If you have ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, you will know what a perceptive and persuasive treatise on the viral power of social trends this book really is.  Through an eclectic set of superbly chosen anecdotes, Gladwell engagingly unveils this phenomenon, from the retro rise of Hush Puppies footwear to the disturbing epidemic nature of teen suicides.

But do such findings really apply to a brand’s advertising and marketing?  Can we see an outwardly perceptible relationship between the few, influencers who have the capacity to influence, and the many, general consumers of a brand or product.  If so, can we readily quantify that relationship?

To help answer this, we recently interrogated the word of mouth study, Talk Track, by the Keller Fay Group.  We found clear evidence that the relationship between influencers and general consumers talking about a brand varies by market category in quite a predictable relationship.

Each year, Talk Track asks 36,000 consumers about their daily word of mouth goings-on and how often and in what ways they talk about brands. Talk Track also classifies people by the size of their social network and the amount of advice they provide to others in a specific market category.  Consumers placed in the highest social network and category advice levels are called Conversation Catalysts, as an effective proxy for a category’s influencers.

Taking the fifteen market categories that Talk Track monitors, we can place them on a map to determine if there is a visual relationship between general brand mentions by consumers and Conversation Catalysts or influencers.  We call this type of map, the WOM Opportunity Grid (see Figure 1), and it shows a clear relationship between the two criteria:

Figure 1

As we can see, the map implies a connection between, on the vertical axis, a category’s share of total mentions (for all brands in all categories) and, on the horizontal axis, the penetration of a category’s Conversation Catalysts among the general US population.

The individual blue dots on the map represent each of Keller Fay’s 15 market category’s spanning the full range from Media & Entertainment to Household Products.  We can see the best line of fit, the regression line, as the dotted blue line that dissects the map, running diagonally from bottom left to top right.  And we can also quantify the relationship or fit between these two factors where correlation is 81%.   In other words, as conversation levels increases there is, on average, an 81% proportional increase in influencers and vice versa.

This map and its findings have two major implications for marketers:

1.     If a brand is to maximize its conversation potential, it is not enough to focus simply on creating that conversation with consumers, a parallel communications strategy should often be embraced for influencers.

2.     Where a brand and its category fall on the map is critically important for that brand’s conversation, face-to-face marketing and social media strategies.  Plainly, it is not a case where one overarching conversational strategy will fit all brands in all categories.  Brands in categories in the top-right hand quadrant, high mentions/high influencers, have a very different – and much easier – task to develop consumer conversation levels than products in categories in the lower left quadrant, low mentions/low influencers.

How do we identify and reach influencers?  For an influencers’ strategy, it not just a case of reaching them but actively nurturing them as well.  For example, the major media survey, MRI, has specific proprietary questions to identify what it terms category influentials.  Taking the travel category as an illustration, MRI indicates three magazines, Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler and Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel, are particularly relevant at reaching travel influencers.  Online has similar opportunities such as Trip Advisor.  By proactively harnessing these media, one would not only aim to reach out to travel influencers, but also via competitions or promotions or other invitations to be involved, start to build a direct dialogue with them and establish a highly customized, relationship marketing strategy.

In such a short column, we can only quantify and explain the core issues.  Macro approaches and solutions that are individually tailored to a brand’s conversational aims and needs also follow some clear guidelines.  If you are keen to know more, I would urge you to attend to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association Summit on November 17-19.  Among others, Brad Fay of Keller Fay and I will talk about tangible and practical solutions to the issue of amplifying a brand’s conversation levels using the approach outlined here.

Whether it’s buying a car, choosing a financial services provider, or deciding whether to buy a Mac or a PC, everyone relies on other people to help.

Depending on the category, and the exact nature of the target, somewhere north of 50% of people say the most important influence on their final decision is family and friends,  96% say they take their friends and family’s opinion into account.

