BEARNE ON MEDIA
P&G should not set the agenda for engagement
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Procter & Gamble’s move to pay more for engaged users is worrying for publishers, who are asking: how do you measure engagement? How do you define it?
Last week new media age revealed the FMCG company’s pioneering move to introduce an engagement ad rate across publisher sites, which means P&G will pay publishers more money for a user who does more than merely view an ad but takes actions such as signing up for newsletters, listening to a podcast or entering a competition (nma 17 September 2009).
It seems P&G is defining what engagement is and this could potentially shake up the measurement landscape. The industry has been fixated on CPM and CPCs (see my last column) but it needs to move quickly to define engagement rather than allow an advertiser to set the standard.
How does the industry know the value of a user listening to a podcast or watching a video? Of course, CPM rates differ between advertisers and publishers but there’s no industry metric about engagement.
Collective industry action is needed to define engagement. Rather than be dictated to by a major advertiser – even one as powerful as P&G, which regularly advertises brands such as L’Oréal, Gillette and Pantene on, for example, Marie Claire and Elle – publishers need to get this issue on the agenda and initiate industry discussions around it.
Having spoken to publishers and agencies last week, the industry is rightly wary, asking how you define and measure engagement. Before more brands follow suit and set their own definitions, publishers need to act swiftly to understand this new term.
I applaud P&G for this step in the right direction for the industry, away from click-through rates and impressions. And if it means more money is ploughed into publishers from major FMCGs, that can only be a good thing.
But the likes of the Internet Advertising Bureau and Association of Online Publishers need to wade in and get this on the agenda so publishers fully understand engagement before advertisers end up defining it for them.
Readers' comments (1)
Paul Moss (archibald ingall stretton...) | Tue, 22 Sep 2009 5:57 pm
This is great news. The advertising and media industry has to think hard now to find a balance between quantity and quality.
However, I am wary about standardisation of engagement and this has been debated in web analytic circles for some time now.
One of the issues is that there is a danger taking hard web metrics and generically classifying them as 'engagement'.
For example, if someone spends 10 mins on your site are they positively engaging with your brand or just frustrated because they can't find what they want? It's for these reasons that a measure both of rational and emotional engagement is necessary, something we have been working on for years at archibald ingall stretton...
I think P&G are correct to set this on their terms for their site. They, after all, know what they want customers to do when they reach their site whereas a standardised model based on hard measures is unlikely to meet their objectives.
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