Web viewBecause looking back at my CRE files and I came upon a proposal from Jim Webster from Northwestern in 2005 ... RICHARD ZACKON: Last word for anyone else?

WHAT IS IT TO WATCH Dialogue Series

June 8, 2016

RICHARD ZACKON: What I’d like to talk about today is this thing that we call engagement. And at which time some of us widst because of a long history with the term.

So, actually, if I could ask people to mute, which you can find on the lower corner of the screen, if you’re not speaking, because we are getting things in feedback here. And if you’re on your phone, you can probably mute with *6, I think, is the standard way to do that.

Before I share the standard ARF definition of engagement, I’d like to hear what the term evokes for people. When you think engagement, Naomi, I know you’re going to provide us with a definition later in the call, so you don’t get to use your cheat sheet just yet. You can be listening to kind of the common parlance of engagement. So when I speak of engagement, what comes up for anybody?

MALE VOICE: I would say attentiveness.

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay.

CERIL SHAGRIN: Similarly, I would say totally absorbed.

RICHARD ZACKON: Beyond attentive.

CERIL SHAGRIN: Mm hmm.

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay. Attentive. Absorbed. Who was going to say something?

ROBIN: Oh, this is Robin. I was going to say interactive. I think of people tweeting and interacting via social media around media.

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay. Zaria, you’re not escaping me. I know that you love to contribute. So when you think engagement, what comes to…?

DARIA: I’m muted.

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay, well you’re unmuted now.

DARIA: Oh, it was engagement. What’s my definition of engagement?

RICHARD ZACKON: Not necessarily. It could be a definition or it could just be a word that it triggers.

DARIA: Oh, okay. Well, to me, it’s actually you have some kind of personal involvement with whichever media in which you’re interacting. You actually care about what’s going on. So.

1 What is it to Watch – Dialogue Series June 8, 2016

RICHARD ZACKON: So involvement and care?

DARIA: Yeah.

RICHARD ZACKON: Good. We’re recording, so. [Inaudible – 02:58].

FEMALE VOICE: Connected.

RICHARD ZACKON: Connected.

MALE VOICE: It brings census to mind for me. You know, where you’re listening, where you’re watching, if it’s a device you can be touching.

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay. The term that we used to use, those of us who were around before 2005, which is many, but not all of us; it used to be attention or attentiveness which, if I’m not mistaken, Simmons measured. And that’s in media planning, in my days as a media planner; we would look at attentiveness scores. And then…

MALE VOICE: They actually still measure that Richard. They actually still do that.

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay. Very good. So they still have that and they weren’t swept away by the engagement. Which is interesting because you could take a long trending on attentiveness scores and see how that might have changed over time.

But somewhere around 2000, it sure became common in the online world and in 2005 the [inaudible – 4:04], the AMA and the 4A’s and, I think the IAB and the [inaudible – 04:09] got together to define engagement. Anyone want to take a stab at what the formal definition of engagement is? I looked it up, so I cheated.

CERIL SHAGRIN: Only because the word engagement is used in many different ways. I would think committed.

RICHARD ZACKON: You would what? Sorry, Ceril.

CERIL SHAGRIN: I think engagement relates to being committed.

RICHARD ZACKON: Committed. Even beyond caring?

CERIL SHAGRIN: Mm hmm.

MALE VOICE: I’ve seen some people talk about it in terms of duration. How much duration, because that’s something you can measure digitally and on television.

RICHARD ZACKON: Joe Plummer, who is a researcher who was commissioned to come up with a definition, not to be confused with Joe the Plumber, who is a political figure for a short time in 2008. But Joe Plummer and the committee defined engagement as “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.” “Turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.”


Now, you can turn on a TV set. I can observe someone turning on the TV set. Nielsen can measure someone turning on a TV set. I found that as somewhat surprising standard definition. And I’m of a certain age when I hear turning on I think the name Timothy Leary, who some people on the call can remember, who encouraged a generation of young Americans to turn on, to tune in and to drop out. Does that definition fit for people?