While friends and family used to influence one another face to face, this is changing.  Face time is declining – between 2005 and 2009 shared family time dropped 30%. [1]  There are a lot of reasons for this – economic stress means that people who are working often have to work harder, or to travel farther to find work. People are working farther from home – Among transplants, 40% say that the place they consider home is not where they currently live. [2]  But they are still staying in touch, and they are still helping one another make purchase decisions.

This is not exactly new news. In fact, it’s so obvious that when we put marketing plans together we ignore it.

The change is not what, but how

When we look at how people are making purchasing decisions – the process is still the same. If anything, the groups of people collaborating on a decision are bigger than ever – crossing geography, nuclear and step families, and generations. They gather information, share it, discuss and decide. What’s changed is not what they do; it’s how they do it.

People are still making decisions within networks that share information and discuss it, but these days the networks are tied together with digital media, rather than just face to face communication. This presents two opportunities for marketers:

1. A channel opportunity: Digital media – Social media, IM, Email, text messages, pictures sent via the mobile web, just as a start.
2. A targeting opportunity: There is a relatively stable cast of characters across decision making networks:

• A doer – the person who actually gathers the information, and from a marketers point of view, becomes the lead
• A catalyst – the person who has the idea for whatever needs to be done. Whether buying a second home, or vacationing in the tropics
• A professional friend – a friend who works in the industry who can advise on the pros and cons of the various options being considered
• A cheerleader – Someone who provides emotional support for the decision

The implication for marketers

The mistake that most marketers make is in focusing their marketing efforts on the doer alone. Because the decision making network is held together by digital media, and because the different players in the network want different types of content  – we hypothesize that by programming  content discretely to the players in the decision-making network we can increase the overall efficiency of a client’s marketing efforts.

We’ll be testing this hypothesis in some upcoming client engagements, and will post again on what we find. In the meantime, if you’d like more information, take a look at the studies below.

[1] Source: USC Annenberg School digital future project

[2] Source Pew Social & Demographic Trends survey

To gain a deeper appreciation of success and ambition, Simmons offers about 20 questions on the subject. UM’s marketing and communications survey, Media in Mind, which is linked to Simmons, expands this by a further 25 questions.  What can these 45 questions tell us?

Ambition in its archetypal sense is a young, primarily male characteristic.  Men under 35, especially those under 25, are twice as likely as the general adult population to agree with statements such as: “I like to have possessions others envy.” or “People are impressed with…the technology devices I use” and “…owning a luxury car….” Women under 35 follow a similar pattern except that retail therapy takes on an added dimension since they agreed they “like shopping at prestigious stores,” while Women 25-34, index highest on “I like having expensive jewelry or watches.”

If you are targeting a $250K+ “high earners”, owning a luxury car often appears to be a key status symbol.  It indexes at 286 among this group versus the general adult population.  No other success metric comes close for this income group.

Curiously, ambition and happiness do not appear to be the same personal mindset.  Just as being ambitious has an inherently younger male slant, being happy has an opposite older female bias. Media in Mind implies that, as you become older, happiness is more prevalent than ambition. This finding is corroborated by Barbara Stauch in her recent book The Secret Life of the Grown Up Brain. As Stauch observes: People feel better as they get older. They feel more in control and they feel grown-up and handle the stress of life. Not only is their judgment better, they actually feel more cheerful, and focus more on the positive than they did while young.

Yet what attitudes indicate or help make any of us feel happy?  For instance, would you agree with any of the following three statements:  a) I am satisfied with my, b) life I am very happy with life as it is and c) I am happy with my standard of living.

Chances are pretty high that you’d definitely agree with at least one of these statements, as do 77% of US adults.  If you’re lucky, you’ll be in the fortunate 10% that agree with all three.

We probed our Media in Mind database, and what distinguishes being happy can be encapsulated in four key attitudinal statements:

• I am good at what I do.
• If at first you do not succeed, keep trying.
• I am able to balance what’s important in life.
• It’s important to feel respected by my peers.

