• by Wayne Friedman , December 7, 2009

Veteran media and brand researcher Nick Shore has been named senior vice president of strategic insights and research for MTV.

Shore will be responsible for all MTV's research efforts across MTV, MTV2, mtv.com, mtvU and MTV Tr3s platforms. He reports to Stephen Friedman, general manager MTV.

For more than two decades, Shore has done a wide variety of work for Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, AMC, Motorola, McDonald's, Nickelodeon and FX. He ran his own brand agency, Nick and Paul Inc., as well as working at agencies such as Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners. More recently, he was at the Way Group, a New York strategic consulting company.

In hiring Shore, MTV admits the decision was a little out of the box. "One of the things that has always defined MTV is our visceral understanding of the youth audience that goes deeper than data and statistics," said Friedman.

For example, to help understand the psychology of pain, hoping to come up with better drugs for migraine medication, he interviewed dominatrixes. For Coca-Cola, Shore researched what was behind the "Princess Diana" brand. Adds Friedman: "He can help us dive even deeper into the hearts, minds and lives of this generation and uncover new truths that will guide the next chapter of MTV's evolution."