Advertising needs more than “tonnage”, it needs to “engage”: Those are words you will hear frequently concerning the ARF’s major new research initiative

The Top 10 Insights

From the Advertising Research Foundation’s Oct-Jan Webcasts

Advertising needs more than “Tonnage”, it needs to “Engage”: Those are words you will hear frequently concerning the ARF’s major new research initiative being conducted in conjunction with the ANA, 4As and hopefully MSI. It’s currently being described in a series of webcasts by Joe Plummer, long a leader in ad research and now the ARF’s new Chief Research Officer. As one who presented a paper “Why tracking should replace GRP’s” at the 2001 ARF, I can only encourage the broadest support, and offer the sotto voce comment, “It’s about time!”

Big campaigns are still defined as the ones with lots of GRPs and $ (“Tonnage”): That’s despite the evidence that has been piling up over the years that increasing the amount of advertising cannot be relied on to produce more sales. This new ARF initiative promises to bring together many of us who feel there has always been a missing link that is now being called “Engagement”, meaning that sales result when people are not only reached, but “Engaged”.

What is “Engagement”? Joe Plummer outlined a number of things he feels they have learned so far. Engagement can be thought of as being “pulled into” an idea or a media vehicle in a number of ways:

Surprise/Discovery: You are pulled in and stay engaged because you are not sure where it is going but you see some unexpected indications it may be relevant.

Utility: You stay engaged because the personal relevance is obvious.

Empathy: You might also stay engaged because it feels comfortable, familiar: something you can relate to, agree with, approve of, or want to be part of.

He said engagement is a spectrum of activities beginning with frame activation: an emotional response triggered by the stimulus in a context. Depth of engagement increases when consumers interact with the message to make it more personally meaningful. It becomes effective when it creates something in existing perceptions that was previously missing: the linkage of a brand with a personal need.

So, how do you measure “Engagement”? That’s the question the new ARF initiative is out to answer. He said at this point it looks like the impact on brand sales is likely to be a function of three factors: the extent of engagement with both the idea and the media, the amount of trust in the brand and the media, and the number of targeted contacts that are made. He didn’t get into the mechanics of how all this might best be measured. (But for any who are interested, we would be happy to describe how BRC’s recognition-based post testing has been measuring almost all these key factors for decades.)

Hispanics speak English, but react Latino. In an earlier ARF Webcast Sonya Suarez-Hammond said her Yankelovich Hispanic Monitor Survey, that has been running since 1971, shows this is one of the key confounding characteristics for those trying to reach the Hispanic market. Only 38% prefer communicating in Spanish, but virtually all tend to look more favorably on advertisers who show they are aware of, and welcome business from, Hispanics – through steps like advertising in Spanish.

People meter’s Houston test promises change. Success in getting a good cross section of a culturally diverse market to carry meters that record what people listen to all day makes it more likely they will eventually replace diaries in measuring all radio audiences. Like the first test in Philadelphia, last summer’s Houston test, showed the type of changes this can be expected to produce. Bob Patchen, CRO of Arbitron, said the more accurate measures showed a 20% lower average quarter hour audience, but with much higher reach – double the weekly reach diaries have been showing for most stations.

British set to try cell phone based people meters. Ipsos is currently developing this technology, another of five types of electronic meters being worked on worldwide. The cost of obtaining the information is the big advantage of this approach. It uses a standard smart cell phone, so there is no need to build tens of thousands of custom designed meters. Andy Fessel described a new trade group, AMI of San Francisco, and it’s industry-wide efforts to encourage and keep an eye on all these measurement systems.

Measuring attentiveness is still a problem. Leave it to media guru Erwin Ephron to bring up this key issue. The improvements being described in measuring the number tuned in to any given station at any given time, did not include any major improvements in measuring the number that were actually paying attention to what was being broadcast. For radio, like TV, print and all other media, you will still have to get that type of information from other sources - like the recognition-based ad tracking studies our firm has been specializing in for almost 30 years now. Erwin’s comments brought this particular webcast on measuring the size of media audiences right back to the basics of the ARF’s new initiative on measuring “Engagement”.

Forced exposure is wrong for online pretesting. David Brandt of OTX pointed out that the quick, cheap forced exposure pretesting still used in all too many TV pretests, definitely doesn’t work in pretesting web ads. Asking people to look at advertising and then questioning them about it actually changes the nature of the advertising. It’s first function is to get noticed and capture attention. In a test where you force people to look at it, you can’t learn anything about that. Today’s multiplicity of media is particularly distracting for online advertising. We are learning about the emotions key to buying decisions that can be formed with low levels of attention. They show testing that forces detailed attention to an ad produces results that are largely irrelevant. He showed a fascinating solution: an extended clip exposing the respondent to many types of advertising, including driving by billboards. The test? Can they recognize the web ads being tested, as having been shown in the clutter of other advertising shown?

Do you really need to pretest online advertising? Most of it calls for an immediate direct response. It is easy and inexpensive to change. So why not try an online ad briefly, and if it doesn’t work, try another? An attendee asked a proponent of formal pretesting of online advertising why it wouldn’t work for web ads? That type of “research” has been working for direct mail for over a century. It left a number of us feeling that was a very good question.

Don Bruzzone

January 2006

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