Self-Interest Is the Anesthetic That Dulls Innovation
This year’s holy grail and favorite buzzword has been “engagement.” There’s been a good deal of speculation about engagement’s efficacy, especially by those who have difficulty defining engagement or figuring out how to integrate the concept into their current brand, creative, marketing, or media programs. This is especially endemic among those who fear that having to innovate will force them to face the cold, cruel realities of marketing to the “bionic” consumer in a multi-touch-point, 21st-century marketplace. Change can be scary!
Some of these difficulties stem from the “official” definition that was offered up earlier this year by a task force of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), which had to do with “turning on” the consumer to a brand.
You might have thought that from the average marketer’s perspective, measuring “engagement” against such a definition would have been attractive because it gave marketers so very many options to choose from. But some marketers insist that engagement is the wrong metric, period.
Take Scripps Networks, the parent company of the Food Network and HGTV, among cable-TV networks. Recognizing that the networks can’t absolutely control engagement, Scripps contends that “ad receptivity” is what actually gets viewers to buy the products advertised on TV.
Mike Pardee, senior vice president of research at Scripps Networks, was quoted as saying that the industry is “confusing ad effectiveness and media engagement.” He went on to say that “what we deliver is ad receptivity–you attract the right viewers and offer the right program environment,” all of which sounds suspiciously like what we used to call “audience demographics” and “editorial environment.” Not much innovation there, but let’s be fair and look at all sides of his position.
Would it be fair to say that it is a given that marketers have to be able to reach an identified demographic audience? The answer is yes, which is what the practice has been for 50-plus years. So I think it’s fair to say that “attracting the right viewers” isn’t much of an innovation. Is “programming environment” an issue, any more than it was in the 20th century? Well, other than that there are many more appropriate vehicles than ever before, the answer would be no.
So what does the Scripps approach offer? Perhaps Scripps just wants to do what it has always done, only call it something else. Attract the “right” viewers and offer an “appropriate” program environment and make the creative responsible for closing the engagement loop. Not only does it serve the model that the TV networks have had in place forever, but it also raises two questions: Isn’t that what everyone proffers, and what’s the opposite of “innovation”?
At my company, Brand Keys, we define real “engagement” as the consequence of any marketing or communication program that yields an increased level of brand equity for the product or the service. (When we say “brand equity,” we mean the degree to which a brand is perceived as meeting or exceeding consumer expectations for the category.) And we’ve discovered that the media environment into which you place an ad has tremendous affect as to whether consumers will be engaged.
Yes, the quality of the advertising matters, as always. There have always been and always will be differences between good and bad advertising, on- and off-strategy advertising, and rational and emotional advertising in terms of engagement effects. But the media environment, beyond the demos–excuse me, I mean the “right audience”–and the programming (a.k.a. “program environment”), can be measured for its ability to contribute to overall engagement. The system is an approach that we call Brand-to-Media Engagement, or B2ME for short.
Here’s an example. A client did his media planning and identified (among others) two perfectly acceptable TV shows with virtually identical “program environments.” Both had the “right viewers.” Neither was a Scripps program, but based on what Scripps has said, it would have approved of the criteria used that identified “20/20” and “60 Minutes II” as acceptable options for this client.
The brand’s target audience rated the brand an overall brand equity index of 115, independent of any media environment. When target consumers (and “right” viewers of the specific programs–you can’t do a real media-engagement assessment without including both elements) were asked to assess the “brand advertised on ‘20/20,’” it received a 136 brand equity score. Thus “20/20” as a media environment significantly enhanced the engagement level of the brand. When "advertised on ‘60 Minutes II,’” the brand equity score was 119, only slightly higher than the baseline brand score of 115.
When validity studies were conducted, we found that there was a virtual, straight-line correlation between the B2ME engagement scores and
• attention paid to the advertising
• increased levels of brand imagery
• increased levels of likelihood to purchase
• increased positive behavior toward the brand
• actual increases in purchases
• increases in brand profitability.
Perhaps equally important is that the actual strategic effects—in other words, which of the category drivers were positively influenced, and to what degree–differed depending on the specific programming environment the advertising was placed in, which makes it possible to select media for an ad campaign on the basis of which better reinforces the brand's specific copy strategy objectives and, therefore, ad receptivity. But that’s just another innovative application.
Also, both engagement and ad receptivity are more emotionally driven than they are rational. So it is more than likely that asking only direct, rational, self-reported questions such as “would you pay more attention to a channel [you watch],” “would you glean valuable information [from a channel you watch and pay more attention to]”, and “would you make shopping decisions at least in part based on the ads seen [on a channel you watch, pay more attention to, and glean valuable information from]” would yield highly correlated, self-fulfilling, and excellent answers to what are essentially meaningless questions.
The bottom line: Real media engagement can be assessed, and the quality of creative plays a part, and all of it can be measured. But it requires a bit more innovation than some companies seem willing to put forward.
A clever marketing innovator once pointed out that if you want to do something new you have to stop doing something old. As a psychologist, I would point out that innovation requires change, and change has a considerable impact on both the human mind and the marketing landscape. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because it means that things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.
Self-interest and the status quo notwithstanding, of course!
Robert Passikoff, Ph.D., is founder/president of New York-based marketing firm Brand Keys and is the author of firm “Predicting Market Success: New Ways to Measure Customer Loyalty and Engage Consumers With Your Brand.”
Other articles by Robert Passikoff:
Seven Brand and Marketing Trends for 2007
Consumer-Generated Content: Let Yourself Go
