The world of marketing has long relied on metrics like “frequency” and “impressions” to gauge the success of its projects, but that’s all changing: just announced, the new measure will be “engagement.” Intending to reflect “the complexity of today’s media choices and consumer-empowered media consumption” (in the Advertising Research Foundation’s words), the term is a bit iffily defined: it seems to have to do with how invested you are with a product or company (do you subscribe to emails or RSS’s? tell your friends? buy regularly?). “Civic engagement” has been around for awhile too, and looking at how often “consumer engagement” appears in a Google News search, perhaps the time is fast approaching when engagement–civic or otherwise–could benefit from some new terminology.
