Ad Groups Open Big Can of Worms

More interesting news from the ANA conference this week (via AdAge): The Association of National Advertisers, American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Advertising Research Foundation have all come together with a new task force charged with redefining ROI metrics for advertising exposure. "Frequency" is finally being traded in for the superbly nebulous concept of "engagement." According to Robert DeSena, director of relationship marketing at Masterfoods USA, "There is so much media now that consumers control access... It’s much more about finding a way to talk to them as individuals."

I would add that consumers not only self-select into highly personalized and relevant media experience, but they also create and disseminate the brand messages that oftentimes intercept prospective customers before they ever reach official brand advertising (e.g., blogs, recommender engines, user groups, review websites, discussion forums). 

Setting these small details aside, the measurement of engagement seems like a task suited for Sisyphus. Psychologists have been struggling to operationalize the behavioral correlates of media exposure for decades. Some of the problems: 1) intentions are often unrelated to behavior; 2) recall measures are highly unreliable; and 3) attitudes are ambivalent and fleeting.

There has been a rush towards more sophisticated and expensive measurement devises, such as Arbitron's "portable people meters." I have written elsewhere why I believe this is a fundamentally flawed approach (see "Portable People Meters: Closing the Loop, or Hawthorne Effect").

On the other hand, there has also been a healthy trend among advertising professionals towards multi-channel, multi-tactic campaigns that help triangulate the impact exposure has on consumer behavior. Broadcast and print advertising now almost always has a dimension associated with online behavior, which of course is trackable, and in many cases back to a dollar-for-dollar ROAS metric. More importantly, however, is the fact that the biggest marketers in the world are taking consumer generated media, vertical search and long tail economics very seriously. They are driving accountability in the advertising industry based on a new paradigm which increasingly hinges on the co-creation of marketing communications, which in my view is the ultimate measure of engagement.