Unfashionable confession : I don’t really get this whole Engagement versus Exposure debate that seems to be in these days. I mean , are ‘engagement’ and ‘exposure’ mutually exclusive ?
Yes. The concern over whether cheap exposures (GRPs / impressions) are being bought at the expense of more effective (read ‘engaging’) media choices is very valid. But it always has been , right ? Its not a particularly new New Age thing.
I read this piece in a regional trade mag recently where somebody said it was wrong of advertisers to expect Reach and OTS measurement from online advertising , that Reach / Frequency / GRPs are ancient concepts that need to be done away with , at least with online advertising.
Wrong ? Um , why ?
Something like GRPs have come to be identified with a particular medium , a mode of thinking , an approach , a whole other thing-in-itself that can be isolated neatly away.
When it isn’t and can’t.
GRPs are only a measure of the ‘weight’ of a piece of communication. It could range from anything over zero to anything under infinity but it applies to any piece of communication , including this post , including that award- winning , product-shifting viral campaign you came up with. Every piece of communication has a GRP.
Its a different point that the number may not be produced because the research capabilities do not exist, or that it should be ignored because better measures do exist . I totally get that . But to be so condescendingly dismissive about such calls on a misplaced point of technicality is like right answer wrong reasoning .
Or worse , no reasoning perhaps ?
Just when the Digital Superman is bringing us closest to the measurement holy grail that we’ve ever been , surely we’re not going to pull it back now ? Surely we’d expect more measurement, not less ? Surely we’d be OK if it also added ’exposure’ metrics to our ‘engagement’ ones ? Surely we’d not cry wolf if the guy footing the bill asked for both ?
You have a similar thing offline with ‘quality’ planning. Like forget the ratings , this TV program is qualitatively right and the way we are using it will engage the viewer. Which is good but how often is it thought through ? Simply put , have we judged the best we possibly can that the on-ground end results for our clients – and thats what we’re in the business for – from ‘engaging’ with fewer exposures will be better than those of a plain vanilla , higher exposures plan ? Have we given that a thought ? In my experience , we , most of us including myself , usually do not. As I once wrote on a TV planning training slide : “ 100% quality x 0% viewership = 0% quality” (yeah , i like that one too :) )
This whole debate could provide a nice shoot-from-the-hip-in-the-dark license to some people. And I guess that kind of sums up my point of this post. Sure , it’s the Black Swan zeitgeist. But its good to remember that Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s attack of the Bell Curve-based system stems from a very deep understanding of it as a hard core insider. As Bob Dylan sang ” To live outside the law you got to be honest” – and when was the man ever wrong ? 
