Engagement And Exposure Debated At MediaTel Research Seminar
Taking different approaches to research was another of the big topics up for discussion at yesterday’s MediaTel Group seminar, with chair Torin Douglas probing the panellists for their views on the pros and cons of engagement and exposure.
Lynne Robinson, research director at the IPA, said that it is important to not get carried away by the appeal of engagement at the expense of other methods, particularly exposure. “It’s obvious that how media works and how advertising works is an immensely complex process. The one thing that always annoys me is ‘do we still need exposure?’ ‘should we go to engagement?’. We need all of these measures,” she said.
She added: “But we’re not going to get away from exposure as the lowest common denominator. Because you need to know how many people have the potential to engage, you need that basic measure before you can move on into a whole raft of other different measures.”
Richard Silman, non-executive chairman of Ipsos, agreed with Robinson and sounded a note of caution on engagement: “Measurement of exposure is a critical first step. I think understanding engagement is very important but interestingly, in terms of going out and talking to clients about their understanding of engagement, what one then appreciates is that it means different things to different people.
Quoting an American media commentator, Silman continued: “engagement equates to the physicists view on dark energy. The term does not mean anything. It might not be dark and it might not be energy. The whole name is a place holder for the description that there is something funny we have discovered but we do not yet understand.
“That sums up largely where we are on engagement. We know there is something going on that takes us from engaging through to behaviour, but we don’t yet understand that particular process.”
David Brennan, research and strategy director at Thinkbox, referred to the research his organisation has been carrying out on engagement and said that some of the more traditional measures of how research works have no relation at all to either brand favourability or intention to purchase.
He said: “It’s a very emotionally led process, and actually it’s about those sort of almost creative takeouts from the brand communication that lead to ad liking, that lead to brand favourability and intentions to purchase, and there’s a much stronger and much clearer correlation in that respect and that’s the sort of work I think we need to do, to say not just what engagement is, but what does it lead to.”
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