Engagement Redux

On Monday, Microsoft announced Engagement Mapping, a new approach to measuring online ad effectiveness. Purportedly, this approach will transcend the “last ad clicked” standard and take into account all the online messaging touch points—impressions across rich media, search, or display—a customer has been exposed to before completing a transaction.

Surrounding all this is the standard, messianic rhetoric about “advertising 2.0,” etc. I understand where they’re going with it and I will grant that it’s not all madness. With the overall average click fraud rate closing 2007 at around 17%, there is compelling evidence that click-base sale attribution is irreparably flawed.

But for engagement mapping to take its place, in my view, it needs to be more than another opaque and ill-defined metric that tries to jam numbers around experiences that are scarcely quantifiable. If they can credibly measure all the multifarious types and instances of brand exposure that precede a buy and then somehow weigh their collective cognitive impact on the purchasing decision, then more power to the Big M. But, given that the average guy probably doesn't even remember the ads he was exposed to in his last browsing session, is this at all realistic?

Or is it just more excuse-making? Maybe a clever way for ad distribution platforms to hedge against underperforming paid search in a climate of recession? They can convince the brands that people really do remember the ads they were exposed to four weeks ago at two in the morning., and they can couch it all in terms of engagement—a word that seems to sell well nowadays and one that really no one could be offended by.