• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, November 8, 2013

Jed Meyer was recruited by Nielsen out of college and from there launched a stellar career that took him all across the United States and as far as China. His experience includes building the set-top-box data and Web measurement businesses for Nielsen, and  relaunching television measurement program for Nielsen in China. Now, as U.S. research director for Annalect, he is responsible for all the day-to-day research at OMD, as well as all of the data-driven businesses owned by Annalect itself.

In my interview with him, Meyer talks about his work at Annalect that spans all platforms, Millennial behaviors, Nielsen’s acquisition of Arbitron, set-top box data, cross-platform and the definition of television.

Videos of the interview can be viewed here. Below is an excerpt from the interview:

CW: I just attended a panel of Millennials where one of the participants announced that he never watched ads and made every possible attempt to avoid them. Do you see this as a trend -- and if so, what can agencies do to make commercials more viewable to that segment?

JM: I would take issue with that perspective, only because I was on a panel last week on cross-platform attribution and the hosts of the conference also had a Millennial panel earlier in the day. They brought in four people from the market (Austin, Texas).  As I recall, one of the panelists was in his early 30s, one was in her mid-30s, and the other two were a little bit older than that. When they talked about the devices they owned and what they did with them, they also talked about privacy and their receptivity to commercials.

This is very interesting to me because I love focus groups and I love hearing the voice of the consumer. To me, one of the funniest aspects of their panel was when one panelist started talking about a commercial that she liked -- they all started laughing at her story, including the youngest guy, the “ad-avoiding younger Millennial.” To top it all off, the commercial they all loved was for an insurance company.

It was such a cultural touchstone. These are younger people and they were still engaged with traditional commercials. So, I think one takeaway is that advertising, when it is done right, cuts through age. It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, people respond to good advertising. And I think that puts a healthy pressure on us as a company to come up with creative ways to reach people and persuade them.

 CW: How are you measuring cross-platform?

JM: We are trying to use the best sources out there that we can, but it is challenging. We are looking at traditional research companies like comScore, Nielsen and Kantar to come up with tools that we can use to understand trends even at the high level, such as how much time are people spending on different devices.

The CRE did a great study earlier this year called the “TV Untethered Study,” and it gave us some really good insights on how to reach people at different times of the day with different types of devices. That was very useful for us and our strategy teams.

We are huge consumers of various sources of market information, and we love the syndicated studies currently available. And we also conduct our own work in this area, with our primary research team examining things such as the big demographic trends, consumer attitudes towards new technologies and other research that are useful to our clients.

But the net-net is that the syndicated data currently available is inadequate. I have hope for tools like online GRPs that we can use to compare to digital delivery to TV. There is great potential in that, but much more work to do in this area.