Engagement Measures Go Mainstream

Posted 2009.05.15

Ford is among the latest major advertisers to finally using engagement measures to price TV buying deals. This is further proof that such measures have become a new standard.

NBC started this three years ago when it guaranteed engagement scores for Toyota. Then just before the upfront in 2007 NBC extended this offer to all advertisers. Now Jim Farley, the Toyota CMO who brokered the original deal, has taken it to his new employer Ford.

Used on their own, traditional Nielsen measurements have always seemed inadequate to me as a way of assessing media value. We all know from our own experience that simply having the TV on means nothing. Your interaction with it can range from active avoidance to rapt attention, yet up until recently these would have been measured as the same impression.

About fifteen years ago I undertook a qualitative research project for Barclaycard, the UK’s biggest credit card, to look at different types of TV watching behaviors. We identified five different types:

Golden Hour: Your favorite show of the week. You’ll stay in to watch it.
Appointment: You plan to watch these shows (in the days before DVR’s)
Regular: You click around to find something to watch
Fodder: You’re barely watching
Radio: You’re listening to it in the background, using it as a radio

This is pretty basic stuff, but the principles hold true:

1) All TV programming is not created equal.

2) Impact = numbers of people watching X engagement.

Now marketers have really embraced this notion. An article in this week’s Business Week estimates that, “more than half the top 100 US advertisers are now pegging prices to viewer engagement”.

The current leader in engagement measurement is IAG, which Nielsen bought last year. It uses a simple method: sampling from a panel and asking them ten questions about a show. The more correct answers, the better the engagement.

IAG uses the same system to measure engagement in the advertising as in the TV programming, ensuring a like-for-like comparison.

“It found, for example, that while the Discovery Channel’s (DISCA) Dirty Jobs series, starring Mike Rowe, delivered puny ratings points, the engagement level of the show’s viewers is off the charts — and proved to be a ripe demographic for Ford trucks. That led Ford not only to advertise on the show, but to strike a deal with Rowe, who appears in Web videos for Ford showing how tough the F-Series pickup is. “It’s a hugely efficient buy for us, but none of that happens without the kind of data we can get now on what people are tuned into, for how long and how closely they are watching our ads, because the Nielsen ratings alone wouldn’t have led us there,” says James Farley, Ford’s chief marketing executive.”

This sort of deal takes us one step closer to the future of communications planning, where the objective is not maximum tonnage but an environment that becomes part of the message itself.