Gasta Advertising:The new fundamentals of digital engagement

Long, long ago, way back in 2005, engagement was the cause du jour of mediaologists and media metricians.

Enthusiasm for the concept was so great that, for a brief period, agency and marketing personnel had "engagement" added to their titles: Chief Engagement Officer became the new meaning of "CEO."

By April 2006, the Advertising Research Foundation issued its official definition of engagement -- "Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context."

Find that definition unsatisfying? You are called legion, for you are many.

Since then, agencies, advertisers, and research companies have taken stabs at just how to measure engagement.

A new book published this year attempts to lay out not just a definition of engagement as it pertains to the digital space, but how to accomplish it. Written by Leland Harden and Bob Heyman, two of the earliest pioneers in the online advertising space, "Digital Engagement" could be seen as a follow-up and update to their book "Net Results.2," which itself was an update of "Net Results: Web Marketing that Works" -- a book I look to as being the first real textbook on web marketing.

To call "Digital Engagement" a follow-up, however, would be unfair. Instead, it's a whole new "how-to" playbook for planning and measuring online advertising. It also expands its scope, looking beyond banners, keywords, and websites to include examples of virality, mobile marketing, PR, blogging, widgets, social media, affiliate marketing, and more.

In this book, Harden and Heyman are not articulating the principles of what motivates behavior (like Martin Lindstrom's "Buyology") or exploring the philosophy of media and culture (Theodor Adorno's "Culture Industry"). These guys want you to know what others have done, what the outcome was, and how you might go about doing it yourself.

The book is replete with case studies for each tactic they cover. For example, what are the things to consider when optimizing your website?

First, you get a rule: If your site launched more than a year ago, it's time to dust it off and give it a work-over. It might need a lot, it might only need a little. But to find out, read on.

Harden and Heyman give us a list of some analytics tools that make your site optimization job easier. Then there is a list of best practices. Then questions to ask yourself at the outset -- answers that will determine which of those practices are best for you. After that, they provide tactics for communicating with your marketplace about your changes.

Throughout the book are brief descriptions of what some companies are doing with their sites -- good or bad -- and finally, a brief case study (the chapter about making over your site is a case study for Tommy Hilfiger).

The best thing about the book is that there are so many examples of what companies are doing with the full range of digital tools and tactics available to them.

Some of the play-by-play can seem rudimentary at times. The brief review on why online video is important, or the examples of what online video might cost, seem more relevant to an audience reading two or three years ago. But a list of video-sharing sites is a welcome quick review resource. Or a proposed formula for measuring success from TubeMogul, the online video analytics and distribution company, will appeal to quants who are looking for a way to prove the effectiveness of a video campaign.

As a media nerd, something that stood out most was the formula for calculating a total engagement index (TEI), contributed by Eric Peterson of WebAnalyticsDemystified.com. There may be other variables for defining and determining engagement, but this is the first time I've seen anyone use something beyond just, say, time spent, as a method for articulating engagement.

Click depth x Loyalty x Recency x Duration x Interactivity x Subscription / 6 = TEI.

All of these variables have to be assigned by whomever is doing the measuring, which means that the formula can mean whatever you want it to mean. And that means that engagement remains an amorphous designation. But at least it is an attempt at definition and determination that no one else is offering.

Harden and Heyman are offering this and other things they've found in their examination of today's practice of the online advertising discipline.

At the outset, the book participates in some of the usual "traditional-media-is-doomed" predictions common among the digerati's more zealous advocates ("newspapers, magazines, and television went down in flames in 2007").

The biggest problem with books like this, however, is the same thing that afflicts all bound volumes dealing with digital media, marketing, trends, culture, and the rest as their subjects: By the time the information is recorded, edited, re-edited, printed, and bound, the world the text reflects has changed. Certain companies called out as either examples or resources will no longer exist; forecasts for spending or usage are outdated almost as soon as they are released.

But the fundamentals of "how-to" and "what-to-do" put forth in "Digital Engagement" should hold steady long enough to make the book a good guide for the digital marketer starting out today or wishing to make the change from just buying banners and keywords (though there are good suggestions for doing both).

You don't have to read it straight through. The chapters are clearly listed by tactic ("Search Engine Marketing," "Public Relations 2.0"). Go straight to the chapter relevant to what you are considering and review it.

At the beginning of "Ogilvy on Advertising" (still the greatest advertising book ever written), David Ogilvy quotes: "When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.'"

