• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 9, 2009

In another hire of a top media sales and marketing executive, Clear Channel has recruited Debbie Reichig as senior vice president-business development and marketing of its Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings unit. Reichig, who has a long track record for leveraging innovative research measuring the ROI, or return-on-investment, of media buys for advertisers and agencies will be responsible for developing sales strategies and research related to it. She reports to Rocky Sisson, executive vice president-sales and marketing.

Reichig's appointment comes just months after Clear Channel hired another high-profile media marketing executive, John Partilla, 44, to serve as executive vice president and president of global media sales of the parent company, Clear Channel Communications, indicating that the company remains committed to an aggressive sales development marketing strategy. Partilla had previously been head of Time Warner's Global Media Group.

Prior to joining Clear Channel, Reichig had been principal of In-Focus Media Consulting, developing sales strategies for key clients including Weather Channel, Rainbow Media and Current Media. Prior to that, she served as senior vice president-market development at NBC Universal, directing the integrated media sales marketing division across all assets and instituting mechanisms for enhanced marketing communications across the organization.

But Reichig is perhaps best known for her role as senior vice president-sales strategy at Court TV, where she developed innovative research initiatives to measure the ROI of advertising buys on the cable channel. Among other things, she created an ROI Council in which ad agency executives and advertisers directed innovative, primary research on media advertising effectiveness, and she also helped strike some of the first upfront advertising sales deals based on guarantees of ROI, as opposed to conventional ratings delivery.

Reichig left Court TV when it was sold to Time Warner and integrated into its Turner Broadcasting System unit.

Reichig also has extensive experience in research and marketing for broadcast TV and online media, having worked in senior roles at iVillage, Comedy Central, the Network Television Association, AGB, Lifetime Television, and Blair/Telerep. But this is her first role explicitly developing out-of-home media, which increasingly is taking on auspices of other electronic media outlets as it integrates digital technologies and screens.

"I worked in both cable and online when they were nascent industries and although outdoor is one of, if not the oldest ad platform, I see a great many parallels," Reichig tells MediaDailyNews. "Outdoor is poised to explode on the marketplace with new digital capabilities, new metrics and newly defined value. I am treating it as a new ad platform and expect it to see similar levels of growth."