What is striking about this list is the need to maintain an equilibrium between a) a strong internal gyroscope focusing on what we actually do and what we need to do and b) the desire to balance that focus with other aspects of our life and gain positive feedback from others we value.

So what are the implications for marketers?

1. Actively treat our target prospects with respect.  We consistently see Americans culturally relate success and happiness to both self-respect and mutual esteem.  Social media only increases this expectation.
2. Assiduously align the brand’s product plan to our audience.  Avarice is clearly a trump card in marketing to young adults and some wealthier cohorts.  For example, if we’re in technology, making our device conspicuously cool is a major prerequisite for victory.
3. Encourage relevant feedback and interaction via user communities to help consumers feel reassured, reaffirmed and happy about their brand choice.

George Santayana, the Spanish-American philosopher, noted Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.  That’s a seductive insight and I’d like to agree except I intuitively suspect that raw, unbridled ambition simply refutes the status quo of the possible.  And in their purest forms, ambition and happiness are probably quite opposite constructs.

Ouch.

Before we embark on this journey together, I will tell you that I am conflicted.   I am conflicted because on one hand, I believe that our industry desperately needs a “single source of truth” (yes, Jack – we can handle the truth) in media measurement.  Our version of the “Nielsen television rating” or “Arbitron radio rating”.  A de-facto, agreed-upon dataset which enables us to make informed media decisions, transact commerce, and steward our clients’ investments.

On the other hand, a single source provider controlling the currency that determines how a media type is transacted could lead to complacency and the status quo.  Dominant companies rarely deliver the kind of rapid iteration and innovation that competition delivers.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am under no illusion that Nielsen and/or Arbitron are perfect.  I fully understand the limitations of the data, especially as the world continues to fracture into smaller and smaller slices of audiences and content.  But, there is something awfully seductive about a number that isn’t questioned: a number that is accepted as fact.

The challenges in the digital media business are numerous.  For starters, the two well-established research companies that provide industry data are so wildly disparate that it is comical. In March 2010, did “Viacom Digital” have 32 million unique visitors (Nielsen) or did it have 64.9 million (Comscore)?   Did cnn.com have 20.6 million or 42.9 million?  How about CNET.com – 32.1 million or 17.2 million?  Take your pick.

These numbers are not even in the same country, let alone the same ballpark

Now I know that some will say that the problem is with the nomenclature and the “custom entities” that publishers set up with the research companies (more on nomenclature another time).  These custom rollups allow publishers to aggregate traffic from a number of different properties under an overall umbrella (like Viacom digital), and there can be different rollups from one service to another.

I liken this phenomenon to buying a mattress.  If you have ever gone mattress shopping, you will know that retailers do a masterful job of creating different names for the same product.   It soon becomes impossible to compare prices from one retailer to another, so you are forced to go with a retailer that you trust and hope to get a quality product for your investment.

We should only be that lucky.  After choosing about a dozen different properties – large and small, the sizable variances between Comscore and Nielsen were the norm rather than the exception.  This is before we even look beyond overall traffic to more pertinent information like age, sex, income, geography, etc.

Should we care?

The world is moving rapidly towards buying audiences so custom and discrete that they will make syndicated research companies like Comscore and Nielsen Netratings nearly obsolete.  In the meantime, however, I do believe that our inability to convince large, traditional marketers that we have a currency as solid as the Nielsen television rating only serves to retard our growth as an industry.

What is the solution?  Will we ever get to a place where we are able to have such concrete “ratings” information that we can make the biggest of traditional marketers comfortable?

I would love to hear your perspective.

To assess the relationship between advertising and word-of-mouth, we constructed a regression model built specifically for the purpose.  The model tapped two syndicated data sources: Keller Fay’s Talk Track for word-of-mouth and TNS’s Media Intelligence for media spend.  We looked at two different advertisers, both of whom are UM clients.  Let’s call them Advertiser A and B.

