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.
(19 votes, average: 2.58 out of 5)
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September 20th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
Thanks for the contribution, Noah! Here’s the link to your appearance on Engagement By Engagement: http://consumerengagement.blogspot.com/2006/09/nigel-hollis-of-millward-brown-engaged.html
Cheers,
Max
September 22nd, 2006 at 8:53 am
Does your penultimate paragraph imply that it is better to sponsor the football grounds of losing teams???
September 25th, 2006 at 4:12 am
Maybe not losing teams, so long as they put up a good fight which engages spectators, but a dull match may well cause people to look around more and notice the ads.
September 25th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
Nigel, I agree, engagement with content is tricky. It’s true that our research showed that different types of content did not influence online ad recall. But it’s also true that the more engaging the content is to viewers, the more likely they’ll keep going back to the content, which means (usually) higher ratings, which means that the content is a better audience delivery vehicle. But that doesn’t mean that the audience is more engaged with the advertising placed within that content.
Another point is that there are often differences in the types of people that find a certain kind of content highly engaging–for example, news or business content. In this way, engagement works similarly to affinity and may signal that certain media vehicles are more relevant to the consumers of a particular brand. In other words, engagement with the content can be used as a targeting tool.
September 26th, 2006 at 3:50 am
Thanks for the comment Michelle. The fact that engagement with content will increase potential frequency of exposure adds yet another element to the bridge between medium and brain. As you say, however, content engagement does not guarantee that the copy will be able to leverage that engagement.
September 26th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
One thing your entry doesn’t mention is the relationship between the advertisement and/or the brand being advertised and the media environment. I would think that the more closely related the creative/product/message are to the media environment, the more engaged people would be with the advertising.
For example, I am an avid reader of ‘This Old House’, which is a magazine for anyone who, like me, was naive enough to think that buying a ‘fixer-upper’ house was a good idea. My level of engagement with this magazine is infinitely higher than others I read, and the ads border on content for me as I am interested in learning as much as I can - even if it comes in the form of a paid marketing message.
September 28th, 2006 at 3:38 am
Thanks for the comment Marisa. You are right that targeted engagement with the content can improve attention to the ads as you describe. I think it confirms the point that we cannot assume that engagement will work the same way across all media or even the same media under different conditions.
October 2nd, 2006 at 7:58 am
Thinking further on this, it seems to me that there is an essential difference between magazines and Internet that may result in a very different relationship between content engagement and ad engagement.
When we were testing ad banners back in the late 90s most of them were placed around the edge of the page. The person asking for the page usually knew what content they were looking for and where to look for it. An ad had to be visually engaging or the content not very interesting for attention to be given to an ad.
With magazines people usually ’search’ by fipping through the pages, giving equal consideration to content and ads because they have little expectation of what they will see when they turn the page.
The move to in-content ads online may have changed the original finding (our data shows in-content ads perform better on average) but it does still suggest that different modes of navigating content will change the relationship between content and ad engagement.