It’s about time…

BY: BRADY GILCHRIST  |  Online Marketing

For a long time now, I have been sharing publicly at conferences our recipe for engagement, which we define as Reach x Frequency x Interaction - where interaction was generally measured in time. Truthfully, time is only one vector but it’s the easiest to understand and is most important from a branded entertainment and narrative advergaming perspective.

Well, it looks like the ratings world has finally caught on to the idea as well. Nielsen / NetRatings is now including time spent as a measure from here on in. Nielsen feels time is the most important engagement metric. They are on the way, but in my opinion many media buyers and agencies will misuse the new information to make poor choices. Here is the background…justification for this opinion follows.

The market research firm on Tuesday added both Total Minutes and Total Sessions metrics to NetView, its syndicated Internet audience measurement service. While NetView has always reported average time per person and average number of sessions, the new metrics are designed to better portray total engagement across sites.

“Total Minutes is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using RIA and streaming media, but also of Web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and Internet applications,” said Scott Ross, director, product marketing for NetView.

– Abstracted from Media Post

It’s good to see Nielsen is taking a proactive stand. It’s important to note that Fuel strongly believes that time is only the one of the measurement tools required to provide useful data for analysis. If time was the perfect measure then there would be nothing wrong with television advertising. To assume that just because people are spending more time with a site that the advertising may be more effective is a dangerous misconception, and unfortunately one that many media planners will immediately leap toward.

The alchemy of building content that influences is much more complex than simply being there. When we look at eye tracking studies of how people view webpages and online content we see things that should be very disturbing to those that sell banners and buttons - people tend to ignore them and it’s not that we skip over them it’s that our brains just filter out the messages. We do online what we do in the real-world when we see thousands of signs on a busy road - we filter at a subconscious level.

Engagement is not defined by time, it’s defined by interaction. Interaction is a function of how deep someone is willing to dig into your narrative - your story, your message…it’s a complex definition. When we’re planning a campaign, we think in terms of creating content with cognitive gates - which are kind of like points down a journey to comprehension. We are more interested in people hitting those gates than we are having them spend hours and hours on a site. Don’t get me wrong - we still tell people we focus on time because the truth is most marketing managers get glassy-eyed when I use the term “Cognitive Gate.” It’s a hard bit for many to grasp because they were never trained to think of marketing and advertising as a progressive message. (Still, the smart ones get it right away.)

From an advertising perspective, the challenge is getting attention, and attention is only partially influenced by time. Even if people spend lots of time on a site, remember this - they are there for the content - not the advertising. If you want to reach them, you need to get closer to the content, otherwise you are just noise in the middle of a quest for something interesting. As Cluetrain co-author Doc Searls said, “There is no market for messages.”

While this sounds like a no brainer, the truth is that until the media function and the creative function get closer together the very act of how media is bought and sold will continue to perpetuate the creation of ineffective advertising. It’s not the measurement that truly needs improvement it is that traditional marketers really have a limited comprehension of getting deeper into the heads of those they are trying to reach. Creative is now longer about fancy pants ads - it’s equal parts psychology, social engineering, nodal marketing, design, and sales funnel architecture. No measurement system in the world will help old school thinkers do any better.

Acknowledging that time is an important metric is a step in the right direction but it’s not the whole story. What’s happening with attention is the real question here…in many ways this is just continuing to move old style thinking forward. Honestly, we would love to share our thinking with Nielsen - perhaps we will.