Engagement

New Rules of Engagement
By STUART ELLIOTT
FOR decades, advertisers spent billions to determine consumers' awareness of brands and their recall of television commercials. Now, with awareness of most brands a given and advertising money moving to new media, Madison Avenue is turning its focus to something called engagement.
What is this non-nuptial form of engagement? Dawn E. Hudson, president and chief executive of Pepsi-Cola North America, offered an example. In six weeks, Pepsi plans to begin an advertising and promotional campaign that will offer consumers customized ring tones for cellphones, which can be downloaded from the Internet with codes found under soft drink bottle caps.
"Whenever the phone rings, you'll think you got that from Pepsi," said Ms. Hudson, whose company is part of PepsiCo. That engagement with Pepsi products and that "depth of brand experience," she said, is far superior to what can be achieved with a "quick, passing message" like a TV commercial.
Ms. Hudson was among six executives on a panel who grappled with the brave new world of engagement at the opening session yesterday of the 52nd annual convention of the Advertising Research Foundation. Several panels and speeches during the convention are being devoted to the subject.
Determining levels of engagement "is a big challenge for all of us," said Eric Salama, the convention chairman, who is also chairman and chief executive at the Kantar Group division of the WPP Group.
A major reason is the need to create measurement methods that will pass muster with all the stakeholders involved: marketers, agencies, media companies and researchers.
Engagement, "from a research standpoint, is momentary and driven by emotion," said Joseph T. Plummer, chief research officer at the foundation, who is scheduled to speak to the convention today on efforts being made to define engagement to everyone's satisfaction.
"It's turning the mental model of the industry on its head," he added, compared with previous benchmarks like awareness and recall, which are longer-term and have a rational basis.
Another big difference is that engagement "happens inside the consumer, not inside the medium," Mr. Plummer said. "All the measurements we have now are media metrics: ratings, readership, listenership, click-through rates."
"What we need is a way to determine how the targeted prospect connected with, got engaged with, the brand idea," he added. "With engagement, you're on your way to a relationship instead of just a sales transaction."
Ms. Hudson and the other members of the panel outlined several initiatives they described as going beyond awareness or recall to promote engagement with consumers.
To better gauge product consumption patterns, Ms. Hudson said, Pepsi-Cola North America has given 8,000 Palm Pilots to consumers "to record at every point where they bought a beverage, where they consumed it, why they purchased it and what they were thinking about."
"People who are consuming at 3 o' clock in the afternoon are different from people consuming at lunch," she said.
Paul Alexander, vice president for global advertising at the Campbell Soup Company, described how Campbell "sends millions of recipes every day" to visitors to its Web site, which are garnished with an auditory fillip: the music from the venerable "M'm! M'm! Good!" Campbell's Soup jingle.
Tony Pace, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for the Subway restaurants franchise association, said that customers interested in learning more about Jared Fogle, a star of the company's ad campaign, are directed online. That "allows them to get the information at the speed and depth they want," Mr. Pace said.
David Cohen, executive vice president at Universal McCann Interactive, said that for one client, Wendy's International, the agency created an animated character, Smart Square, based on the square Wendy's hamburger, which has its own Web site (goodtobesquare.com). A profile was subsequently created for the character on MySpace.com, the social networking Web site.
The character "has over 100,000 friends on his network, talking about the brand, interacting with the brand," said Mr. Cohen, whose agency is part of the McCann Worldgroup division of the Interpublic Group of Companies.
Giovanni Fabris, vice president and international media director at another fast-food chain, McDonald's, said the emergence of the cellphone as a medium would significantly improve the ability of marketers to engage with consumers.
Rather than thinking of it as a phone, Mr. Fabris said, marketers ought to consider it "a hand-held computer with video capabilities that allows you to make and receive telephone calls" — and whose owners can be found wherever they happen to be.
Ads delivered by cellphone to those who request them will stand out because of their "contextuality," he added — that is, their ability "to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, which is not provided by the traditional media."
The representative of the traditional media on the panel, Randy Falco, president and chief operating officer at the NBC Universal Television Group, part of the NBC Universal division of General Electric, sought to change those perceptions.
In a speech he delivered before joining the panel, Mr. Falco said that "an industry built on its ability to reach large groups of people at once" is striving "to expand and transform itself by reaching one consumer at a time."
For instance, Mr. Falco said, during the Winter Olympic Games last month, "15 million people visited our Olympics Web site, which served 9 million video streams, equal to more than 125,000 hours of video."
NBC Universal also delivered Olympic content through video-on-demand orders on cable networks, wireless Web page views and wireless video, he added.
"So-called old media does stand on the verge of a new golden age," Mr. Falco said, "a difficult, intensely competitive, hard-fought golden age that will leave the carcasses of our vanquished competitors on the roadside, but a golden age nonetheless." That line, delivered deadpan, drew laughter from the audience.
More than 800 people have registered to attend the convention, which continues through tomorrow at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.