CERIL SHAGRIN: I have a problem with it. It doesn’t sit right with me and maybe it’s because it talks; it takes engagement and applies it to advertising, whereas a program could be generating engagement as well.

RICHARD ZACKON: I think it’s what happens when you put the ARF and the ANA and the 4As in the lead. Add the IAB and the DMA, you’re a marketer. It didn’t seem to have strong media ties. It seemed to have stronger advertising ties and it seems largely to have been in a brand’s concept.

I could have well missed some things over the years with media definitions of engagement. And I asked this esteem group does anyone know? Have there been other media, more media related definitions?

Nielsen has a term “residence.” Robin, does Nielsen still use the 3Rs?

ROBIN: Yeah.

RICHARD ZACKON: Good. So I won’t quiz you, Robin, but the Nielsen “residence” is influencing attitudes, affecting propensity to buy, and provoking desired action.

Similar to the 4As, and the ARF, and the ANA, why does it matter? Why do we care about it?

MALE VOICE: Well, I think there are a couple of reasons. One, in terms of measurement, Nielsen predominantly, for television, uses audio to figure out which device or what source you’re watching. And I think with the multiple devices it’s important to get a handle on where the messages are being received.

CERIL SHAGRIN: I think “engagement” or “residence” has become more important as people use multiple devices at the same time. They can’t be engaged with all of them.

RICHARD ZACKON: Billy, when we use audio to capture that, it kind of leaves out the individual. No?

MALE VOICE: It does. Because people do, and it’s shown a lot of social media now. People are watching videos without the audio and so you wonder where the attention is.

RICHARD ZACKON: Is it a hot term still compared to, say, three years ago, five years ago? Ceril, you indicated it’s getting hotter; that it’s more of an object, a phenomenon of interest. No?

CERIL SHAGRIN: I think it’s of greater interest because people watch television differently or consume media differently. So when there were fewer choices and it was all on a television set, the engagement sort of came without thinking about it. But today, when you’ve got, on one hand you’ve got your smart phone and you’ve got your tablet, and then there’s the big screen, which one are you really engaged in?


MALE VOICE: What’s really interesting about that is that prior to these other digital devices, people were reading books or talking to other people in the room. There was also a division of attention, but we just never thought about it until the digital devices came.

RICHARD ZACKON: Who was it who mentioned that Simmons still measures attention?

DARIA: I did.

RICHARD ZACKON: You did, Zaria.

DARIA: Oh, I’m sorry. It was Zaria that mentioned it. NRI also has an [inaudible – 10:57] question for each TV show as well as Simmons.

As a matter of fact, we had, I had invented a metric with NRI’s approval that I call them the involvement factor, which is basically a combination of how often you watch a show along with how much attention to cater it.

In fact, back when I started using it, it favored shows like Lost and Grey’s Anatomy. So it was a good metric for us. So I consider that involvement. And, to me, involvement was probably more important to words than engagement because it implies an interactivity with the content.

RICHARD ZACKON: The question I had, and that’s a good answer to the question I had and you had asked it, Zaria, which is who can share some kind of mini case studies or quick and dirty case studies regarding engagement or involvement, or like that, that have proven successful either on the planning side or the sales side.

RICK PICK: I was just going to say, oh, this is Rick Pike. We do a certain amount of direct response advertising here and we will find that certain types of programs will more likely generate a response. For example a cable news channel, people are paying, perhaps, more attention to what is going on as opposed to a comedy or a drama. And whether that is getting towards engagement or greater involvement, it’s hard to say, but definitely different types of television programming, I think, are being viewed differently.

RICHARD ZACKON: Who else has experience with successful business use of engagement or involvement or something of that order?

MALE VOICE: We’re doing studies, currently, with digital and how television influences digital traffic both on an advertising perspective and our own websites, you know, when we run a story, how does that cause the viewers to spike the digital traffic.

