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The Top 10 Insights From the ARF Conference on Engagement at Yahoo!, July 11, 2007
What was broken is being fixed. The ARF’s Joe Plummer positioned the conference and all the recent work on engagement as the ARF’s and the whole advertising research industry’s answer to the claim that “Marketing is Broken”, so forcefully made by P&G’s Jim Stengel. The old tonnage models where Share of Voice was assumed to equal Share of Mind which in turn would equal Share of Market may have had some validity once, but certainly not now. The raw reach and repetition of advertising is definitely not what is driving current sales. The conference was designed to update everyone on research suggesting engagement is the missing link, and get everyone thinking how to apply the new knowledge.
Engagement is 8 times as important as GRPs in generating advertising impact, according to one of the studies cited by Plummer. That’s why you can no longer find a relationship between GRPs and sales - without allowing for the amount of engagement that occurred.
Engagement is subconscious and immediate. Research on emotion and how the brain works is showing, if it happens, it starts as an instant emotional reaction that people are going to have a hard time describing later. Some of the classic old copy-testing questions don’t help much. (Like, “What was the main point?”) However, if engagement is going to be of any real benefit to the advertiser, it has to raise consciousness at least to the point where the individual is aware of what is being advertised and is moved closer to buying it. So, some of the old questions are still needed to show if engagement really took place. (Who was that ad for? How likely are you to buy Brand A?)
Every “consumer touch point” is becoming important: TV is now just one among many ways of reaching prospects. The internet is what has really broadened the possibilities. Engagement is more likely to occur when that initial contact takes place where there is some perceived relevance. Advertising that reaches someone when they are online searching for information on the product obviously has great relevance. That can be a big plus for internet advertising. Studies are showing some media add more than other media for specific advertising. In one case, advertising seen on a highly rated TV show produced more than advertising seen on a lower rated show.
“Turning on” has been defined: It is “activating associations, experiences, and metaphors to co-create brand meaning and co-ownership of the brand.” That’s important to those who felt the phrase was too loose in the ARF’s initial definition: “Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.” Plummer cited the name “Mustang” as an example of a powerful metaphor that established a favorable brand image for Ford. He cited the failure of “New Coke” as a consequence of ignoring the public’s strong feeling of co-ownership of the old Coke. Rational, reason-why messages are not very important. Story telling, focusing, and framing to make that initial reaction favorable are extremely important.
Sales drive advertising, more than advertising drives sales: Leapfrog’s Craig Spitzer jarred attendees into attentiveness with that opening and embarrassing truism. He described how Leapfrog developed engaging advertising for the firm’s educational software by capitalizing on the surrounding context and co-creation that came from stories of their customers’ lives. A mother’s efforts to get dad more involved in child rearing was a key one. It is reflected in mother being the “hero” while dad belatedly realizes the benefits. While engagement diagnostics help in development, he said the real test is the effect on sales, and he prefers Schwerin-type pre/post shifts in preference to see if persuasion took place, along with measures of likability.
HP: “The computer is personal again” Hashem Bajwa, from their agency, Goodby, said the campaign developed when they found that, contrary to the view that computers have become a commodity, 80% said they would give up their TV rather than their computer. He showed a series of videos easily reachable online through HP.com, YouTube, or Google, featuring the Shrek Princess, Jay-Z, Vera Wang and the variety of things each keeps on their computers to demonstrate the new HP slogan.
How BrainJuicer measures emotional engagement: Ari Popper described the process that avoids what are now the largely discredited questions about message recall and reactions to it with a mixture of qualitative and quantitative questioning. They trigger initial emotional reactions by asking if they had any of seven “feelings” about the ad and showing pictures of faces depicting each emotion. Then, they use additional pictures in asking how intense that emotion was. Finally, respondents are asked to write down why they felt that way and what triggered that emotion. Their research has shown happiness is the emotion most frequently associated with successful advertising.
We still have obsolete models from the 20th Century. Joe Plummer started with AIDA that he labeled as Linear Persuasion invented by two English engineers over a century ago. Someone probably should have called him on that one, because when you think of it, engagement is a form of Attention and the process still culminates in some type of Action. No argument that “Think-Feel-Do” describes little of what happens with current advertising, but “Feel-Think-Do” and “Feel-Do-Think” does. Same for his views on the notorious Tonnage Models that assumed volume of advertising equaled awareness of the brand, which in turn equaled share of market.
Some of BMW’s viral marketing worked, and some didn’t. Ameritest’s Amy Shea tested two short movies BMW produced for online viewing and found one with close-up shots of a BMW during chase scenes did a much better job for BMW.
A multiciplicity of measures is needed. That’s one thing everybody agreed on. It has become apparent there is no one single metric that is going to measure engagement. (And sorry about that Top 10 thing. Too much good stuff here.) Don Bruzzone DonBruzzone@Bruzzone-Research.com
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