a line if you'd like to participate in an interview. Everyody's doing it! See below.

Barbara Bacci Mirque of Association of National Advertisers
Michelle de Montigny of Millward Brown
Michael Burgi of Mediaweek
Noah Brier of NoahBrier.com
David Berkowitz of 360i

Engagement Video Series: Michelle de Montigny of Millward Brown

2006-09-22T04:59:00.000-07:00

Nigel Hollis, chief research analyst at Millward Brown, is overseas and couldn’t make it for an Engagement video interview this week (but did offer a nice written contribution here). Fortunately, for my video aspirations, his colleague Michelle de Montigny, senior vice president, was kind enough to cover. (Speaking of Millward Brown, here’s a fun fact: Mary Ann Packo, CEO of Millward Brown North America, hired me to Media Metrix in the late nineties, when she was president of that company!).

Click the Play button below to view. And be sure to drop a line if you'd like to participate in an interview. Everyody's doing it! See below.

Engagement Video Series: Michael Burgi of Mediaweek

2006-09-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

The next installment in the Engagement video series features Michael Burgi, esteemed editor of Mediaweek. He talks about Advertising Week, new media, audience participation, engagement and walking the talk. Click the Play button below to view.

Be sure to drop a line if you'd like to participate in an interview. Everyody's doing it! See below?

Pete Engages on Engagement

2006-09-21T02:12:00.000-07:00

I first heard about the "engagement" movement from one of my former P&G colleagues, Ted McConnell, and upon hearing the word I immediately got very excited. Yes, we're all bringing a diverse range of definitions to the table (perhaps too many), but there's no question the "engagement" debate is pushing the frontiers of our thinking about advertising effectiveness, and in a highly consumer-centric manner. Indeed, the current model or reach & frequency is outdated and over-simplified, especially in the age of consumer control. From my particular vantage point, as someone (like Max) who meters and measures online consumer expression for a living, I'm seeing a whole new context of engagement, and the chart here tries to illustrate (in the bottom half) what I'm talking about. What's so powerful about consumer-generated media (CGM), is that it represents clear de facto evidence of "engagement" with brands, including the spectrum of negativity, which I firmly believe must always be factored into the equation. I'm written a few articles on this subject. They include:

Get Ready to Engage with the Engagement Metric

Consumer-Generated Media: The Age of Engagement

Are GRPs Enough in the Age of Consumer Control?

Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown: Engaged By Engagement

2006-09-20T16:25:00.000-07:00

Nigel Hollis from Millward Brown contributes his point of view on engagement:

I’m on the road for three weeks, keeping busy with various speaking commitments and client meetings, and so, much to my regret, I will miss next week’s Consumer Engagement Conference hosted by AAAA and ARF. Coming across this blog, Engagement by Engagement, reminded me of the conference, and got me thinking once again on the topic of engagement.

Why should we care about engagement? The simple answer is that engagement is the key to successful communication. Engagement determines whether or not a brand idea will make its way from the screen, loudspeaker or page into someone’s brain. But engagement alone does not make advertising successful. The idea conveyed by an ad must be assimilated into a person’s set of existing mental brand associations, and must increase the desirability of the brand.

So engagement is a necessary precursor to advertising success—a bridge between the advertising medium and the human mind. That bridge is complex and multi-faceted. At least three types of engagement work together to determine whether an idea successfully crosses the bridge.

“Engagement not interruption!” cry the ad agencies, completely ignoring the fact that people have always dismissed trivial, irrelevant and boring creative, just as they fail to engage with any other activity that possesses those characteristics. People will continue to engage with creative ads that they find enjoyable, interesting and relevant.

Much of the recent debate has focused on media engagement. The underlying assumption seems to be that the strong engagement with content on a media channel will lead to strong engagement with an ad carried by that channel.

I think that this assumption is flawed. In the early days of online ad testing, our data clearly demonstrated a negative relationship between ad recognition and how interested people claimed to be in the page that carried the ad. In other words, the more interested people were in the content, the less likely they were to notice and remember the ads positioned around it. Luckily we also found that good creative could overcome this dampening effect. More recent work by Dynamic Logic and Millward Brown supports the fact that creative engagement tends to dominate content engagement.

The jury is out on whether the same finding would apply to other media. It seems likely that the relationship between content engagement and ad engagement may vary by medium.

Finally we turn to consumer engagement. The degree to which a person engages with an ad or medium will be subject to both the current mood and the prior experience of that individual. Mood may be created by engagement with the medium, but it can also be a separate predominant state. For instance, excitement – as a result of your football team winning an important game - may cause people to be distracted and less likely to attend to a medium or an ad. Familiarity with the brand and its advertising will determine how readily people engage with communication from that brand.

So when we discuss engagement, let’s not make assumptions. The role that the three different facets play could vary dramatically across media channels.

Engagement Video Series: Noah Brier of NoahBrier.com

2006-09-20T09:51:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to present the next installment in the Engagement video interview series. Next we have Noah Brier of NoahBrier.com, famous for his deep insights into marketing, media and attention. Click on the image below to view our short chat.