RICHARD ZACKON: Naomi, I think it’s time to ask you. Naomi Nuta is with Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience. I think I got that right.

NAOMI NUTA: Yep.

RICHARD ZACKON: Doing some work with CRE applying neurometric research to TV viewing. Actually even cross platform viewing. And they, in their proposal, use the term “engagement,” which is a term which they use from their perspective, which not everyone on the CRE was


pleased with the term or at peace with the term or were eager to use the term, but I was wanting to know if you could share with us your definition from a…and by the way, we’re going to invite, it’s a little unfair today to put Naomi on the spot…we will be inviting you to future conversation, and Carl Marcy, Dr. Carl Marcy, to discuss it with us. But Naomi will play the part of Carl Marcy today and define for us how Nielsen Neuro sees engagement.

NAOMI NUTA: Sure. Thanks Richard. So I think a lot of the terms that were used when we first started talking actually are included in our definition of engagement. And we think about it in terms of engagement is paying attention to something that emotionally impacts you and activates memory.

So, from the consumer neuroscience perspective, we can measure engagement via a combination of different tools, but the idea is is the audience paying attention. Is it activating an emotional response and then we speak about emotion, we’re speaking about either physiological response activated by a limbic system, or an EEG response activated by the surface area of the brain, and does that activate memory. It doesn’t, necessarily, indicate that you are creating memory or you’re recalling memory, but memory, in some way, shape, or form is being activated as well.

RICHARD ZACKON: Before you go all science on us, Naomi, so it is emotional impact, attention? Emotional impact and the third one was some form of recall or learning or…?

NAOMI NUTA: It’s actually form of memory that science typically is captured in the moment. So it doesn’t mean an outcome measure, like recall, although that can play a role. But it literally means that the memory area of the brain has been activated in some way, shape, or form.

RICHARD ZACKON: And you guys can measure that?

NAOMI NUTA: Exactly. So, usually it’s best applied when looking at linear content from an audience perspective, so taking a sampled-size or a group and seeing how they respond to one advertisement or an entire program. You can measure engagement that way.

When you’re looking at individuals and how they’re paying attention to television or changing the channel, then you might actually bring in some behavioral elements to look at attention and emotional response as well. Just literally see is their head up at the screen or are they changing the channel or something like that.

RICHARD ZACKON: So one thing that I’ve learned already from this study, and we’re still in the middle of it; haven’t really put anything out. But from the neuroscience perspective, engagement is a micro phenomenon in time. It happens in very short bursts. We’re talking, I think, among like you say, milliseconds?

NAOMI NUTA: Yep. You can measure it in half second or less increments, but someone mentioned earlier that context plays a role. So when you think about engagement, you are thinking about the context in which you’re watching. If you’re watching television, which is more of a passive experience, you can capture different levels of engagement for a piece of content. If you’re using interactive platforms, like mobile devices or you’re searching on the internet, then engagement will come in slightly different forms. But it can be measured in very small increments. Yep.


RICHARD ZACKON: So, to the credit of the ARF for the definition which came out 10 years ago, context was a part of that definition, whatever turning on is. I think it was Beth Rockwood who’s working with Howard leading that effort, talk about how the disconnect with our Nielsen data; we measure in terms of average minute. And my understanding or recollection of the Simmons data and our standard way of looking at engagement is not in terms of micro time periods and maybe not the whole evening, but certainly in a minute or in a program average over a half an hour. So I’m wondering how that fits for people. Is there something we can d o for that?

CERIL SHAGRIN: I’m not sure how Simmons measures engagement or attentiveness, but that’s…they’re asking a question and people are saying, yeah, I’m engaged or I’m attentive, but are they really?

RICHARD ZACKON: Well, they say they are. Most attentiveness research is a self report, whereas what Nielsen Neuro was doing was have little things in your…picking up electrodes and things are in your skin response and not self report.

CERIL SHAGRIN: Which is why we need to be able to take the findings from the neuroscience work that’s being done and say how do you transmit; how do you take that finding and apply it to how people are watching TV when they aren’t being measured with their brain?

