By Giles Ivey

Online advertising needs to be more transparent, accountable, and also more engaging. Marketers who believe that engagement starts and ends with the click of a Facebook ‘like’ button are missing the point.

We need to think about how brands can move away from more traditional ‘look-click’ ads, and instead work towards building stunning creative that drives deeper audience engagement and participation. This type of creative can deliver measurable results with the metrics that marketers need to demonstrate ROI.

The term ‘engagement’ has come under fire lately. The great marketing buzzword is now seen as little more than smoke and mirrors term designed to get brands to part with their cash. Perhaps that’s a little melodramatic, but we are seeing a backlash from brands against some of the traditional forms of engagement marketing because much of this activity is inherently unaccountable.

Flooding Liverpool Street station with dancers at 11am is one tactic, but this type of stunt engagement is at best difficult quantify. It’s also somewhat haphazard in that it is almost impossible to know exactly who will be passing through the station at that time. That’s not to say it isn’t a clever marketing trick to raise awareness of a brand or product, but in these tough times brand owners need something more than ‘clever’; they need results. They need to be able to see people interacting with their brands and they need to know their campaigns are delivering. Unfortunately, much of the time, we don’t really know that this is happening. Yes we can surmise, or guess, but we don’t know for sure.

The fact is, to corrupt the famous line from Orwell’s Animal Farm, some forms of engagement are more equal than others. For one thing marketers seem obsessed with Facebook ‘likes’, but what is the real value of this if brands are driving people to Facebook but then doing little with them once they are there? It would be interesting to see exactly how many people come back to a branded Facebook page after clicking the ‘like’ button. Currently these stats are conspicuous in their absence.

Like for like's sake: The rush for empty engagement

For engagement to work, it needs to lead to a consumer action rather than simply being engagement for engagement’s sake. Clicking the ‘like’ button is not enough…spending time with a brand online, sharing something on social networks or making an online purchase directly from an ad are actions that can be measured and quantified.

Over the past decade, we have seen an increasing migration away from traditional media towards digital. This has led to brands looking for new ways to connect with their target audiences. Times were a lot easier for marketers when all they had to worry about was which paper to run their ads in and what time slot to show their TV ad. Today they have a raft of choices, yet the reality is consumers are most likely to interact with brand advertising online or on some sort of mobile device.

However, the current structure of online advertising leaves a lot to be desired. The go-to model for online advertising is CPM (cost per thousand), with brands paying every time someone navigates to the page their ad is on. Not surprisingly CPM doesn’t deliver staggering results – an industry standard of 0.3% or 3 clicks out of every 1000 page impression, and how many of those are people clicking on them by accident?

CPE (cost per engagement) on the other hand is a model that delivers transparent and measurable results, as well as a click through rate of 1% (almost 300% more than CPM). How does it work? By putting a time delay on expanding online ad units (normally a 3-2-1 countdown), advertisers are only charged once the online ‘experience’ has fully loaded – this removes charging for any erroneous rollovers. These online experiences can include anything from video, to games, to social network interactions. And they are also measurable. We can tell exactly how long people have stayed with the brand experience, what they have done and also, where they have interacted with a social network - way beyond anything you could possibly hope for via CPM.

The fundamental basis of CPE is about creating online experiences that encourage consumers to undertake an action on behalf of the brand – sharing, posting, tweeting, starting a conversation or watching a video. Through CPE consumers spend an average of around 23 seconds with brands. This is as powerful as any other form of engagement marketing channel and can be crucial when it comes to building relationships between brands and audiences.

No media channel is 100% measurable and there are faults with every measurement. But an engagement online when you are putting a message in a certain environment, where you know your target market will be and only paying when someone actually spends time with your brand, has got to be more appealing – and indeed more transparent – than trying to capture the attention of whoever happens to be walking through Liverpool Street at 11am on a Tuesday morning.

Giles Ivey is UK Managing Director of SAY Media.