1. Media Engagement
and
Advertising Effectiveness
BOBBY J. CALDER and EDWARD C. MALTHOUSE
Presenter: Cher WANG

2. The quality of the Brand
The quality of the Message
Medium

3. What is Engagement?

4. Definition
The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) defines
engagement as follows: ‘‘Engagement is turning on a
prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the
surrounding media context’’ (ARF 2006).

5. What Engagement feels like?
A sense of
• involvement
• being connected with something
Comes from
• experiencing something in a certain way

6. What is an Experience?

7. Definition
• A simple answer is that an experience is something
that the consumer is conscious of happening in
his or her life.
• “. . . we have an experience when the material experienced
runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it
integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of
experience from other experiences . . . is so rounded out that its
close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an
experience is a whole and carries with it its own
individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is
an experience. ” (John Dewey)

8. Engagement and
Experiences

9. Engagement as Motivational
Experience
the sum of the
motivational
experiences
consumers have
with the media
product

10. Analysis of Engagement and
Experiences

11. Identifying Experiences

12. The Four Types of Engagement
Experiences
breadth

13. The Four Types of Engagement
Experiences
• Transportation: where the activity itself is the goal
• Promotion/Prevention: where the goal is extrinsic to
the activity
• Rejection: when the goal is extrinsic to the activity
• Irritation: when the person wants to avoid the activity
itself

14. Levels of Experience Description
depth
identify common media
experiences from
qualitative research

15. Identifying Media
Experiences

16. Method
• Qualitative research in the
form of individual in-depth
interviews with users. Each
interview focuses on a specific
media product, such as
magazines, newspapers, TV,
and online sites.
Logic
• From qualitative interviews
they induce a large number of
experience items.
• Then employ quantitative
methods to explore the
relationships among the items.
• Refer to these sets of items as
experience metrics or scales
and use them to measure
experiences.

17. Results
Transportation
experience
• Timeout Experience
• Visual Imagery
Experience
• Regular Part of My Day
Experience
Promotion/Prevention
experience
• Talking About and
Sharing Experience
• Utilitarian Experience
• Makes Me Smarter
Experience
• Credible and Safe
Experience
• Community Connection
Experience

18. Results
Irritation experience
• Ad Interference
Experience
Rejection experience
• Overload, Too Much
Experience
An experience with a media product will
ordinarily be a combination of different
constitutive experiences.

19. Metrics for Measuring
Media
Experiences and
Engagement

20. Why measure experiences and
engagement?
• Experiences with media content can affect reactions to
advertising. Marketers need to understand the experiences
offered by various media vehicles when placing ads.
• As for media organizations, they should monitor
consumer experiences as a marketing management tool.
• A media organization may wish to test new content to
determine whether certain experiences can be improved.

21. How to measure experiences and
engagement?
• Two methods:
 a` la carte (means you order one dish at a time): for
measuring just the relevant experiences.
 table d’hoˆte (the restaurant or hotel dining room menu
offers 3 or more courses for one price): for measuring a
variety of experiences

22. A sample of “table d’hoˆte ”
Online Engagement and Experiences Measurement Model Used for Testing Effects on Advertising
Application:
In the case of media
products with a wide breadth
of content and high degree
of similarity with other
competitive products across
publications.

23. Engagement and
Advertising Effectiveness

24. The effectiveness of advertising
The quality of the Brand
The quality of the Message
Medium
• Execution(passive)
• Constitutive experiences
(active)

25. How to prove constitutive experiences
impact effectiveness of advertising ?
• Summarize several studies that demonstrate the basic
effect.
• Examine how often this occurs generally and how
important such context effects are relative to other factors
such as the size and placement of the ad.
• Examine the hypothesis that advertising can be more
effective when ads are experientially congruent with the
media vehicle. (congruency hypothesis)

26. Study summary
• The extent to which readers experience the content of a
magazine as Utilitarian or as Makes Me Smarter is
related to standard copy-testing measures for a test ad.
• Web site users who are engaged with web sites are more
positive toward an online travel agency (Orbitz) ad and
are more likely to click on the ad.
Malthouse, Calder, and Tamhane (2007)

27. Examination of how important is the effect
• In another study of over 3,000 actual magazine
advertisements, they show that the effects of experiences
on ad recall and measures of the actions taken because of
seeing the ad are very general, holding across this large
sample of ads (Malthouse and Calder 2007).
• They also show that the experience effects are roughly
comparable in strength to execution factors including the
size (half-page, full page, etc.), placement (run-of-book,
back cover, inner back cover, etc.) and the number of
colors in the ad.
The research suggests that an ad appearing in the more
engaging magazine will be more effective than the same ad
appearing in the other magazine.

28. Examination of Congruence between
Advertising and the Media Vehicle
• Evidence 1：‘‘the medium and the advertised brand
converge and become more similar in consumers’ minds’’
（Dahle ́n (2005) ）
• Evidence 2：Experiential congruence is related to
advertising effectiveness. (congruency hypothesis study)

29. Congruency hypothesis study
Method
• Four magazines with four ads
are read primarily by women
• Recruited readers of each of
the magazines to come to an
online research site to view a
copy of the cover of one of the
four magazines and read
typical content from it.
• The readers were asked about
their Visual Imagery and
Timeout experiences with the
magazine and about their
reactions to the ad.
Logic
• Measuring experiences to the
experience of ads and asked
whether congruence between the
two experiences impacts
advertising effectiveness.

30. Congruency hypothesis study
Ads Used to Test the Ad Experience-Media
Experience Congruence Hypothesis Online Magazine Testing Procedure

31. Result
Experiential Similarity: Four Magazines
and Four Ads
The Relationship between Visual Imagery
Congruence and Advertising Effectiveness
The smaller the distance between the ad and
magazine, the more effective the ad.
The more the Visual Imagery congruence
between the magazine and the ad, the more
effective the ad.
Both media companies and advertisers need to give more thought to the
congruence of ads with vehicles by considering the fit of ad experiences
to media experiences.

32. Potential Negative Effects
of Engagement

33. Current studies
• TV program Sex and the City: Engagement may not
always enhance advertising. (Parker and Furnham 2007)
• Print media and ads & TV program(ER): Engagement
can result in positive effects but sometime it can cause
negative effects. (Wang and Calder 2006, 2007)

34. Future study
• How likely negative effects are and when they might
occur?
• How the experience of the media product and the
experience of the ad fit together and how intrusion can
interfere with this process?

35. Engagement with the
Brand

36. Engagement with
the advertising
medium
Engagement with
the advertised brand
itself
Media
engagement
affects
advertising and
offers a new
avenue to
making
advertising
more effective.
The brand is the
concept that
defines and
describes an
experience that
the marketer
intends the
consumer to have.

38. Integrated Marketing as the
Identification, Measurement, and
Improvement of Experiences
anything
that creates
experiences
a continuous feedback
loop with experience
identification,
measurement, and
improvement at its core

39. Future of Brands

40. • Is there really any choice but to look at the experience of
the consumer and to focus on what would make a
consumer have an experience with the product?
• Can marketing not be centered on finding and creating
experiences for consumers?
The future of brands depends on finding and creating
experiences, and not just experiences based on liking, but
experiences reflecting engagement with what consumers are
trying to make happen in their lives.