NAOMI NUTA: Well, in a digital world, Billy mentioned this, that there are some [inaudible – 20:30] thinking how attention is measured digitally. So, for instance, not only is the video in view, for example, on social media, but how much time is spent on that video before scrolling away, even if it’s on mute. How much attention, visually, is captured on that individual video before consumers kind of scroll beyond it? That’s a behavioral.

MALE VOICE: And the problem with the time in trying to get to the sub minute level, and that’s that there are delays when it gets down to an individual, it really depends on its cable system and the devices that he has. He’s watching that video and how much delay there is, so trying to isolate a sub minute is going to be problematic unless everybody’s watching it at the exact same time. There could be several minutes, actually delay.

RICHARD ZACKON: CRE has a separate study, not a neuroscientific study, but a more standard survey, online study, looking at the impact of four different platforms – TV, a laptop, tablet and Smartphone. We’re going to be recording the results out of the first wave later this month with the Nielsen Client Meeting. We’ll have an event in October. And there, we speak about engagement. It’s a part of the title of the work. And what we actually measure are not much different from what Naomi was saying; we’re measuring attention as reported – do I have this down? No, I don’t. I know what it is. We’re measuring attention, recall, and enjoyment. All of them self reports. Although the recall, we’re actually testing people on.

So we don’t use the term “engagement.” We don’t ask the respondents were they engaged with this program. It’s the same program across four screens. But our dependent measure is their self reported attention; their self reported enjoyments, and their scored recall.

So, I guess my problem is I don’t know what the heck it is, “engagement.” Including the words “involvement” and “connection” and “turning on” and all these other metaphors that we’re 6 What is it to Watch – Dialogue Series June 8,

2016

working with and how helpful they are. And I’m not saying they’re not helpful. I would ask this group what have we gotten out of 10 years worth of discussion about the topic other than 10 years older.

CERIL SHAGRIN: In the work that, the neuroscience work that Nielsen has done, have they had an opportunity to measure engagement when there is breaking news or very important weather information? I would guess at those times you would have the highest engagement.

NAOMI NUTA: That’s a great question. We have done that kind of work and that’s a great guess because, but one thing to remember is what we’re literally measuring is the ability of the sympathetic nervous system to be aroused, to literally…

RICHARD ZACKON: Remind us what the sympathetic nervous system…

NAOMI NUTA: Oh, good point. So, literally, the limbic system is deep inside the brain and it’s responsible for the emotional response. So…

RICHARD ZACKON: Is that our lizard brain?

NAOMI NUTA: It’s our lizard brain. It’s our rotillion brain. And it has evolved to communicate with the surface area of the brain, the cognitive function. So you can literally have a reaction and then talk about that reaction.

Now, one way that academics have measured that over time is via skin [inaudible – 24:32] or skin conductants in your fingers. And that measures arousal. So when you’re watching breaking news or we did this during a recent terror event, for example, accidentally, not on purpose; participants were in the lab for…

RICHARD ZACKON: You didn’t know about it in advance, is that right?

NAOMI NUTA: Exactly. Participants were in the lab, completely different reason and they happened to be watching live breaking news when an event was occurring and immediately we captured a spike in their sympathetic nervous system, their arousal levels completely jumped and remained quite high. And when ads appeared following the news, the breaking news headlines, those levels remained consistently high into the ad pod. Usually what happens in normal content, not just recorded content, your levels will decrease during an ad pod. Maybe not the first position, maybe not the second position, but by the 5th ad, you’re kind of back to where you started. But when you have a breaking news experience where there’s a sense of urgency, particularly in events like a terror event, that will increase the levels to such a point that it’ll extend a halo effect onto the advertising.

Now, that doesn’t imply that…one of the questions that’s been posed is, well, does that mean that there’s a favorable opinion of the advertising during one of those sessions? It doesn’t imply that at all. It just implies that the levels that are as high as they are during news extend to the advertising, which indicates relevancy. But it doesn’t indicate favorable on the brand or next day recall, or any of those measures.

