Have you ever seen an opera singer shatter a wine glass simply with their voice, the same force behind this phenomenon can also make bridges wobble alarmingly — this force is called resonance and it can have a major input in ad effectiveness too. To understand the value of resonance in ad effectiveness, we have to look at the value of attention and engagement in how well an ad communicates with its consumers.

Engagement and attention are sometimes used interchangeably, but they represent two distinct concepts. What is the difference between attention and engagement? In 2002, the Advertising Research Foundation defined attention as the degree to which those exposed to advertising focus on it. Engagement expands on this by incorporating our brain’s processing and reaction to the ad, or, to put it another way, Attention x Resonance = Engagement. This definition also indicates that attention is a pre-exposure ad metric, while ad engagement is a post-exposure KPI including our sentiments and how we start to react or internalize an ad. Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Read his full piece in MediaVillage.