Leader: The rules of engagement online are becoming clearer

17 September 2009 | By Justin Pearse

A few weeks ago we asked how you define engagement. This should be an easy question to answer. After all, it has become impossible over the past year to avoid hearing the term from anyone discussing the benefits of online advertising. However, nailing down how you actually measure or even define consumer engagement online isn’t easy. Sure, you can measure how long someone watched a video ad, but concrete measures of engagement are elusive in an industry still obsessed with mass reach and click-through rates.

This is why it’s so significant that the world’s biggest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, has launched a strategy of putting a defined price on engagement. As our cover story reports, the FMCG giant is now rewarding publishers based on the exact level of engagement consumers have with its ad campaigns running on those publishers’ sites.

The industry has been attempting to define engagement over the last 18 months or so. Indeed, a new acronym has emerged: CPE, or cost per engagement. The term has been used by the likes of ad network VideoEgg. However, its model is limited to a sustained ad expansion action, such as playing a game.

That CPE is so alphabetically close to CPA is no surprise. Both are refinements of the crude mass-reach CPM model of online advertising. However, it looks as though CPE will be the most effective in the battle to attract FMCG advertisers online. Being able to concretely measure the branding impact of online, as CPE promises to do, is of enormous value. Demonstrating how online can truly engage consumers with a brand is likely to be of equal, if not more, importance to big-brand advertisers than the reach metrics promised by the long-awaited online currency.

P&G’s move shows once again that big-brand advertisers have realised their consumers are online. The fact they’re moving more slowly than other sectors isn’t an unwillingness to abandon their media comfort zones. Rather, it’s arguably due to careful navigation of a world better at promising than delivering.

How do you define engagement? Ask P&G.

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