Both Advertiser A and B are large brands who are household names.  Advertiser A has a distinct yet broad female bias while Advertiser B has a somewhat upscale and stylish appeal.  The two advertisers operate in different market categories and draw on advertising’s ability to help spur their business in markedly dissimilar ways.  Consequently as we might expect, advertising’s potential impact on their word-of-mouth, WOM, was also distinctly different for each marketer.

Extensive data interrogation revealed the most pragmatic way of correlating the two data sources was to create rolling three month averages for each data set, refined by some minor tweaks by channel.

For each marketer, we were able to determine a clear correlation between advertising weight and word-of-mouth.  For Advertiser A, it was 94% and for Advertiser B 89%.

Since the model included media spend, we could also establish advertising’s return on investment in building WOM.  Importantly, the model’s spend inputs were not based on total media spend but on TNS’s reported investment in each media channel.  In other words, not only could we see advertising’s overall effect in helping build WOM, but the model would also tell us which media were more effective.

Advertiser A’s unexpected result: dollar for dollar, women’s magazines out performed television by a factor x25!  Yes, for every $1 spent on women’s magazines, we would have had to have spent $25 to build the same WOM effect on TV.  This compelling finding triggered our curiosity to quiz this further – why were magazines so powerful for this advertiser?

Keller Fay’s Talk Track can trace specific WOM brand mentions down to an individual magazine.  We sought empirical evidence of brand mentions for Advertiser A at the individual title level that might corroborate the model’s findings.  Since the regression analysis was based on rolling three months data, we wouldn’t expect to see an exact match to the advertiser’s magazine schedule.  But by comparing Advertiser A’s brand mentions in over 30 magazines to each magazine’s individual reach of Advertiser A’s regular users, we saw a heartening correlation between the two of 78%.  Not quite proof positive, but good circumstantial evidence nonetheless.

Advertising clearly appeared to help Advertiser A build their WOM, and our model indicated that advertising helped generate up to 70% of the total WOM for that marketer.

Although we investigated many alternatives, we found the same approach also worked best in building a regression model for Advertiser B.  In summary, we were able to see a clear return on investment that differed distinctly by channel and reflected this particular advertiser’s broader based media strategy.   Since this advertiser is the market leader in a high interest category and whose quality products command a price premium, Advertiser B is explicitly less reliant on advertising.  Consequently, in this instance we saw that advertising generated 23% of the brand’s word-of-mouth, but this was wholly consistent with the role of advertising for this marketer.

As the media world has become more complex, consumer word-of-mouth has grown in importance.  Arguably, a key factor in this phenomenon is that each consumer has become their own integrator of what they see, hear and interact with.  Word-of-mouth is the consumer’s own output and interpretations of these aggregations.

Yet most word-of-mouth research studies, with the exception of Keller Fay, have a purely online perspective and focus on online conversations, postings and areas such as consumer video sharing.

While online conversation and social media monitors are invaluable in discerning consumer trends, none of them directly demonstrate the value of other media.  We need to continue to develop word-of-mouth tools which appraise not just digital media but the complete media communications spectrum.  As Lord Kelvin, the great pioneering 19^th century scientist, succinctly put it:  If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.

When we ask US online consumers how “trustworthy” they rate information typically provided by various contacts, a wide ranking emerges. Personal recommendations from family and friends scores highest at 6.7 out of a possible 10. Consumer online recommendations on sites such as Amazon score 5.7 By comparison, TV or magazine advertising merits only 3.7. At least advertising beats email spam, which scores a lowly 3.1.

But if online word of mouth is mushrooming in its online presence, how do we embrace it, particularly its most evocative online form — User Generated Content (UGC) — without falling into the classic traps feared by many. Fortunately, if we really want to incorporate WOM, there are ways to draw on research to ensure we can develop scalable and repeatable strategies.