CERIL SHAGRIN: It all makes sense. 7 What is it to Watch – Dialogue Series June 8,

2016

MALE VOICE: You know, I’d like to ask Naomi a question. If Richard said that we studied the recall of someone and turned that as engagement, and you mention about the memory part of the brain has to be activated, is recall a good indicator of engagement? I mean you have to activate that part of the brain, correct?

NAOMI NUTA: Sure. So there used to be a theory…I don’t remember the name of the company, but there used to be a company that did next day recall, and that was their proxy for measuring engagement because they assume, well, if participants are fielded the day after, even two days after, and the ad does leave an unaided impact via recall, then it must be a highly engaging ad.

When I was speaking about memory, it could be thought of in two ways; you can either be recalling something as you’re indicating, or you can be building memory. So when you’re introducing a brand for the first time, you want to create associations. You want the brand to have meaning, so you tell a story with a compelling ad and suddenly you’re telling a story about this brand. And I may never have heard of Pepsi, but via the ad, I now have created memories associated with Pepsi.

Currently, with the technology that we use, we can’t tell the difference between creating and recalling memory. There is FMRI, which obviously, is not very conducive to consumer research. But that’s where you can find that they’re creating or recalling memory.

RICHARD ZACKON: Has there been studies, FMRI studies that you know of, Naomi?

NAOMI NUTA: For creating new memories? I mean there…Temple University is one of the universities that do a lot of FMRI research for branding and businesses, so they’d be the one to know.

We’ve done research looking at which areas of the brain are activated with engaging advertising and that’s how we know that memory area of the brain is activated. But we don’t know specifically whether it’s recall or creating. It kind of depends on that.

RICHARD ZACKON: Billy, you were about to say something.

BILLY MCDOWELL: Yeah, I was just thinking that if we’re testing recall, that would be at least a subset of activating that portion of the brain. So, that would be, to me, engagement. It may not encompass everybody, because you can be engaged without recalling, but everybody who recalls would be engaged. Does that make sense?

NAOMI NUTA: That’s a good point. The one area where I would hesitate to agree is where you have an engaging ad, but you don’t know the brand, so there are stories from Superbowl ads where it was the funniest ad ever, but no one remembered what brand it was associated with or it was really sad. The Budweiser puppy ad. But did they remember it was Budweiser or did they remember it was the puppy? So that’s where you’re putting recall as a very…if you use recall as a proxy for engagement, you’re…there are probably a lot of brands that will suffer as a result because they don’t use their advertising that’s heavily branded, for example.


BILLY MCDOWELL: But the ones that did recall would be engaged for sure. There’s the section that people that they may have been engaged but not being able to recall.

NAOMI NUTA: Mm hmm. Definitely.

RICHARD ZACKON: In 2005 when the topic was hot, the CRE was launched at the same time independent of the, it was a hot topic. And I mention it because in that year, the CRE initially formed two committees. One was recalled at the time, the non response, and Ceril was chairing that committee. I think it’s gone on to become the Data Quality Committee.

But we created another committee which was called Media Consumption and Engagement, and it was called both names, I remember the discussion, but some people wanted to call it Media Consumption, and some people wanted to call it Media Engagement because it was a hot topic. Am I heard okay? Billy, could you wave if you can hear me.

BILLY MCDOWELL: You froze there for a second, but you’re fine now. Yep, good.

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay, because it says it was unstable. And so the committee, like any good bureaucracy wanted to seize as much as it could and decided to call it Media Consumption and Engagement. And that was 10 years ago and it may have made sense at that time. My question to you guys is should we still have a committee with that name? Has engagement passed its prime as a key term? And I know, Ceril, you said maybe someone else agree that it is more important than ever, but is that the term we want to continue using?

CERIL SHAGRIN: I agree it’s more important. I’m not sure what the term should be. My concern with the term of “engagement” is we can do the kind of research we’re doing now in terms of neuro focus, but how do you measure it without that?

