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While the research showed that the most effective channels for brand engagement in this category were TV and press, online adspend was shown to be three times more effective than the investment in this area suggested.

The study looked at consumer response to the advertising campaigns of four brands: Coca-Cola Zero, original Coca-Cola, Pepsi Max and Powerade, and discovered that, on average, internet advertising contributed a quarter (24 per cent) of total brand engagement, while TV contributed 43 per cent and press 32 per cent. However, the average online adspend for these brands was a mere 8.5 per cent of total media budget.

This is not the first time online channels have been found to contribute more than they receive credit for. A 2007 study into haircare products, also by the IAB, supports the more recent findings. It revealed that the average online spend of the participating haircare brands was 4.8 per cent of their total spend, yet online delivered a return on investment of 2.4 times this.

In this FMCG category, TV ads again contributed the most to brand engagement, driving 62 per cent of the overall effect. Online ads and websites however had even more impact here than in the soft-drinks sector as the second biggest influence - combined, they contributed 35.1 per cent of total consumer engagement.

It seems clear from this that brands should be putting more of their budgets behind online channels. The IAB certainly thinks so: "The likelihood is that to get swift engagement with a product, a brand will use TV, outdoor and press, but we have learned with this survey that when you hive off part of your budget for online, you get a lot more. If you ignore that channel, you could be losing marketshare to competitors," says Guy Phillipson, chief executive at the IAB.

The industry body is not alone in this belief. A report by E-consultancy supports this. Its second annual Online Customer Engagement Report 2008, produced with interactive agency cScape, reported that lack of budget and time were the biggest barriers to cultivating better online customer engagement for 60 per cent of its respondents. This was despite almost all respondents - 90 per cent - saying that customer engagement was essential or important to their companies.

"There is a recognition in the digital industry of its potential for customer engagement and in comparison with other channels; the percentage of money going in doesn't equal its qualities," says Richard Sedley, customer engagement director at cScape,

Jed Murphy, digital director at Carlson Marketing, also believes FMCG brands are not investing enough in online, partly because of a lack of understanding of its capabilities in this area, and the difficulty in measuring results. "There's still the philosophy that a lot of online activity is transactional, and also there's the apparent inability to track back to the individual sale," he says. "However, you can't always measure TV advertising either, but there are measures that make you comfortable with that spend."

The difficulty of measuring online's contribution to customer engagement is a major reason for the current imbalance. "For many brands, it has been a complete mystery how much brand engagement online rich media provides," says Phillipson. "The effect of a campaign on brand engagement has been hard to measure."

Slow burn

This is because how warm someone feels towards a brand tends to be a slow burn, and as such it can be difficult to track back to a particular activity or campaign. "Where it happens best is where it happens naturally," says Ian Bates, creative director at direct marketing agency Entire. "Anything you have to try to create is always open to having a heavyhanded commercial feel to it and, rather than the consumer engaging with the brand, it turns the other way round."

Brand warmth is of course the ultimate aim for any brand: the better a consumer feels towards a brand, the more loyal they will be, the greater their lifetime value, and the more they are likely to recommend that brand or product to others.

Brands are also using it to quell any negativity that might surround their identity. "A lot of brands are increasingly losing control of the brand message because of all the ways online you can say what you think of a brand as a consumer - such as customer reviews and blogs. Increasingly, brand engagement is designed to offset any potential negativity and create positive engagement," says Pollard.

One example of this is the Nike ID site, which allows customers to personalise their trainers within certain limits. "It gives you a stake in the brand," says Pollard. "You're effectively in control of it."

Measuring brand warmth

What makes brand warmth even trickier to measure is that it is impossible to truly control how people react to things subconsciously. A brand may launch a campaign seeking a particular result but it might achieve a slightly different outcome because people have reacted differently to what was predicted. This is what the IAB refers to as 'resonance' in its study.

The study defines resonance as how a brand's marketing resonates with a potential consumer and encourages engagement with that brand. While what a consumer directly takes away from a brand communication is important, resonance, or what they take away subconsciously, is twice as important as this. This can be manufactured to a degree - common methods are to have a tie-up with another brand, such as Coca-Cola's iTunes offer, and giveaways, such as freebies or prizes.

"Resonance is massively interesting," says Mary Jefferies, director at aevolve (formerly Carat Insight), which conducted the study with the IAB. "People don't necessarily take out the message you're telling them - ads can resonate in a much wider sense than the literal message of what the brand is saying. The subconscious effect is potentially more effective in fact because you don't edit it. "

The other side of customer engagement - how engaged consumers become with a brand during a campaign is much easier to quantify, and in fact, over time can lead to 'brand love'. FMCG brands can drive consumers to interact with them in any number of ways - website content, on-pack promotions that drive people online, and experiential marketing are all popular choices. Online channels are exceedingly measurable here - through clicks, open rates and dwell times on a web- or microsite, for example.