WOM is deeply rooted in our culture: Americans do like giving their opinion both on- and offline. Tracking WOM across 22 product categories, we have found that 80% of Americans “often inform others on what to buy” in at least one of these categories. More intriguingly, we are seeing the emergence of the Super-Influencer – 30% of us inform others on what to buy for five or more categories.

Super-Influencers exhibit clear preferences in the subjects they like to talk about. At the broadest level, our analysis indicates Super-Influencers will tend to focus on one of two macro-topic groups, either: a) technology and entertainment or, b) more personal and household matters such a fashion, cosmetics, personal health and groceries. Similar smaller topic groupings occur throughout people’s WOM repertoires –people often like to talk to others on several related topics such as music and films, or children, homes and families.

The implication of these types of macro-topic groupings is actually quite profound. If we wish to activate a WOM or UGC strategy, we should avoid the pitfall of directly inviting consumers to create a specific response around our product. As Chevy Tahoe found out in 2006 in the USA, consumers rebuffed the marketer’s invitation to create UGC ads for the SUV, and instead they exploited it as a chance to attack the vehicle’s fuel consumption. As a result of this type of experience, the marketing industry is often hesitant to pursue WOM or related UGC consumer creation strategies.

Instead of inviting consumer responses on the brand directly, we should harness this type of customized WOM topic research to determine what other often seemingly-unrelated product areas do actively interest our consumers to talk to others. We could then include these other potential areas in a re-focused WOM or UGC activation strategy to emphasize our product’s proposition without necessarily talking about our product. In turn, this can unexpectedly broaden the interest and appeal of our brand.

An admirable case in point is ING Canada. A year ago, they ran a UGC competition on the theme of savings – but rather than being about bank savings and deposits , the competition was about any form of saving. Consumers’ UGC responses were diverse, humorous and creative. For example, they included a video about someone trying to save money by ordering a pizza where the pizza was free if it was not “delivered to your hands” in 30 minutes. So the diner-to-be deliberately refused to physically accept the pizza when the delivery guy turned up at his door and a very humorous skit ensued.

It is these sorts of surprising approaches where WOM and related UGC strategies will ultimately succeed because they not only arouse consumers’ genuine curiosity and invite an authentic response that isn’t transparently self-serving to the needs of the brand, they also provide a broader-based forum to interact with the brand and other fans.

If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’re one of us marketing types—the blind optimists who spend our days thinking about where to find consumers, how to capture their interest and, ultimately, win them over. But, the reality we never fully accept is this: the consumer (who is actually a real person with a whole life of his or her own that doesn’t involve us) is not sitting at home all day, forlorn for lack of attention from brands, waiting to be found. It’s a sad love story gone wrong.

So what’s my point? Well, as a fellow blind optimist, I think there is still hope. I think creative media thinking can win the proverbial girl’s heart, ride off into the sunset and have brands and consumers living happily ever after. We all know that it’s harder to push someone into your camp than it is to give him a little pull when he’s already leaning your way. Well, for any category there are particular moments—beyond the obvious ones—when consumers are leaning your way and are just waiting for that little invitation to come in. I like to think of these as “magnetic moments.” Yes, we all know that the days of interruption marketing are over and right now it’s about right time, right place (blah, blah, blah), but, in my interpretation, magnetic moments are more than that. They are a mood, a context, a state of mind (and, yes, a time and a place, too) where your category has become more emotionally charged for consumers. Either consciously or subconsciously, by choice or by circumstance, their energy (and attention) has temporarily been directed your way.

