« Social Media Forecast: Looks a lot like online advertising 1994 - 2000 | Main | More evidence that Boston is the hub of social media »

Is engagement devolving into old metrics?

A new study by OMD shows that their definition of "engagement" increases ad ROI by 15 - 20%. But their definition rests on old measures like media time spent and ad copy testing. Is this good news or bad news?

Engagement began life three years ago as the new metric meant to replace the old standby of GRPs, reach, frequency, etc. which are failing to answer senior exec's real questions about marketing effectiveness. In the ARF's initial model, engagement looks far different that past models.

As reported in Ad Age, though, OMD's model looks surprisingly traditional. Here's the description of OMD's model:

"OMD used its proprietary engagement measure, an index that factors in such things as how often people say they watch a show, to measure media engagement. The agency used copy-test results measuring primarily how much people like ads to measure advertising engagement."

Self-reported media consumption data...copy-test likability measures. Advertisers have been using these data forever.

The slightly new twist is throwing all of this into a market mix model which revealed that media engagement had 3 times the impact of media weight, while ad engagement had 8 times the impact. This gives a more quantitative way of using what has historically been gut-feel hunches about how to build a campaign. (With Mike Hess and Huw Griffiths, both pioneers in market mix models, building the models these findings have high credibility.)

I could make the case that this is good news: marketers haven't been so far off for the past 50 years, they have been using the right variables in their decisions. Now there is a more disciplined way of using these data points to make better decisions.

But I can't help but feel that there must be something more to engagement than a mash-up of 50-year old approaches. Will marketers decide this is good enough, and thus take the wind out of the sails of the ARF's ongoing work to create a new metric? What do you think?

Posted by Jim Nail on July 9, 2007 at 12:05 PM | Email this post Permalink
Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341cdcdc53ef00e0098f66208833

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Is engagement devolving into old metrics?:

Comments

Jim - Considering that the vast majority of marketers appear to use no metrics whatsoever, we should probably celebrate that they are finally doing something! ;)

It's bad enough that marketing itself is woefully under analyzed from just the initial "did it work at all?" perspective. When you see how badly sales and marketing tend to be disconnected, particularly in the world of software, it's really quite astonishing.

The problem of course are as you say - what are the modern metrics that matter?

Cheers,
Dan

Posted by: Dan Keldsen | Sep 29, 2007 9:00:16 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.