I was reading a book on the weekend called This Idea Must Die by John Brockman. It's a series of short essays written by prominent scientists where they put forward an idea that they believe should be culled for crimes of holding back the scientific community. It's a rather brutal thought experiment, but its rationale is sound. As Charles Darwin once said, “To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
When we have a solution to a problem that has worked well for us in the past, it gives rise to a state of inertia as time moves forward. These solutions become norms during their prime and can often remain so even when their feasibility has diminished. It's when this happens that you start to hear people say, "But that's how we've always done it" without being able to give you a good reason why.
I think this culling of outdated ideas is an exercise that would hugely benefit the media industry. As time treks on and technology and understanding become more sophisticated, the potential for new and better ideas increases. But it is the old norms that hold them back. The benefit of being brutal and killing off ideas is that it creates a vacuum thereby removing inertia. New ideas start to compete to fill the emptied space. I'm more than happy to formally kick off our own rendition of This Idea Must Die by putting the "Engagement Metric" on the chopping block.
The use of the term Brand Engagement seems to have popped up around 2007. A white paper published by Forrester entitled Marketer's New Key Metric: Engagement claimed that marketers needed a new metric that holistically encompassed interaction and conversation that occurred in social media and around marketing messages. No evidence based reasoning was given around how this would help brand health or behaviour change in any way.
Since 2007 there has been no agreement on what the definition of engagement actually is. The closest thing we have to a consensus is the social media definition of engagement, which only amounts to a muddy concoction of the various ways that you can interact with a social ad, ranging from a click to offering up your first born child in the comment section (all weighted equally by the way). And while there is still no evidence that ad engagement has any effect on brand health and behaviour change, the assumption is that it does.
It's easy to see why engagement became such a sexy idea. This arbitrary number eased the fear in brands and agencies that their advertising was being ignored. It highlighted the unique selling proposition of social networks as an advertising platform. It also gave niche publications a way of charging more for inventory off the back of the assumption that engagement is more valuable than reach.
I have no doubt that there are components of engagement that do contribute to brand objectives. But that is part of the problem. We don't know what components of this aggregate measure are having an effect and to what degree. The assumption that engagement is doing something is dangerous because it makes it too easy to conclude that something is enough. This is where inertia has set in and it is why engagement needs to die.
Engagement is holding the industry back from developing robust ways of measuring advertisings effect on business objectives and how the disaggregated components of engagement are contributing on their own terms.
If you're running a digital branding campaign, you can commission a brand study with a reasonable sample size for very small proportion of budget. If you want to improve brand sentiment through a social campaign you can run social dips at various points in the campaign to measure actual uplift resulting from different tactics. If you want to increase online sales or website traffic, all it takes is a couple of conversion tags.
The point is that we have ways of directly measuring campaign objectives that render engagement completely redundant. But the fact remains that something as sexy and easy as engagement will continue to breed inertia toward these more accurate measures while it still lives.
Many of you reading this may disagree with my beat down of engagement, but my sincere hope is that we can agree that there are ideas in our industry that need to die to make way for progress. So even if you do feel inclined to take engagement off the chopping block, be a champ and put another idea in its place.
Jeremy Gavin
Digital Trader
OMD