Think about your own experience with the personal finance category, for example. Of the 24 hours in your day and the 168 in your week, you’re probably spending almost none of them thinking about your credit card or checking account. All the while, financial services marketers are making plaintive overtures about how their products can fulfill some bigger promise to you as a “money management tool.” But, then comes the time you take out of each week or month to go through your bill-paying routine. Or perhaps it’s the moment just after or when the mortgage bill comes due. Whatever it is and whenever it is, these are the points where all of a sudden you’re transported into your money frame of mind—you’re feeling the pain of your financial ways and resolving to improve them. At that one point, you might finally allow yourself to listen to how one of these “money management tools” could play a bigger role in your repertoire. That’s a “money moment” for you–a.k.a. a magnetic moment any financial services marketer crafty enough to catch you in that frame of mind.

In the age of interactive, conversational media and utilities, I think there is an opportunity for a brand to help, inform, edify and uplift through its media experiences in “money moments” like these. When the possibilities of media (and what can be turned into media) are boundless, the only limit on our ability to engage consumers is the bounds of our imagination. If we can find these magnetic moments, surely we can find a way to put media there. There’s proof that a lot of brands are thinking this way and are doing better for it. A few examples I’ve really come to like are these:

• Zappos: Yes, shoes can be a highly involved category, so maybe their job is easier, but that doesn’t stop them from thinking really hard about the shoe moments in peoples’ lives. Whether you are a shoe lover or would just as soon go barefoot all day, there is one moment for all of us that is now forever associated with shoes. Yes, the airport security line. A subconscious shoe moment, but Zappos is there with ads in the security bins. Pretty brilliant, I think.
• Charmin: Doesn’t get more low involvement than toilet paper, right? If you didn’t think very hard, it would be easy to conclude there are no magnetic moments here. Well, think again. Maybe there is one…the dreaded, grimy public restroom – an experience that really helps you reflect on the importance of nice fluffy, soft toilet paper. Charmin is there. They’ve sponsored the iPhone app that helps people find survivable public restrooms wherever they might be.
• Max New York Life Insurance: Halfway across the world, an insurance company in India is showing us how to stretch the concept of magnetic moments even further. Insurance is often thought to be a “necessary evil”; but in truth, one could consider it welcome protection against the fragility of life. That said, we rarely think of it this way. So Max New York Life found a creative way to get that very point across. They found Indian consumers when they were tending to other fragile their lives– their eggs. They advertized on egg cartons. A pretty elegant way to remind people of the fragility of life. Nice work.

All of these are pretty simple one-off tactics. But what they say to consumers is pretty powerful. What they say is: “I’ve thought about you. I get you. I understand you more than any of those other brands. And I know you don’t think of me often, but when you do. I’m there.”  If you think hard enough, there are probably magnetic moments you’ve never considered that give you an opportunity to show consumers you’re armed with a little more insight and media creativity than the average brand. Simple tactics, but they are clearly the product of some insightful thinking from people that started by stepping back from solving the marketing problem and first walked a mile in their consumer’s shoes to find those precious few moments when consumers’ energy—for better or worse—is tuned into their category.

At UM, we remind ourselves to truly get to know our consumer before we put our media/marketing goggles on this. We do this through research, talking to consumers and listening to the story that the data tells. With this insight in hand, we use creative media planning tools such as consumer archetypes and consumer journeys to truly understand our consumer and our category within their broader context of consumers real life. Simple, tried and true tools…but what they do is help us be a consumer first, recognize that we only have a small fraction of their attention and find those magnetic moments where we can form a more charged connection. Our hypothesis is that the more your media experiences are around those magnetic moments, the more curiosity and interest your brand will provoke, and the more surprising your results will be.

-By Will Wiseman, SVP, Global Strategy Director

First, the good news: Research and intelligence firm Mintel has found that “optimism is steadily balancing out stress and hardship as people around the world discover ways to transform their lifestyles, regain control and lighten the mood.”

People are demonstrating that they still want to enjoy themselves. In the US, three in five have traveled domestically in the past year, but to save money, more travelers are opting to visit family and friends. The result has been a boost to the trend towards playfulness and simple fun—behooving marketers to build these values into their brands.  In fact, many marketers are already off and running, releasing quirky, light-hearted new products that offer consumers a way to escape by engaging with their brands.