RICHARD ZACKON: Well, if I can address an answer to that, not a specific answer, but you look for other measures which correlate with that. Are there behavioral measures that correlate with that? Because looking back at my CRE files and I came upon a proposal from Jim Webster from Northwestern in 2005 – speaking about that, Jim’s actually going to be at our July event. I don’t know if he remembers submitting that or not. But maybe there are some things that are more conveniently measured that don’t require galvanic skin response, or how many minutes someone stays tuned, or whatever other less obtrusive measures there are.

CERIL SHAGRIN: I think it’s something that we need to try and figure out how would you measure it. I think it is important, but I’m just…we just have to have a good measure.

RICHARD ZACKON: Well, at least we seem to be able to measure, Naomi assures us, galvanic skin response and other physiological and neurological metrics, but they are, I think this points to awkward the capture.

CERIL SHAGRIN: We can capture that in a lab and we can capture that within research. I don’t know how you take that translated to look at the mass audience and figure out were they engaged.

NAOMI NUTA: I mean there is outcome data via sales tracking, for example, so the Nielsen Catalina relationship, single source data. There’s a study coming out at the ARI, actually, that looks at the 9 What is it to Watch – Dialogue Series June 8,

2016

correlation between the consumer neuroscience measures and the ability to predict outcome data. And so they found a lot of high correlations. So it shows that within the Catalina single source data, if you’re willing to wait for that sales effect data, I think it’s like three months out. You can actually identify certain things as a result of that outcome data, which is also kind of [inaudible – 34:22].

RICHARD ZACKON: I’m going to repeat a question I asked earlier, after 10 years, what grounds have we taken in the discussion?

CERIL SHAGRIN: We learned a lot about consumption, but I don’t think we’ve learned a lot about engagement.

NAOMI NUTA: Well, there is, you know, I can’t speak to the past 10 years, but social media has become one of those proxies as well. Twitter feeds, Facebook activity, buzz on YouTube, likes, all of that. Anything that literally causes a consumer to activate behavior to talk about something via Tweets are to press a “like” button or to “share” those are kind of highly active forms of engagement because you’re literally taking action as a result of something.

BILLY MCDOWELL: You’re right. And that’s what we look at a lot based on news stories or features or things that we do investigative reports to see how well it attracted the audience is how engaged they were digitally.

RICHARD ZACKON: Let me ask you…that was Zaria?

DARIA: I was just going to say, yeah, we do that too, and we also offer advertisers a chance, especially, to amplify their message. So that’s very much something that keeps you, the people involvement with the content. The media brands are those things and at the end of the day they’ve seen that impact, so I would say so we don’t have an agreement on what “engagement” is. You kind of know when something has made an impact [inaudible – 36:12].

RICHARD ZACKON: When we talk about “engagement” it occurs to me that we’re not talking about a single dimension; we’re talking about several dimensions, one of which seems to be cognitive, attention, recall, memory. One which is emotional, affective feeling. So I’m wondering how helpful the term is. And also whether it is a continuous or a categorical variable, by which, I mean, is there a 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 vs. some full no engagement. Any thoughts? Naomi, you’re the resident scientist here.

NAOMI NUTA: So, I do have some thoughts, actually. So one way to think about is the conscious vs. non-conscious engagement. So for what’s sometimes referred to as explicit vs. implicit engagement. Implicit is all of that non-conscious, all the consumer neuroscience tools measuring engagement in the moment, in that difficult kind of lab environment.

Explicit or conscious is all of the outcome and behavioral that we’ve been talking about --- recall, the actual clicking on ads, the actual sharing of ads, and you do think of those rather differently because you can measure all of those after the fact whereas implicit is measured in the moment.


In terms of merging the two, at least in our business, what we try to do is look at both sides of the fence because sometimes there are differences. You may be engaged at the non-conscious level, but you will not have a conscious version of the engagement. You might not like what you saw; you might not recall what you saw, so it’s relative to the other experiences and the context in which you are watching. So there is kind of that spectrum that there is engagement measured in these different ways and it’s all engagement, but it kind of manifests a different point depending on the context that you’re in.

