Placing your audience engagement on an exponential growth path

At the end of August, Exponential distributed its white paper on audience engagement. It's packed with insight on defining, applying and measuring 'engagement' for brands and advertisers and provides tangible tips for driving 'active attention' amongst consumers.

David Barnard, Exponential's Country Manager - South Africa and Bryan Melmed, VP of Insights at Exponential explain why these insights are so important to local marketers.

1. There's already a wealth of online resources available to marketers and advertisers, what makes the Exponential 'Engagement' white paper stand out?

Barnard: For the very first time, we have a well-documented white paper on what true online engagement means. It provides useful insights for brands to reinvent their understanding of engagement and how to adapt or change their brand communication to nature the true success of user attention.

Melmed: We've reviewed almost every study on ad engagement conducted in the last ten years, both from the industry and academia, and distilled it into a practical summary of what every marketer needs to know. Rather than jump on the latest fad, we went as far back as Aristotle to discover the essential and immutable truths about human attention.

2. That's comprehensive. Jumping back to the present, driving 'active attention' amongst consumers is definitely a 21st Century problem. List the main contributing factors in this regard.

Melmed: Consumers have never had such busy lives, with so many things asking for their attention, and so many distractions waiting along the way. I found this the other day, courtesy of blogger Alex Danco.

He points out how funny it is, in retrospect, that AOL had the one notification we all remember: "You've got mail!" Now we've always got email.

Not so long ago I would buy a good book for the journey to Cape Town. The last time I flew there I had three screens along for the ride - my laptop, tablet, and my phone - plus on-demand videos in front of me.

Generally, we're seduced by new products and technologies that promise to save us time but just end up making us feel busier. The problem with making things more efficient is that there's nothing to hold it back. We see this with email and social media, for a start.

But slowly, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the value of time. A business we work with offered free movies as a promotion. Older consumers were thrilled, but never got around to watching them. The younger ones weren't interested at all. 'Free' doesn't work like it used to if it demands extended attention. The race to provide delivery and concierge services is another example of this, as we're increasingly willing to pay for convenience.

As people everywhere become more discriminate about how they spend their time and allocate their attention, advertisers really need to up their game. If your message isn't compelling or resonant, it isn't going to get anywhere.

3. Building on this, explain how consumer attention leads to brand engagement.

Melmed: Attention impacts whether there is engagement and also the extent of brand engagement. Advertisers can't influence behaviour without capturing attention and paranoia about subliminal images has long subsided, thankfully. Attention isn't a binary measure, though - not only does longer attention translate to greater impact, so does the nature and depth of attention.

Simply being aware of a brand is the first stage. The concept has to be there before any associations can be made.

The second stage is understanding the brand in context. Berkshire Hathaway is the fifth largest company in the world, but I barely understand what they do and certainly couldn't identify what role they play in my life. Any consumer-facing brand must find a home within existing associations and environmental cues. Beverage companies have this easy. For something less tangible like a financial product, there needs to be a bigger push. For example, if you have a family, you need life insurance.

The third stage is developing an emotional connection. This is what every brand should aspire to, as difficult as it is. Almost all of our decisions are made using emotional cues, even if at one point they were deliberated quite rationally. There are aspects of the product that should reinforce this (our honey comes in little plastic bears instead of bees, for example) but storytelling through advertising is an even more powerful mechanism, if targeted wisely and presented at an appropriate time.

When a consumer feels positively about your brand, it's a connection that is very difficult to break.

4. How does prioritising engagement then positively affect ad campaigns?

Barnard: Prioritising campaigns towards engagement offers tangibility and a method of success for marketers and media buyers in this ever-challenging world to break through the clutter. With viewability becoming a primary objective for brands, the uptake to drive engagement and active attention amongst their desired audience has become a key KPI for online advertising success.

Melmed: If you think about all the hurdles that an ad campaign needs to clear, capturing attention is the most difficult one. And it's not only difficult - attention is also a limiting factor. If you aren't able to capture and sustain attention, nothing else matters. The best strategies start here and orient every decision to this fundamental objective.

Because engagement is so essential, it also becomes our best proxy for success. If we have managed to sustain attention, it's likely everything else that contributes to an ad campaign worked well. Creative, targeting, positioning, and context all need to align just so to create that magic moment when a consumer wants to hear what you have to say. It's relatively easy to measure engagement, and as such can be used to optimise all the elements one controls in an ad campaign, as well as the factors out of your control. It's the closest thing that brand marketers have to a conversion point.

5. Looking to measurement then, what metrics can we use that truly capture active user attention and how effective is it?

Barnard: Delivering real engagement without an intrusive approach but rather with the objective to invite the user to engage in the experience should be the primary metric. Once the user is engaged, it's essential that the brand offers an interactive experience, which leads to increased dwell times - another key metric to gauge success. Any post-engagement click to site requests could be considered as highly interested users and therefore the most qualified entrants to your site, ultimately driving users down the purchase funnel to purchase intent.

Melmed: It's a challenge to have brand marketers think about measurement from the start. Direct marketers inherited this knowledge from direct mail, but brand marketers have this 'television inheritance' - a world in which simply knowing the ad appeared onscreen was enough. You may have to tweak your creative experience to allow for direct measurement of attention or engagement. That said, no one welcomes an interruption, so allowing consumers to explore your brand message when they are ready to do so is both effect and a natural measurement point.

Click here to download the white paper and find out more from the Exponential press office.