Now, the harder news: While a more playful attitude may be on the rise, upon reviewing its 2009 trend predictions, Mintel observed that trust remains a paramount concern. At a time when consumers feel particularly distrustful of the financial industry and food purveyors among other companies, brands who want people’s trust must not only display the values consumers care about, but also interact with people about these values on an incredibly intimate, almost human level.

Nine out of 10 consumers recently surveyed by Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve agreed they are “opting for a simpler life.” Per a September 23 NYT article, “Americans seem to be again entering a period of social change where we’re recalibrating our sense of what it means to be a citizen—not just through voting or volunteering, but also through our purchases.” The idea that we can serve by spending more responsibly has gained steam. “Americans,” the article says, “are starting to put their money where their ideals are.”

Take, for example, this summer’s wildly successful “Cash for Clunkers” program. “It was a potent concept mixing financial incentives with the emotional appeal of unloading a burdensome possession and getting something new in return”—all while helping the environment.

Now, an array of smart home furnishing retailers and manufacturers are hoping to “capitalize on similar motivations by introducing trade-in programs for everything from outdated entertainment centers to used mattresses.”

Ruby & Quiri, a family-run home furnishings center in New York, offers consumers a $25 gift card for every piece of used furniture turned in, or $50 for upgrading to an energy-efficient appliance. The “clunker” is picked up and donated or recycled when the new item is delivered, providing consumers with a headache-free means of “doing good.” Similar programs have sprung up across the US, with variations from 1-800-Mattress and even a “Cash for Teakettles” program from Chantal Cookware Corp.

While “genuineness” may seem to come easily to a family-run outfit such as Ruby & Quiri, it is not completely elusive for companies which operate on a larger scale. As brands take on personas, astute media agencies (such as UM) can bring those personas—and their intrinsic values—to life through interaction with individuals.

Brands need to start opening up the way consumers already have in the online world. After years of one-way conversations, brands may first have to deal with some pent-up anger, but over time, engaging consumers will lead to more balanced relationships focused on cooperation and co-creation. Part of a brand’s newfound appeal might just be the humanity and vulnerability that is demonstrated through a willingness to reveal themselves and be open to feedback from the masses.

“Foreverism” (the concept that conversations, relationships and products that are never done and born of a “beta” mindset) means operating in a more humble, transparent and perpetual beta mode, both as an organizational mindset and as a product development and customer experience philosophy. But consumers will not want everything to last forever. Brands will need to think hard—understanding which offerings should be primarily transient vs. other experiences consumers prefer to be more lasting.

Shouldn’t those investment gurus have known the likely ROI and associated risk that went along with their investment plans?

The answer, of course, is “Yes.” But to that I say:

Who among us in the media planning biz should be hurling stones?

The fact of the matter is, if you’re in charge of media planning on behalf of your client, you’re responsible for the investment of (likely) millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars… most of it probably shareholder’s money.

So ask yourself:

Do you know the likely ROI that goes along with your investment plans?

I think we all know the probable answer to that question.

The fact of the matter is, there does not seem to be enough curiosity amongst media planners as to the efficacy of their investment choices.  Plans are developed–annually for most, weekly for others, daily for some (or so it seems)–and the underpinnings of many of those plans are basic media consumption profiles, competitive benchmarking, or perhaps some broader contact study, if you’re lucky.  But nothing is typically available as to the bang for the buck that the client is getting for their investment.

Aren’t media planners actually investment advisers for our clients?  And if that is true, shouldn’t we have a better handle as to the return on those investments?

Yes we should…but true analytics is often time consuming, often expensive, and is often a data challenge for agencies and clients alike.  And yes, many clients just don’t want to pay for it, or may not truly accept and/or leverage the (sometimes controversial) results.

