Myths of Magazine Engagement

An article in a recent “Ad Age” noted that “engagement” has begun to resemble a Holy Grail of magazine metrics, and we agree. Magazines – all media for that matter – need some form of ROI. Given the complexities of multimedia, multiplatform, integrated marketing (and the fact that ad agencies have continued to deftly dodge the accountability bullet), engagement seems to be a reasonable way to go in the 21st-century marketplace. But only if you define it properly.

The article commented that a new study on engagement was “one among many efforts to demystify the subject, and delivers a blow to true believers.” The study conducted by Starch Communications seemed, said the article, to contradict “conventional wisdom.”

It turns out all this is true only if your version of “conventional wisdom” defined “engagement” strictly from the magazines’ point of view as the “frequency with which magazines are read, time spent with each issue, and how much of each issue gets finished.” Next you need to assume that those measures somehow correlate with ad engagement. Which, apparently, they don’t.

Talk about old models and mid-20th-century thinking! Starch’s heritage is measuring how people read magazines, so “engagement” for Starch is primarily how people read magazines. But the reality is that engagement is none of the things that Starch uses to define it when it comes to the advertising.

An advertiser’s target audience, of course, must actually read the magazine for an opportunity to see the ads being run. But the frequency, the length of time, and how many pages they get through have nothing to do with how engaging the advertising is going to be.

Things seem a bit turned around here. It was always my understanding that the advertiser was supposed to be the beneficiary of the marketing effort. There was supposed to be some return on the exercise. Run the ad, and something “good” (define that as you will, but “increased sales” works for me) was supposed to happen. The media, on the other hand, seem to really like having it both ways: You pay us for some time, space and reasonably defined audience, and the audience is “engaged” with our editorial content.

What about the advertiser? What happened there?

The fact was that there seemed to be no differences in ad effects (the article was unclear as to the yardstick used there, but we’re betting it was off some set of 20th-century data-based norms and/or recall) based upon the frequency the magazines were read, or the length of time taken to read them, or the thoroughness with which the magazines were read. But that isn’t really surprising, especially if you expect that engagement with the advertising will develop only in parallel and corresponding to levels of engagement with the media. Which is not the case these days. Hasn’t been the case for a long time.

“Engagement,” real engagement, is the consequence of a marketing or advertising effort that brings about an increased level of brand equity for the product or service that paid for the effort. And when we say “brand equity” we don’t mean brand awareness or ad awareness or brand imagery or message communication. We mean that there is an increase – an improvement – in the degree to which a brand is perceived by those exposed to the ad as being able to meet or exceed their expectations for the category in which it competes.

Certainly creative matters. Strategy too. And yes, consumers have to be given an opportunity to be exposed to the effort. But the values inherent within the selected medium itself are the elements that can help or hurt – or just do nothing for – an advertiser. By the way, that’s the case no matter how frequently, long, or thoroughly a magazine gets read or a TV show gets watched. A reader can be – as one publisher was quoted – “compulsive about the magazine,” but all that does is optimize the chance that the ad will be seen. Being seen in and of itself has absolutely nothing to do with the levels of engagement that will be attained for an advertiser.

It’s the 21st century. For your next effort to demystify engagement, here are some absolute certainties you might want to take into consideration:

1) Engagement is more than “getting attention,” “being noticed,” “breaking through the clutter,” or “being read for a long time.” Real engagement is the consequence of any marketing or communications effort that results in an increased level of brand equity for the brand.

2) Brand equity is the degree to which a brand is believed by the target audience as being able to meet or exceed consumer expectations they hold for the category.

3) Not all media are endowed with equal abilities to provide an environment in which advertising engagement will flourish. This is true no matter how large and appropriate the demographics or cost-effective the CPMs.

4) Engagement is integrally linked with loyalty and positive consumer behavior toward the advertised brand. If you are measuring anything else, you are not measuring “engagement.”

In fairness, the media can talk all they want about engagement, but in the absence of any real ROI metrics in place, what they’re focusing on is the degree of dedication a reader or a viewer shows a magazine or a TV show and nothing having to do with engagement with the advertising.

These days you have to do better than that!

Robert Passikoff, Ph.D., is founder and president of New York-based marketing firm Brand Keys and writes a monthly column for CHIEF MARKETER.