Gyro International ran an integrated campaign for Palm to raise its profile and launch its 750 Treo Smartphone. The campaign included outdoor posters, email, banners and even branded taxis, plus some Costa Coffee stores. Every channel was trackable and drove the consumer to one microsite.

"We did 'before' and 'after' research to find out where people were with the product, so we knew it built engagement, but overall the campaign was very clearly about getting people to buy the product," says Jon Pollard, head of operations at Mighty Mouse Digital (the new name for Gyro's digital business).

As tough as it may be to measure the brand warmth side of customer engagement, it can be done. One way to measure how consumers feel about a brand is to do pre- and post-activity testing as Palm did, and to use a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research. With the IAB soft-drinks study, qualitative focus groups were used, with participants asked what made them buy soft drinks, what they were looking for and what they felt a particular drink stood for.

Through this, the IAB was able to discover the most important brand engagement drivers. Finally, the panel was shown the participating brands' ads across all the on- and offline channels used, and asked whether they had seen the ads and how many times, to enable the IAB to find out which medium is driving brand engagement.

It is a methodology that takes a fair amount of time - around four months in this case, but, says Phillipson: "This is the most effective and economical way for a brand to measure brand engagement."

Mixed approach

Coffee brand Lavazza also uses this mixture of qualitative and quantitative research to measure its brand engagement, as well as other methods including coupons. It conducts a regional programme of events that it drives consumers to attend through electronic communications. For the Edinburgh Festival, for example, Lavazza took over a big area in Festival Square and used email to drive consumers to visit it there, conducting pre- and post-event research to test brand engagement.

"Electronic communications are an easy way of advising consumers of what you're doing as a brand," says David Rogers, sales and marketing director at Lavazza. "We do qualitative market research pre- and post event but also often use coupons - measuring effectiveness in terms of coupon redemption from that event."

Another challenge comes in deciding what mix of channels to use for optimum results. While the IAB studies show TV, press and online to have the greatest influence in these two cases, with FMCG categories, there are no general rules as to which channels work best for brand engagement.

Experiential

While TV, press and online may be the main drivers for brand engagement for some categories, experiential and online also work well together. "They offer the opportunity for a brand to be savoured face to face and online for long-term engagement," says Atkinson.

Lavazza is not alone in reaping good results from combining these two channels. Geronimo has seen similar success in its work for air-freshener brand Ambi Pur. Geronimo has run its experiential roadshow for the past three years, using digital to support it. It also conducts pre- and post-show research, and uses online channels to do questionnaire follow-ups.

Marketers need to ask themselves a couple of important questions to help them make the right choice, says Murphy: "First, it's about what you are trying to achieve. Second, whom are you targeting? Different audiences lend themselves to different channels."

Something else brands have to consider is what a consumer would do naturally when they come into contact with the brand's activity. "If they pick up a pack in-store, what would they do next, which channel would they go to - how does the hierarchy of messages integrate?" says Andy Snuggs, managing director of integrated agency Geronimo. "Success will come from having creative ideas that can go anywhere."

It can help therefore, when running activity across a number of channels, to get everyone across all the different disciplines working together. "The best integrated campaigns are where there's a multi-agency approach to it," says David Atkinson, managing partner at integrated marketing communications agency space. "Give everyone the brief at the same time and encourage them to think beyond their realms - that's what creates the really big ideas."

Whatever the category, audience or desired outcome, an integrated approach with a mix of on- and offline channels clearly seems to be the way forward, and one that is being followed by many FMCG brands. "Offline is good for raising awareness, and online for reinforcing part of that process," explains Pollard.

Clearly online has a very important part to play in driving customer engagement as part of integrated activity, and through qualitative and quantitative research, its contribution can be measured. And with budgets slowly increasing - the Q4 2007 Bellwether Report reported a greater upwards revision here than in any other category, with internet budgets now accounting for nine per cent of total marketing spend, online's role in customer engagement will surely only grow.

RADOX ENGAGES FAMILIES WITH FAMILYTIME SITE BY GERONIMO

When Geronimo won the Radox business last year, one of its first acts was to ask how many people were engaged enough with the brand to go to its website. Not many, it found. It came up with a proposition to reinforce Radox's position as a family brand that would drive customer acquisition but also, crucially, encourage customer retention and increased purchase through brand engagement.

Geronimo developed a family community site - www.ourfamilytime.co.uk. This is a permanent site with a sophisticated search engine that allows families to search for activities in their area. It also offers tips and ideas on things to do as a family, such as making your family tree.

"We wanted it to be more of a community, and more personalised," says Andy Snuggs, managing director of Geronimo. "Brand engagement doesn't necessarily have to be overtly selling the brand."