Engagement By Engagement

Etsy Sellers Inject Humanity Into Online Commerce | AttentionMax

2013-12-15T11:04:00.001-08:00

Etsy Sellers Inject Humanity Into Online Commerce | AttentionMax

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.”