Yesterday I listened in on the meeting of the ARF’s Engagement Council. A faulty microphone made the first speakers impossible to hear, so I missed the introduction and initial discussion about the definition of engagement (a topic Gordon Pincott will address in an upcoming Point of View). However, the subsequent presentations, which I did hear, proved interesting.

A theme that ran through the first two presentations was that time spent with advertising or content indicated the degree of engagement. The first presentation, by John Kenny, SVP of planning at DraftFCB Chicago, presented the launch of Alli, the first FDA-approved over-the-counter weight loss medication. Alli is unique in that users must follow a strict low-fat diet regime if they are to avoid some nasty side effects. Therefore the launch campaign needed to do more than just raise awareness of the brand; it needed to ensure that potential users who were willing to make the necessary changes would identify themselves correctly.

While the launch was supported by traditional media like TV, the Web site was the key educational device. However, John also highlighted some far more innovative approaches to creating the engagement necessary for people to really appreciate what was required to benefit from the brand. These included a variety of in-store fixtures (which actually failed to adequately engage people due to the grocery shopping environment), a pop-up store, which engaged people for far longer, and a book, titled “Are You Losing It? Losing Weight Without Losing Your Mind,” which was sold through Target, Wal-Mart, Kroger and CVS. John estimated that the book reached 30 million people, 6 million of whom browsed the book for an average of 12 seconds. The book sold 300,000 copies, which is a lot by any standard.

The theme of time spent with content continued into the next presentation by Josh Chasin of comScore. I have to admit that this presentation was less engaging than the others. Essentially Josh had used comScore data to create a measure of site “stickiness” based on a framework created by Eric Peterson. After seeing a couple of data tables, which demonstrated that sites people needed to use, such as Bank of America, Weather.com and Google, tended to rank higher than others, I left to make a cup of tea.

The last presentation by Joel Weinberger of Thinkscan covered ground that was very interesting but familiar. Thinkscan uses a couple of different approaches to identify people’s first, primary response to any message and understand the associations triggered by those messages. They offer a way to disentangle the influence of that “first, good feeling” (click here to read post) from subsequent rationalization. Millward Brown is working with Thinkscan; one interesting project involved the assessment of the Skoda ad reviewed in this post. The measurement of implicit meaning is a very interesting topic and to do it justice I will return to it in a separate post.

To conclude this post, here are some thoughts raised by the first two presentations.

First, John Kenny suggested that the Alli campaign could not be judged on the basis of sales because not everyone should be using the drug. The end-goal was to ensure that good candidates would correctly self-identify. Don’t you think the manufacturer would have a rather different opinion? While the drug might not be right for everyone, I imagine the company would still like to reach as many qualified users as possible.

Second, the Alli case study reminded me that no matter how engaging a pop-up store might be, it is tough to reach a lot of people with them. John said there had been 10,000 visitors to the Alli store in New York, and cited figures of 10,000 and 6,500 respectively for the Meow Mix and Altoids stores, also set up in New York. I have no idea of the cost, but it makes me wonder whether this approach is really scalable (and how many of the visitors were foreign tourists).

Last but not least, both John and Josh focused on how much time people spent with the content, either that of the brand or the site. Time spent might be a partial surrogate for engagement but it is not a direct measure of it. In the case of Alli, understanding and self-identification as a good or poor candidate for the drug would seem a far better measure of whether someone had engaged with the campaign or not. In the case of engagement with a site, we need more than just behavioral metrics. We need to know why someone was visiting the site. If the financial sites were anything like the one I use on a regular basis, engagement was forced upon many visitors and created a negative experience. Don’t we need to take that negative valence into account when measuring engagement?

And this brings me to one final thought related to a comment made by someone in the room at the ARF. (I did not catch his name). If I remember correctly, he commented that much of the focus on engagement had centered on media, not advertising creative. Then he said, “Not much work has been done on engagement of creative.” I was so taken aback by this comment that I spilt my tea. It just proves that what I take for granted is just not recognized by many. I guess the past twenty years of discovering what predicts real-life copy engagement have been wasted. If you want to know what it is that makes a piece of creative engaging, try reading this post for a start.

I would love to know what other people think about engagement. What defines it? Is time spent with the content a good surrogate or not? And have I missed something? Do we not know what drives engagement with creative content? Let me know, and thanks.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Brands, Creative, Media, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Print this Page