I don’t think, to the question about is there one version of engagement. I don’t think there is because you can measure it in so many different ways and different time points. But it’s important to look at all of the approaches.

RICHARD ZACKON: Robin Gentry, are you still on the call?

ROBIN GENTRY: I am.

RICHARD ZACKON: Delighted. So I apologize if this puts you on the spot, but Naomi is Nielsen Neuro. Not really Nielsen. You’re really Nielsen/Nielsen. What is Nielsen/Nielsen have to say about this and maybe with the context of residents but what’s Nielsen/Nielsen have to say?

ROBIN GENTRY: I’m not sure I’m the best person to speak to that.

RICHARD ZACKON: But you’re the person here.

ROBIN GENTRY: Unfortunately. I know, unfortunately.

RICHARD ZACKON: Who might we bring in from Nielsen/Nielsen into the conversation? We’ll hear what you have to say just based upon your own experience.

ROBIN GENTRY: Yeah, I do know that there were some people that, in the area of radio, at least, we have been doing work on engagement metrics which were important to clients. We did some work years back and I don’t think we made a ton of progress. But I think Beth Webb was involved with that and I can get her engaged in this.

RICHARD ZACKON: So to speak. Beth Webb? I don’t know if I know, but I know…

ROBIN GENTRY: Yeah. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as involved in that particular piece of it. I do know that we’ve also looked at the social media aspects of trying not to media consumption, which is an interesting, to me, I think, is a very interesting manifestation of whether or not people are engaged. I’m sorry not to be able to give you more.

RICHARD ZACKON: That’s okay. But it suggests to me that it’s not a high visible, highly active area of effort by Nielsen, except perhaps…

ROBIN GENTRY: I would say it’s not necessarily for my particular group.

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay. And Elizabeth…would Beth Webb be the person? Is there someone in Measurement Science area?


ROBIN GENTRY: Well, I can speak with her, but I think that there are others in this area that are much more engaged than this particular topic. So I can search that out for you.

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay. In general, is it more on the product side, do you think?

ROBIN GENTRY: I do think it’s more on the buy side of the business where we’re asking for [inaudible – 41:35].

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay. That would make good sense.

ROBIN GENTRY: Rather than the watch side of the business, where we’re looking,” what are people consuming? And measuring the consumption. So the reach in residence part of the business is much more on the buy-side. I can help you get those people engaged.

RICHARD ZACKON: Okay. We should have a conversation about it.

ROBIN GENTRY: Okay.

RICHARD ZACKON: I’d like to go around. It’s a little over 45 minutes in. Any additional comments, additional thoughts about this?

DARIA: Can I say something?

RICHARD ZACKON: You sure can. The answer is yes.

DARIA: Okay, good. I think the word “engagement” has many different aspects and I think we can learn something from baseball [inaudible – 42:25] who has many metrics for success; each one important to different constituencies. So, perhaps, it’s a good idea to look at consumption, to look at consistency, to look at involvement, but maybe not, necessarily, have to mix them all because some of those things are more important to some than others. Just like in advanced baseball stats there’s on base percentage plus slugging percentage. There’s a range for in-fielders. There’s [inaudible – 43:08]. They’re all different things. They’re all measures of success and stuff. So maybe in “engagement” you should be open to looking at all the different aspects and then after we have all of that in front of us, the new decide what to do with it.

RICHARD ZACKON: Thank you. Joey, something you might want to add?

JOEY: I think it’s…I agree totally with Ceril that it’s a more important topic than ever. And Daria’s right, that there are so many aspects to it that we can draw from here that I think the work that the CRE is doing with neuroscience looking at local people meters is so important. Are people really engaged enough to cooperate with the measurement?

I think there is an aspect of the different devices and the cross platform uses and how engaged people are and where they’re getting their messages, their advertising and their content from. So I think it’s a great topic to be talking about to be…and I think it’s more important than ever.