Yes…and?  That’s no reason “not to know.”   And the fact of the matter is, you can begin to understand the ROI of your investments even if you cannot push a true analytics model to reality (although that is always preferred).  At UM, I’ve seen many simple but often overlooked learning opportunities pushed forward to fruition on behalf of our clients.  These were not time-consuming and were not expensive but did result in very useful learning.  Just a few such examples include 1) benchmarking client and competitive spending vs. consumer-generated perceptions of a) the advertisers’ presence in individual channels, and b) consumer sentiment as to the efficacy of those channels to determine ROI (pretty inexpensive to do); 2)   “old school” media mix tests to help determine channel effectiveness and refine media strategies; or 3) the basic interpretation of–and leveraging of–DRTV call response data to aid in a TV creative rotation, or even print and online selections.

So, while true multivariate regression models are invariably the preferred pathway to ROI enlightenment, if you cannot perform one, there is no excuse for being kept in the dark on some basic ROI measures of your client’s media investment.

Stay curious.  Push for what’s right.  Learn what’s working, and what’s not. And handle your client’s investment with the best of care.

Essentially, he posited that any reasonably intelligent intern could join a media agency and hopefully, after a couple months, he or she would fully appreciate basic media planning concepts such as reach and frequency.

But as he followed through to his punch, he doubted that even if the intern stayed at the agency a couple of years whether she or he would be able to nail a crisp definition of engagement because it is so multifaceted and indistinct a concept.   It was then I realized the enigma of engagement: Every media person knows what engagement is, but nobody can put it in terms which everyone else can agree on.

Subsequently, I came across a succinct definition of engagement by Dr. Carl Marci of Innerscope.  He defined biological engagement as:  attention + emotion = engagement.  For me, the strength of this definition is in its simplicity, yet it can have a universal application across media.

Moreover, Dr. Marci revealed how, in a lab setting, he could measure engagement by a combination of biometric proxies such as eye-gaze, heart-beat and galvanic skin response.  For example, someone can watch the same TV ad in different program environments and as a consequence be responsive at varying levels of intensity to the ad depending on the type of program being watched.

We can also pinpoint evidence of consumer engagement in the real world via a panoply of robust surrogates.  One of the more palpable is the increased level of active consumer interest when using multiple types of screens: for example TV, computer and Smartphone.

In the Spring of this year, UM and AOL completed an exclusive joint venture research endeavor exploring one of the most inspiring areas of the digital media revolution, Smartphones.  Entitled Smartphone, Smart Marketing, this extensive study harnessed qualitative diary panels, ethnographic study and quantitative research to interrogate the opportunities in this area.

A key area we probed was media meshing.  Media meshing extends beyond what is called concurrent media exposure – it is when the consumer is viewing more than one media channel specifically to look at particular content so that you can be fully immersed in the topic.  Owing to their ability to provide instant information gratification anywhere the user chooses, Smartphones are today’s ultimate media meshing tool.  For instance, if you want to check out an actress you’re watching at that very moment on TV, a Smartphone can parade to you everything known about her in an instant while you remain in your armchair and continue to catch glimpses of her.

Smartphone, Smart Marketing highlighted 67% 18-34s were more apt to look at similar content on their Smartphone while viewing another medium.  One of the reasons why receptivity is amplified when Smartphones are an integral part of the communication mix is that only 13% of consumers agreed they were “completely focused” when watching TV but this doubled to 27% when viewing their Smartphone.

Similar findings that substantiate the power of media meshing and its influence on engagement have been seen from organizations as diverse as MTV and Keller Fay.  These studies underscore that viewing related content on two screens or more increases viewer receptivity and spurs them to talk about the topic they were watching.

The industry has taken a long time to come to terms with engagement.  In our industry’s characteristically faddish manner, the concept has probably lost many of those who might have been originally enticed by its promise of more effective communications.  But now we can understand and measure it both in the biometrics lab and the real world.   It’s time to re-engage with engagement.

-by Graeme Hutton, director of consumer insights