Ipsos and the quest for Media Brand Engagement
Like modern-day Argonauts, Ipsos MediaCT have embarked on an ambitious project to discover the essence of media engagement, from how people engage with media brands all the way through to how this might influence advertising communication. In today’s presentation of the first stage of their work, MD Liz Landy confessed that at the outset, they weren’t even sure it could be defined, let alone found.
This morning, many of the industry’s top commercial marketers and researchers were shown Ipsos’s work-in-progress model of media brand engagement, and asked what they thought so far. The reception was warm but full of challenging questions.
The first stage of Ipsos’s work involved seeking consensus on what media engagement means. Neil Mortensen of agency group OPera gave a succinct, consumer-focussed response: “consumers interacting with content in a positive way”, while David Brennan of Thinkbox quoted the ARF’s definition: “turning on a prospect to a brand message enhanced by the surrounding context”. From a series of conversations like this, Ipsos have broken the challenge into three areas: engagement with media brands, media behavioural engagement, and advertising engagement. Their work so far has sought to build a model of the first of these elements.
Building on their existing brand equity and loyalty models, Ipsos re-designed some of the inputs to be more specific to media brands. Their work tested causes and effects in all sorts of combinations, but settled on a model with 13 drivers of media brand engagement. These thirteen drivers group into four areas: consumer perception (including credibility, respect), need fulfilment (physical end emotional), buzz (how much they hear, talk about and recommend) and equity (including quality and standout)
They now have a model where consumers of different media brands can score those brands against the thirteen dimensions, and showed various analyses to the media expert audience. YouTube, for example, appears to have stronger engagement scores overall than the VOD vehicles of its traditional TV counterparts. But every quest for new empirical knowledge has its perils and as soon as the specific comparisons began, so did the difficult questions. To what extent did usage familiarity from usage influence the scores? Can TV brands be sufficiently differentiated from their premium content? How can video engagement be measured generically when it shifts on a split-second basis during consumption?
Ipsos invited those difficult questions and hope to use the dialogue to build on their learning. The openness of their approach and the audience’s response suggest that Ipsos’s Argo may be allowed to sail on rather then getting caught in the clashing rocks of research debate.
Ipsos will be posting their presentation online, but for more information please email Sarah Gale at Ipsos