MI5, MI6 and MI 4 - CCE or Cummulative Consumer Engagement

After many years of groping, the Advertising Industry has adopted "Engagement" as the highest order metric for measuring media effectiveness.

In 2005, a body in the US was set up to develop a framework for the media and publishing community to work together with this new metric. It was nicknamed MI4 since four key stakeholder groups were involved: advertisers, agencies, media, and researchers.

Consumer Engagement: Jargon or Math?

While engagement is an intriguing metric, it raises more questions than it answers. What is Engagement? How does one measure it? What is the frequency of measurement? What is the scale, is it ratio-scaled (an analyst's joy) or Nominal Scaled (as a digression, several Old Media Metrics are not Ratio Scaled, lending themselves to analyses that have limitations - the more primitive the data, the fewer and less sophisticated tools the data can be subjected to) ?

Broadly, engagement could mean any action reflecting an experience or touch point with a brand, product, group, or message.

That could involve interacting with an ad, requesting an ad, or even talking about an ad or product.

Note the emphasis on the word "Action". This means that old media metrics, or "Opportuinities to be Seen" metrics do not exist any more.

Consumers requesting ad-hoc updates about the Brand or Product via RSS (Really Simple Syndication), is probably pretty high up in the Hierarchy of Actions. A SMS response to an ad is also an action.

The action need not neccsarily be as an input driven by the marketer. It could also be Consumer Generated, such as one consumer evangelising the product to her friend, or calling in to find out if spares or printing cartridges are available. These consumers are "High-Engagement" consumers, and need a special way to be addresses, relative to consumers who solely react to Marketer driven communcation. Failure to acknowledge and manage these "High-Engagement" consumers can be dangerous for a brand.

Whats happening:

We have lots of research pointing to the fact that an Offline or Old media input is reacted to by the consumer with an action that is exploratory in nature - it could be a call, a visit to the Brand URL, could be a MO (Mobile Orginating) SMS, or it could be a search on Google.

If the response is an online actoion, then it is possible to track Actions by Unique Consumer. WIth Persistent cookies, this can be tracked over the lifetime of that Unique Consumer. (Of-course there are moans and groans about Cookie-Overload, Cookie Deleting, 3rd party cookie blocking etc, but with 300 Cookies, and overwriting of only session cookies on a FIFO basis, persistent cookie death may not be dramatic).

What Advertisers need to do - Today!

With these 2 developments, it is possible to atribute causality to Action, typically my media source. Through using a system of URL 301/Meta Redirects the Browser based tracking system can assign cauality of any action performed online, (including Phone calls, if the mechanism is a Request for a VOIP call-back).

Therotically there are no constraints of either number of actions that can be uniquely measured, or the number of media sources, or the lifetime of the consumer.

Given this model, marketers and advertisers will now rapidly migrate their spend where ideally every single action performed on an IP-enabled media consumption device can be uniquely identified and Post vist actions quantified over the lifetime, leading to a metric that I'll call Cummulative Consumer Engagement.

Cummulative Consumer Engagement with AJAX-based visualisation of All touch points:


Cummulative Consumer Engagement can be quantified in near-real time, and can be correlated on an AJAX interface with Marketing Investments plotted over time. Imagine something like Google Trends or Google Finance, with the Y axis showing the CCE, while the X axis shows time. Roll over on the line and you see the correlation. Marketers, starved of anything but the most primitive metrics will LOVE this.

This does not mean that marketers will stop their TV spends (which account for perhaps 90% of all their spend with advertisers like P&G) overnight. But whats going to happen is more accountability, and the emergence of Consumer Engagement Consulting, a practice that I predict will become a premium huge end consulting practice in the media industry. The mobile phone showed some promise but with clunky WAP interfaces, and mostly SMS interaction, and now SPAM, that promise has died. It will emerge afetr 10 years, and that is why Google is investing in the Mobile Space, but that's the story of another posting.

More on this later.....Rajeev