(Btw, I've got even more great people lined up for Engagement interviews, including: Michael Burgi, editor of Mediaweek; Erwin Ephron, the grandfather of media planning; and Paul Donato, chief research officer of Nielsen Media Research. Be sure to drop a line if you'd like to participate. Everyody's doing it!)

I'm Engaged!

2006-09-20T09:39:00.000-07:00

Hello! I’m Sandra Parrelli, marketing manager with Nielsen BuzzMetrics and I’m engaged – to consumer engagement that is. This is my very first blog post and I am so excited to be a contributor to Engagement by Engagement, a grassroots blog to provide highlights of the ARF/AAAA Consumer Engagement Conference, as well as developments in the advertising industry’s Engagement initiative.

For years now, I’ve heard the term engagement tossed around the industry as it applies to consumers. Today, it’s become one of the most important and challenging issues facing advertisers. Understanding how to measure engagement is crucial to advertising, as we all need to know how effectively messages are received.

Coming from a TV ratings background after nearly 4 years of service as a research analyst with Nielsen Media Research, I was always interested in learning how involved consumers actually were with programming. I’ve since learned that a link can be made to a consumer’s engagement by gauging their recall, awareness and overall sentiment towards the brands and products being advertised during a specific program. Now that I have joined Nielsen BuzzMetrics, I realized that the concept of engagement goes way beyond the scope of television and is so pertinent, that there are conferences devoted to this topic alone. Not only is the importance of consumer engagement linked to a television program, but also to products, services, reputation and corporate image. Understanding what engages consumers are crucial to smart business decisions, since the likes of this highly influential group is substantial.

I think it’s fascinating that the concept of engagement has exploded, and has taken marketers by storm. I am looking forward to the Consumer Engagement Conference next week, and look forward to sharing what I learn.

Till next time.

Engagement Video Series: David Berkowitz of 360i

2006-09-19T17:46:00.000-07:00

To kick of the Engagement By Engagement video interview series, I had the pleasure of meeting today with David Berkowitz, director of strategic planning at 360i, a search marketing firm. Many of you probably know David as the prolific search guru at MediaPost SearchInsider, or from MarketersStudio, his personal blog. I presented today at his firm’s Digital Media Summit, and I convinced him to be my first engagement video victim. He’s a smart guy, and not typical of those we tend to see at the ad industry's engagement discussion table. I encourage you to click on the video thumbnail below to view our short chat.

(Remember: If you have something smart to say, and would like to be interviewed via video, audio or text, leave a comment here! Upcoming interviewees include Bob Barocci and Joe Plummer of ARF, and Mike Donohue of AAAA.)

Advertising Pros: Get Ready To Engage!

2006-09-18T20:53:00.000-07:00

Greetings! I’m Max Kalehoff, vice president of marketing with Nielsen BuzzMetrics, and I’m thrilled to introduce Engagement By Engagement! As the title says above, this is a grassroots blog to provide highlights of the ARF/AAAA Consumer Engagement Conference, as well as developments in the advertising industry’s Engagement initiative. This blog is led by Nielsen BuzzMetrics and supported by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA).

Why? We wanted to contribute to the engagement discussion in a unique and compelling way, and this blog is an experiment to achieve that goal. We outlined four key objectives:

Facilitate dialogue at the Consumer Engagement Conference, and continue contributing to the industry’s larger Engagement initiative.

Experiment with and demonstrate Consumer-Generated Media (CGM) firsthand by engaging industry stakeholders at the summit – physically at the event and virtually. We’re turning on minds, right?

Capture raw, unvarnished highlights and permanent archives of the Consumer Engagement Conference.

Leverage blog communication to deepen ARF and AAAA member satisfaction, loyalty, and likelihood of engaging with future ARF events.

What will we blog about? We’ll include periodic entries leading up to the Consumer Engagement Conference, including links to relevant articles, short summaries of industry events, Q&A’s and a few short videos. But the real action (and work) will take place during the conference, where we’ll have a small team on site at the Conference, to blog the sessions, panels and other.

Who are the bloggers behind Engagement By Engagement? I’ll be the lead author; you may know me from my weekly advertising columns at MediaPost (archived here), as well as my writing on AttentionMax.com, my personal marketing blog. But in addition to me, you can expect contributions from my colleagues Pete Blackshaw, Stephanie Calip and Sandra Parrelli. The latter two will be on site with me at the Conference.

Will other people participate? Yes, and we sure hope you will! We’re open to accepting short, written contributions from anyone who has something smart or pithy to say about advertising, media, research and, of course, engagement. Also, let me know if you’re interested in doing a written Q&A or four-minute interview on video. You can email me at max (dot) kalehoff (at) buzzmetrics (dot) com, or leave a comment here.

What will happen to Engagement By Engagement after the Consumer Engagement Conference? I don’t know, but I can tell you there will be a permanent archive of this experiment – right here on this blog. Maybe we’ll continue on, maybe not. Who knows? But I did promise the ARF I’d present my experience and results to them. This is new ground, so I don’t fully know what to expect. I hope ARF and AAAA stakeholders will find this blog interesting and actively engage in some way.

With that, I’m going to declare this my first post. I hope to see you at the Conference, as well as in the comments section of this blog!