• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 27, 2009

Bruce Goerlich, a long-time Madison Avenue media research guru who most recently was the top researcher within Publicis' ZenithOptimedia Group, has landed as Chief Research Officer at Rentrak Corp., one of a group of companies vying to develop a commercialized research marketplace from the burgeoning universe of digital set-top devices.

Rentrak also announced that Michael Vinson, former senior vice president-managing director of digital insights and analytics at Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group, has joined as vice president of statistical sciences and analytics.

The moves mark part of an ongoing exodus of top media researchers from Madison Avenue to the vendor side of the business, and come at a time when research, analytics and consumer insights are being touted by major ad agencies as a critical resource.

Rentrak said the positions - both new in its organization - have been established to help develop new research products aimed at Madison Avenue, as the ad industry shifts from traditional linear television to video-on-demand, online and mobile video advertising platforms.

Rentrak, which began as an aggregator and analyzer of videocassette rental data for the major Hollywood studios, has move aggressively into the digital video marketplace, and is now a major player tracking the distribution of video-on-demand content. More recently, it has pushed into the burgeoning digital set-top data marketplace, and is competing with companies such as TNS, TiVo, TRA Analytics, and even Nielsen Co., as they all vie to become the dominant source for audience measurement data derived from so-called "clickstream" databases.

According to a recent report in the Financial Times, a coalition of big advertisers, agencies and TV networks is backing yet another soon-to-be-announced player, dubbed CIMM (Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement) that reportedly will launch a new measurement service combing clickstream data from TV, online and mobile databases as soon as this fall.

Rentrak executives have long positioned their expertise as one based on aggregating, managing, and analyzing the data streams of video content, and claim it is what enabled the homevideo marketplace to develop a commercialized structure.

According to a Rentrak spokesperson, the company currently is processing data from 13 million digital set-top devices in the U.S. with "commercialized data" available from 3.8 million of them via AT&T's U-Verse system.

The company was also retained by NBC Universal recently to begin aggregating, analyzing and modeling video-on-demand and mobile video data streams.

Goerlich and Vinson are expected to help bridge the gap with Madison Avenue. Both are well known and highly respected among both advertisers and agencies.

During his 25 year career at some of Madison Avenue's top shops, Goerlich was a key player in the development of new approaches to media research, including TV audience reach optimization systems and econometric approaches. Most recently, he was the president of strategic resources at ZenithOptimedia North America, and had previously served as chairman of the Advertising Research Foundation, and is a past president of the Market Research Association.

Prior to his role at Starcom MediaVest Group, Vinson was chief research scientist at erinMedia, a company that had an ambitious plan to develop a new commercialized TV audience measurement system derived from digital set-top devices that would have competed with Nielsen. After settling a federal antitrust suit against Nielsen for undisclosed terms, erinMedia has since gone dormant.