RICHARD ZACKON: So I’m going to do something unfair and unreasonable, it doesn’t bother me, and invite Eleanor who is new to this community; Eleanor is doing some work for CRE getting out a


comparative, we call it our metrics matrix, looking at different providers. What do you see in this conversation, Eleanor, as someone just entering into the conversation? [No response.] If Eleanor is still there.

BILLY MCDOWELL: Maybe on mute.

DARIA: Richard, I think she dropped off and never came back.

RICHARD ZACKON: Could be. That happens a lot to me. Rick, something you might want to add?

RICK PIKE: It’s a little bit off topic, but it ties into an earlier remark that I think Ceril made, and that is the distraction that people are having, but I’m frustrated the way it typically gets reported. Eve Marker and other people will put out a study that says 60% of the time somebody’s using their phone to surf the internet while they’re watching TV, but then when you read the boiler plate, it’s with a frequency of at least once a month.

To me, it would be helpful to know how frequently people are using multiple devices and how that does get into, I think, the whole concept of “engagement,” “attentiveness,” and “involvement.”

RICHARD ZACKON: There are a lot of salty statistics, so I threw that out there. Ceril. Last comment.

CERIL SHAGRIN: Yeah, 15 years ago I could do a phone survey and measure engagement as we knew it then. Today, it’s not possible t do. It’s more valuable for us to find out, but we still haven’t broken a code as to how we measure it and how we report it.

RICHARD ZACKON: Last word for anyone else? So let me ask Naomi, and I’m going to give you the last word, although I shouldn’t, but I will. Do you see something different now that has you better appreciate why this was an issue that came up with the CRE with your proposal?

NAOMI NUTA: Let’s look at the question. I think Ceril kind of mentioned surveys. A few years ago, that was the only measurement tool. So consumer neuroscience now at Nielsen encompasses Nielsen Neuro focus and Interscope. And when Interscope was first starting out, their measure of engagement was based solely on biometrics. So your arousal.

Since Interscope was founded, they added on eye tracking, facial coding, they kept self report, they added on implicit testing, which is an online quantitative non-conscious measurement tool and now we have the EEG tools which each have their own three metrics.

So if you think about it, within just the consumer neuroscience world, measuring engagement has evolved to include six or seven different technologies that you can apply. So even within our own little world, we use different engagement tools; I guess you could say, depending on my client’s question.

So, as a kind of lens into it, I think that when we think about “engagement,” we think about engagement relative to what’s the question that they’re trying to ask? Is it the “engagement” with the campaign overall an ad campaign. Is that an effectiveness measure that you need to look at


long term, or is it engagement with one piece of creative that you need to make better or risk assess whether it should move forward into the market, something like that.

So depending on the question, then we apply a different lens of engagement to answer it.

RICHARD ZACKON: I think for me, and I’m going to the privilege to close, is it’s tough to measure something you can’t directly observe. All this conversation is a step away from whatever that phenomenon is we’re using surrogate phenomena to capture it and we can measure those surrogate phenomena, but they’re not necessarily whatever we think engagement is.

But I thank this group. This has been an engaged conversation and is achieving my purpose in doing this. There are a couple of topics we’re looking at for what’s next and I think…oh, one last thing. Maybe it’s a good place to start for next time, is there’s a new distinction that I hear a lot more of now. It’s kind of the opposite of “engagement” called “distraction.” And people are talking about “distraction,” maybe because we can imagine what that is, or maybe simply to distract ourselves from conversations about [inaudible – 49:33], I don’t know. But we’ll bring that up along with different viewing conditions next time.

So thanks everyone. My sign says my internet is unstable, but I’m here and I’m going to say so long and we’ll invite you to the next dialogue.

GROUP: Thank you.


Documents

Web viewBecause looking back at my CRE files and I came upon a proposal from Jim Webster from Northwestern in 2005 ... RICHARD ZACKON: Last word for anyone else?