What this means is that it doesn't matter how much you like the advertising, what matters is that you buy the product. "Digital Engagement" is an excellent lesson plan for getting that done using digital and emerging media.
By Jim Meskauskas
March 31, 2009

Gasta Tech News: Digital Platform Advertising,Robert Moskowitz part 2.

By Robert Moskowitz part 2.

Another factor may simply be structural. Karna Crawford, EVP, chief media and connections officer at Engauge, a total marketing solutions agency, thinks that: "When you can buy huge scale one time with a quick hit, that's worth a premium. 'American Idol.' 'The Super Bowl.' That's a huge audience available for a finite period of time. Because people are so engaged with the content, the advertising is more likely to be paid attention to. And a lot of products want to advertise there, which also drives up the price. The digital space doesn't command such a premium because your audience has exponentially more opportunity to take control and move away."
Historically, advertisers have been hesitant to push dollars into something new and unproven. "Think of the internet now versus 1995," Crawford says. "Wireless isn't proven in many instances, a lot of advertisers still don't know how to use it, don't feel confident about the expected ROI. So the prices are significantly lower than a video ad on ESPN, which is tried and true. It's the same adoption cycle you'd see for any other product."
The practical value of online advertising is also determined by the needs and strategies of the advertisers. Todd Riley, senior vice president, digital media & integrated strategies at Doner, headquartered in Southfield, Mich., the largest independently-owned advertising agency in the world, points out that, "The real benefit of the online space is the ability to engage, now. For example, a car purchase requires a lot of research. Digital media has the ability to make many relevant connections to content to help the process along. A can of Coke, on the other hand, can be purchased by anyone at anytime, so engagement is nice, but much less important."
Given all this, the inability of online advertising to fully replace the income lost from offline advertising probably reflects that advertisers simply don't perceive it to have an equivalent value.
For one thing, in today's more complex advertising environment, it's more difficult to accurately define and pinpoint ROI. "Is the goal a direct sale," asks Spiegel, "or the overall increase in sales during and after the campaign? I continue to support the idea that different media channels can support different goals/metrics and that a 'one vs. the other' comparison isn't all that useful."
"You're hoping to get different outcomes from the various media," Ellet points out. "It's why you're thinking about one medium versus another. They all relate to an overall objective, but the way you're going to use the media is very different. Online advertising might be about requests for information, driving sales, traffic, and so forth. Offline advertising might be about raising awareness or changing beliefs or attitudes about your product. Every advertise has different priorities; some are all about raising awareness and so are willing to pay more for that outcome."
"CPM is one useful benchmark," says Ben Kunz, director of strategic planning with MediAssociates, a media planning and buying agency, "the other is probably cost per inquiry -- how much do I spend to make my phone ring? The relative value of offline tends to be less in both areas. It's more easily measured, and it's putting a lot of downward pressure on CPMs."
CPMs in a high-end financial magazine might be $60, but advertisers recognize that people don't read every page of the magazine.
On the other hand, says Kunz: "you have to be careful not to take that logic too far. People spend four hours a day watching TV. That's two months per year. Internet gets a lot of buzz, but TV washes over you and you may be exposed to a commercial that you would not click on, on the internet. There is a lot of value in offline media."
"It's not news," Maitra says, "that print is in trouble and readers are migrating online. As a result, we're seeing innovation in terms of what kinds of ads we use, we're looking at better metrics, and we're learning how one medium can amplify another."
Central to success in today's complex advertising environment is an understanding that we live in a very fluid world. People now watch TV while sending emails and tweeting. They read magazines and then go online to check details about what they've read. As a result, there are now very complex relationships across the media types and channels. Advertisers are learning to look for the relative contributions of different media in different campaigns, different situations. For example, a successful TV campaign can lead to a huge jump in the number of online searches for a product or a company name.
"The idea that 'digital's not getting its fair share of the advertising dollars' is bit of a fallacy," Crawford argues. "Advertisers may want digital to be 50 percent of their media mix, but that doesn't mean it has to be 50 percent of their dollar spend. There's too much dialog about the dollars and not enough about the share of the media mix that's going toward digital."
"Obviously, budgets have been cut and cut and cut," Crawford acknowledges, "but media vendors are really hurting for advertiser dollars. So advertisers should start asking for improvements in pricing, interesting pricing models, and set some precedents to build on when the economy gets healthier."
"Marketers need to advertise where their consumers spend their time," says Spiegel. "In time, most, if not all, media channels will become digitized and this comparison will be moot."