Helping FMCG Advertisers Find Out What Engagement Really Means

IAB marketing manager, Amy Kean, examines the company’s latest engagement study, and discusses whether marketers are investing enough in their online campaigns…

As the online industry grows, it’s inevitable that the way we measure campaigns should also mature. The age-old tried and tested methods may no longer apply, and at the IAB every day we’re further enlightened to the changing media habits, wants and needs of today’s consumer. In order to grow with your audiences, it is essential to really push the boundaries in terms of how you measure the effectiveness of cross-media campaigns. This is where the IAB brand engagement studies come in.

People have been talking about ‘engagement’ for a while. Why? Because it’s widely acknowledged now that brands need to establish relationships with consumers (however fickle!) rather than swamp them with irrelevant and interruptive messages that fail to activate their interest or any kind of emotive response. With online in particular, creative agencies are raising the bar higher and higher, and increasingly we’re seeing some truly inspirational integrated campaigns. Furthermore, whilst click-throughs and interactivity are easy to measure, more and more of those brand-building briefs are emerging, even in the more traditional DR sectors such as finance and travel. But advertisers need proof that online works, beyond clicking.

Engagement can mean different things to different people. Furthermore it can mean different things within different product sectors and can even vary between demographic groups. With such a subjective concept, it’s incredibly hard to pin down what it is about your brand, and your brand’s marketing communications that can really engage consumers. Finding it out, however, is definitely worth investing in.

Last year at the IAB, we released our first brand engagement study in association with Carat Insight, aimed at the automotive sector. To be honest it was greeted with a mixed reception, mainly because online was shown to be the most effective medium, for this sector, in driving brand engagement. Well the IAB would say that, wouldn’t they? Well actually we wouldn’t. It is important to remember that this study represents just one industry category, and just one particular demographic – that being mothers in the UK with young children. And indeed, whilst according to the research the internet was found to drive brand engagement with consumers to a greater extent that any other medium, press and TV weren’t far behind. Of course, the automotive sector has fully embraced online and remains one of the highest-ranking categories in terms of internet advertising expenditure. Therefore for the next study, we decided to examine the effectiveness of different media in promoting brand engagement within what is often considered the ‘holy grail’ of advertising spend for the internet… the FMCG category.

The cross-media study focused on five haircare brands and singled out TV and online as the key media for promoting brand engagement among consumers. As discussed earlier, definitions of brand engagement rely entirely on the sector, product and audience, and in this case it referred to consumers’ “willingness to recommend”, “brand preference” and “intention to use in future”. The benefit of this metric is therefore the ability to identify the strengths of a particular medium and tailor messages accordingly.

We used focus groups, quantitative research and in-depth analysis, to examine the cross-media activity of five major haircare brands: Elvive, Fructis , Pantene, Aussie and Herbal Essences with female respondents aged 20 to 60 who are interested in beauty and fashion.

We found that typically, brand engagement in the haircare sector measures consumers’ trust in a brand, as well as their perceptions of a brand’s product range, value for money and quality. The most unsurprising finding from the study was that the greatest impact on brand engagement came from TV ads, driving 62.2% of the overall ‘effect’. TV is an incredibly effective, trusted and powerful medium that remains high on the marketer’s agenda, with good reason (and the IAB is happy to say that!) Online ads and associated websites combined had the second biggest influence, representing 35.1% of total consumer engagement and press ads were somewhat less effective contributing around 3.3%.

The study also identified the relative strengths of different media in relation to their brand engagement effectiveness. For example, TV helps promote a product’s image as a good quality brand, while online is better at building trust and highlighting an entire product range.

The most interesting aspect of the results, in this instance, was that internet marketing is actually 2.4 times more effective than its share of spend suggests. The average online spend of the brands was 4.8% of total spend – online delivered 2.4 times the return on investment – suggesting that brands should be investing nearer 12% online if they want to capitalise on a higher brand engagement index.

The study also found that women who saw a brand’s online advertising were 3.5 times more likely to view its associated webpage. This proves that the internet is unique in its ability to combine brand advertising messages that lead women to seek out and engage with relevant content that helps them make informed choices for their hair.

So to talk about engagement in broad terms is extremely problematic, and if it is to be recognised as a key mode of measurement in future marketing campaigns, the concept requires even further analysis. Each brand engagement study is very precise, based on a particular sector, product type and demographic, as it has to be in order to gauge the true extent of your campaign’s effectiveness.

But at least we’re taking important steps in the right direction. For the FMCG sector, marketers know their audiences are spending more time online, but unlike finance, automotive and travel, it’s harder for them to quantify the brand contribution online can make to the media mix. This study has found that predictably, TV is still king, but online clearly performs well – especially on the key ‘trust’ metric. So, it’s important that that FMCG advertisers allocate greater proportions of their media budgets online in order to fully achieve brand engagement with their increasingly digital audiences.