Madison Avenue has turned to "consumer engagement" as its new media planning metric - one that could replace "frequency" as the multiplier in most media plans, MediaPost reports(via MediaBuyerPlanner).

Meeting at the Association of National Advertisers' 2005 Marketing Accountability Forum, a committee composed of members of the Association of National Advertisers, American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Advertising Research Foundation agreed that engagement would likely complement audience reach and supplant frequency, or the number of times a consumer is exposed to an ad.

The initiative, termed MI4 (for Measurement Initiative: Advertisers, Agencies, Media and Researchers), will attempt to tackle the seemingly impossible task of figuring out new ways to quantify the marketing effect of emerging media, including web films, gaming, blogs, place-based out-of-home media and interactive TV, according to MediaWeek.

Consensus about how to define engagement as a measurement - or whether it even could be defined - was hard to find at the Forum. The question remains whether all media should be treated on the same basis in terms of engagement, because finding the right metric that works across all media is difficult.

The decision follows a survey released yesterday at the Forum, where it was reported that 61.5 percent of respondents said defining, measuring and taking concrete steps in the area of advertising accountability was important, but only 19 percent said they were satisfied with their ability to take those steps.