Nobody wants to be engaged.

Nobody has ever finished their day and said, "I engaged with a brand today." Nobody wakes up hoping a yogurt will start a conversation with them. Engagement is not a human desire. It is our word, invented to describe what we want from people, and somewhere along the way we started believing it is what they want too.

They don't. And everything we know about how people actually behave says so.

A word built for our reports, not their lives

Look at how little it takes to count someone as engaged. On Facebook, a video ad becomes a view after three seconds. In 2016, Facebook admitted it had overstated how long people watched videos on its platform for about two years, by an estimated 60 to 80 percent. Nobody in the industry noticed, because the number told us exactly what we hoped to hear.

A number everyone in the room benefits from is not a measurement. It is an agreement.

What people do when we ask for their engagement

They look away. Lumen Research tracked where around 300 people actually looked across roughly 15,000 online ads. Fewer than half of the ads were looked at at all. Only 4 percent held someone's gaze for more than two seconds.

Even the people who raised their hand do not want more. Researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute followed the top 200 brands on Facebook for six weeks. In a typical week, less than half of one percent of their own fans engaged with them. These were people who chose to follow. They still did not want the relationship we kept proposing.

That is not rejection. It is a polite, permanent no. What we report as engagement is mostly people waiting for us to finish.

We don't measure attention. We measure tolerance.

What happens when we chase it anyway

When the thing people don't want becomes the thing we are paid for, the work starts bending. Louder hooks. Cheaper provocations. Bait. Economists call this Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

In April 2017, Pepsi's protest-themed film with Kendall Jenner gathered more than a million views in two days and a flood of reactions. Pepsi pulled it with one line: "Clearly we missed the mark." On an engagement dashboard, it was a hit. Engagement cannot tell love from outrage. It only knows that people reacted, and people react most to the things they want to push away.

What people want instead

People do not want to be engaged. They want to be moved, helped, entertained or seen. The difference matters. Engagement is something done to people. Choosing is something people do.

In 2013, Dove released Real Beauty Sketches: three minutes long, slow, almost no product. Within weeks, Unilever said it had been seen more than 114 million times. Nobody was engaged into watching it. People chose it, and then chose to send it to the women they love, because it said something about them. Binet and Field's analysis of the IPA effectiveness databank points the same way at scale: emotional campaigns are roughly twice as efficient as rational ones. Feeling is not decoration on the message. It is why anyone chooses to receive it.

Ask a different question

If people don't want to be engaged, stop asking how engaged they were. Ask a harder question: if your campaign vanished tomorrow, who would go looking for it? Who would ask a friend, "did you see that one?"

Work people would go looking for does not need to be pushed. It gets shared without a budget and remembered without a reminder. Work nobody would look for has to be paid for every single time it is seen.

Engagement is what people give you when they cannot leave. Choice is what they give you when they can.

Ahmad KammounRegional Creative & Strategy Director