Johnson & Johnson has recently implemented a global media evaluation process which looked at the issue of metrics. Australian marketing director Amethyst Hall told B&T that engagement metrics will be tested in the United States prior to its eventual rollout to other regions.
But it has been investigating this area locally for years as a keen subscriber to the Audience Development Australia’s (ADA) Q scores, pioneered by David Castran. “We are seeing the major networks utilising the Q scores results to ‘sell-in’ programs when negotiating TV media buys. It would be fair to say that this will become a standard measurement and evaluation tool across the industry,” Hall says.
Q scores, which measure the number of viewers who consider particular programs as “must watch”, reveal that high-rating programs sometimes have low viewer engagement, while some lower-rating programs have high engagement, which means in the long term the former’s ratings will drop.
Unilever Australasia corporate relations and communications director, Nick Goddard, takes engagement into account in a more implicit way.
“Programs that rate well tend to also be the programs people are most interested in... while we don’t explicitly buy media according to engagement scores, by selecting better-rating programs, we tend to skew towards programs with better engagement scores,” Goddard says.
However Castran disagrees with this sentiment, which goes against the ADA’s philosophy. He says that while there are some cases where high-rating programs have high involvement, it is not a linear relationship.
“The business of buying TV is increasingly becoming commodified. Everyone can tell you the cost, but no one can tell you the value. Whilst some agencies are doing a terrific job, others are just paying lip service,” Castran says.
Universal McCann national investment director, Henry Tajer, agrees that engagement is a real measure.
“TARPs only tells you half the story. What they don’t tell you is how many people took action because of what they saw. Engagement provides full accountability and gives you a 360-degree diagnostic of what we do [as a media agency],” Tajer says.
“It’s about evoking a reaction to purchase. It’s about putting in a qualitative measure on a quantitative method. Having a high level of engagement built into strategy and execution is critical for us to deliver to our clients. More and more our clients are looking for that in what we provide.”
And nor is the measure of engagement exclusive to TV, with online also providing marketers with a good framework for accountability.
OMD executive director of trading, Peter Horgan, says even though Johnson & Johnson is leading the push in the US, the UK and Australia are really the leaders in this area of strategic thinking.
He says since media agencies broke away from creative agencies and pushed the cause that “30-second ads are not the answer to everything”, they have moved towards a more channel-agnostic platform, “whereby the media is anything that touches the consumer and assembling the communications mix on the basis of media consumption”.
Horgan says that has been taken a step further with the focus on moving from broadcast communications to engaging on a platform of communities of interest.
“The best example of that is what we’re seeing at market level in terms of the migration of funds from traditional media like free-to-air TV and print, to online and subscription TV,” Horgan says.
He adds the perception that the market is soft at the moment is not the case in reality, as what is actually occurring is a structural shift in spending into growing media platforms.
“It’s also why media agencies are setting up divisions like OMD’s Fuse, which focuses on content exploitation, event generation, sponsorship management, where you actually generate events that reflect given community area of interest,” Horgan says.
He is of course referring to ‘branded content’, which is forming more and more of the marketing mix.
Hall agrees that OMD’s own media-buying strategy has seen an increased use of alternative media, such as outdoor, web-based, print and integrated sponsorships. “Johnson & Johnson consumer brands aim to achieve a 360 degree surround sound advertising campaign to increase reach,” Hall says.
