• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, November 11, 2009

Richard Zackon is not only an accomplished media researcher, he is also a lawyer (from his stint at Court TV) and a life coach. He also teaches a class on media at NYU and is a consultant with Nielsen as part of the CRE. Richards shares his insights about dramatic changes in the industry, industry innovations, some of his current projects and even some life coach advice.  Links to all eight of the individual video clips can be found at http://weislermedia.blogspot.com/2009/11/q-interview-with-richard-zackon.html

 

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

CW: What would you say is the most dramatic change in the industry in the past five years?

RZ: Two biggest changes: The ever-more-rapid expansion of choice, which has had research people scramble to keep up with the consumer. And the change in the work world for those who work in media research, is just how busy everyone is. It is truly remarkable. People have always felt that they were busy and researchers work pretty hard. But the demands placed upon them and the pace with which they need to respond is really remarkable. I would say [this trend] began taking off with the introduction of email and has continued through one technological breakthrough after another.

CW: Richard, what projects are you working on now?

RZ: Other than the course that I teach at NYU and some individual coaching work, the largest project that I am working on is the Council For Research Excellence (CRE) which is a consortium of Nielsen clients conducting research which Nielsen funds. It's kind of a think tank.

And two major projects have come out so far (and more on the way from that work). One is the Video Consumer Mapping Study, which is conducted by Ball State with Sequent Partners to do the analytical work. That looked at media usage through out the day -- a sixteen hour day and in some cases longer -- by about 370 people in five markets.

We looked at them for two days, one in spring and one in the fall, and someone watched them and recorded every media device which they used including television, computer, magazine, newspaper, telephone, etc. So it is a very, very rich database of simultaneous media usage in context. It is really unique in that way.

And the second study, which is about to be released, is the study on response bias asking the question, "[For] the people who participate in surveys, in this case Nielsen surveys, is their media usage the same as the people who don't participate in the Nielsen surveys?"

CW: So in the observational study, the first study that you described, were there any interesting findings that you could share?

RZ: There were interesting findings. Maybe the most surprising one to me was that the overall usage of television as measured by observation matched within about one or two percentage points [results from] the Nielsen measured people meter device -- at least for in the home.

We have other measures for out of home that matched virtually as well. So the fact that through two entirely different methodologies, we pretty much arrived at the same result is pretty remarkable, confirming the validity of the Nielsen methodology and the validity of the observational methodology. That to me was the single biggest surprise....

CW: Thank you so much. How can we contact you?

RZ: You can go to my Web site, RichardZackon.com. You can send me an email at RZackon@researchexcellence.com