Problem: Settling for Engagement.
As media choices grow, engagement has received interest as a metric for elevating cross-media assessment. All eyeballs are not equal and some media channels, particularly digital ones, assert they are better than others at delivering eyeballs that matter more to a particular brand. Engagement focuses on the qualitative side of communication and deepens traditional reach and frequency discussions.
But engagement is only a partial measure of total advertising effect. Engagement is loosely defined as producing a positive brand experience. It is often operationalized through such measures as views, clicks, likes, shares and comments. Knowing whether an ad experience has been engaging is more actionable than knowing where and when an ad ran, but it is not as actionable as knowing whether an ad influenced buying behavior. Achieving sustained performance improvement and brand building requires more than engagement.
Solution: Engage When You Must, But Persuade When You Can.
Finding the best ways to attract prospects and retain customers is the #1 marketing challenge for many companies. Advertising costs have risen seven- to nine-fold since 1990, more than any other business costs. The economic pressures behind this trend aren’t abating: successful brands demand human attention and human attention is limited in supply.
Media channels, particularly digital ones, can relieve these cost pressures by offering more efficient avenues for reaching and engaging high-assay audiences. Says P&G’s Chief Financial Officer, Jon Moeller, “digital media [now] delivers a higher return on investment than TV or print.”
But efficiency is only part of the solution. Ad effectiveness, which has to do with the quality of the messaging itself, has shown itself to be a powerful engine of long-term brand building. It is not yet known whether efficient digital engagement will have the same power as mass TV and print persuasion in delivering lasting growth.
One of the reasons behind why it may not is that a person goes through different processes in choosing the message to which they attend in TV and print than in digital. In TV and print, the audience makes attends very briefly to the messaging and then “decides” whether or not to watch/read more. If the “choice” is not, they act on her decision by changing the channel or turning the page. This process of “attentioning” is not strictly deliberative in the sense that it is known to the conscious mind, but it has own communication value for the brand. Even the split-second focus on the messaging seems to leave a small brand-centric residue in the mind. By contrast, digital attentioning may have less value to the brand as it can be operated on simply by avoiding the ad entirely (by not looking at the part of the page where the advertising appears) or, when the advertising is presented more intrusively in order to force attention, by the brand being viewed with resentment. This problem is especially acute in the small-screen mobile world.
Additionally, when a digital ad engages, it often does so by narrowcasting. It seeks to disseminate its message to a narrow audience. This cuts out potential prospects, such as those who are situated earlier in the purchase tunnel and undercuts the special long-term benefit of advertising – its ability to convert buyers in the short-term while also attracting new ones in volume and moving them through the purchase funnel over time. The full value of advertising lies in its ability to differentiate products and connect their benefits to the personal values held by the target audience; that is to persuade, which is different from and well beyond engagement. Persuasion is important not only for efficacy products, but for any brand that seeks to control advertising to sales ratios. Persuasive advertising creates and reinforces both a rational preference and emotional attachment to a brand. These don’t seem to be separate processes in that the successful connection of benefits to personal values can produce the emotional response that leads to stronger salience and preference.
Research has shown that central persuasion-centric messaging is stronger and lasts longer than peripheral engagement-based advertising. Both influence thoughts and feelings about the brand, relevant and differentiating communications will go farther than positive brand experiences in mitigating the increasing costs of advertising. Engagement is good, but persuasion is better. Make sure your advertising and your media supports both.
You may want to read the IAB’s most recent take on Engagement, which can be found here: http://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Ad_Engagement_Spectrum2014_FINAL2-5-2014-EB.pdf
For a recent discussion of the benefits of Persuasive Communication, you may want to read Christopher Carpenter’s, “A Meta-Analysis of the ELM’s [Elaboration Likelihood Model] Argument Quality X Processing Type Predictions,” which can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hcre.12054/abstract
For more on Harvard’s Thales Teixeira thoughts on the costs of advertising and the economics of attention, you may want to visit: http://www.economicsofattention.com/
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