Tangible tips for driving active attention among consumers

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Exponential Interactive has today released a whitepaper that discusses the significance of ‘engagement’ – and why the lack of understanding around user engagement leads to misaligned incentives, dissatisfying results and wasted dollars.

Exponential is one of the largest global providers of digital advertising solutions, reaching more than 600 million users each month. The company’s APAC regional HQ is in Melbourne, and it has people on the ground in NZ (scroll down).

“We distributed our Audience Engagement Whitepaper via press release in Australia, South Africa and the US,” writes APAC marketing manager Anna Palmos to M+AD. “I would love to get it out to our NZ media audience.”

The paper titled Engagement: Not Just a Buzzword, The Art of Driving Active Attention with Your Next Consumer, discusses how prioritising engagement positively affects ad campaigns, including these five points:

  • Engagement should be discussed in terms of capturing conscious active attention – by looking at the brand as a learned behaviour and attention as the allocation of mental resources to visible or conceptual objects.
  • Big data is ultimately insufficient without effective application of engagement tactics because data by itself may be too convoluted, overvalued and intrusive.
  • Emphasising engagement is not only cost-effective, it aligns incentives for advertisers, publishers and vendors alike.
  • Opt-in user interaction is best enhanced through video advertising and rich media – particularly with optimal use of the teaser and brand consistency in interactive elements.
  • When measuring brand impact, advertisers should look at cognitive, emotional and physical engagement on a spectrum that is well-tailored to the specific campaign. This includes larger, brand awareness metrics such as purchase intent, sentiment and intent to seek more information to more physical metrics including conversion rate, dwell time and interaction rate.

“Our industry has used the term ‘engagement’ liberally for two decades, with little consensus on what it means,” says Exponential insights services vice-president Bryan Melmed. “Instead, we turn around and optimise our advertising campaigns towards simplistic metrics that reward high-volume, low-involvement content.

“This isn’t working for anyone, especially brand advertisers. We need to think critically about why engagement is important in the first place and what metrics we can use that truly capture active user attention.”

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