It's official now. "Engaging" with customers is becoming a more important metric than the much used concept of "frequency" which has been used by media planners for years now. This is expected to complement the other traditional media measures.
Yesterday, the Association of National Advertisers' 2005 Marketing Accountability Forum met to define this metric. They struggled to define it, though!
How does one define engagement?
Quite frankly, the tracking that is done today, only measures viewership to channels and programs thro' devices like people meters, diaries etc. In my opinion, if it starts with a mass media mindset, we will make marginal changes only.
We need to put customers at the core of this solution.
May be it will then lead us to an idea like replacing " people meters" with "engagement meters". According to me this could be one of starting points. What this could mean is that, one should track the way households respond and use communications post the 30 sec TVC, which includes logging phone calls -mobile and landline( to track toll free numbers called), internet websites they visit, movies that go to ( to identify correlation between impact of product placements and purchases), SMS that they send and respond to etc. It's a bot that can collate and calculate the engagement index.
It needs a new mindset, an entirely new method of tracking, which will then drive the metrics for engagement.
Photograph: webzone.k3.mah.se/ k3jolo/Sketching