Ipsos Brazil project examines the level of engagement of digital magazine readers
The digital environment is causing significant changes to existing relationships between brands and audiences according to a study by Ipsos in Brazil. The Digital Magazine Metrics Project was conducted in partnership with magazine publisher Brazil and the CESAR institute (Recife Center for Advanced Studies). The growth in interactions for individuals – both online and offline – is reconfiguring the type of communications advertisers are trying to establish in order to continue impacting positively their target audiences.
In the past, brands have aimed to achieve awareness, leading to later purchase of the product or service advertised. Today, they seek to find ways to promote emotional involvement. This in turn is usually associated with content relevant to message recipients and the type of experience with the brand.
In this race to attain audience participation and involvement, a term has been much used by communication managers and academics: digital engagement. The meaning of engagement is “affiliation to an ideology, philosophy, or another idea, and to struggle for it”, but it may also be defined as “to work for an idea, a cause, something, or work for a certain activity or endeavour”. This type of effort, in the virtual environment, is mostly used for activities of social mobilisation, exchange of information and contents of all types, collective creation, or even actions about consumption.
To shed light on this setting, the Digital Magazine Metrics Project proposes grading digital engagement into six levels of involvement and consumption of magazines. The metric created, based on the model proposed by Forrester Research, with only four levels (involvement, interaction, intimacy, influence), was expanded to include questions that allow us to measure six levels of digital engagement:
1. Knowledge (recall)
2. Involvement (contact)
3. Interaction (action)
4. Intimacy (feeling)
5. Influence (recommendation)
6. Satisfaction (loyalty)
