Commentary

ARF Repositions, Goes To Next Level

The highly experienced advertising and media research authority Scott McDonald has been named the new president and CEO of the Advertising Research Foundation — and the ARF board is repositioning the 80-year-old foundation.

I spoke with McDonald and ARF board chairman Jed Meyer, EVP-corporate research at Univision Communications, on the eve of today’s announcement about the evolving scope, vision and innovation needed to take ARF to the next level.

They seem to have a clear path.  

Meyer said he believes McDonald’s appointment underlines the importance of ARF’s role to the advertising, media and research communities it serves, as well as to its continuing leadership, value and growth opportunities. The board’s goal is to “increase ARF’s visibility and vitally for its many constituents.”

Past ARF chair David Poltrack, Chief Research Officer of CBS and president of CBS Vision, added: “The search to lead ARF to the next level was a tough assignment and took time.”

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4 Key Challenges

McDonald and Meyer emphasized the need for the ARF to embrace even broader challenges in an exponentially expanding advertising, media and marketing research world.  They identified some of the potential challenges for ARF to address in continuing its role as the neutral focal point. Their list includes:

  1. “Continuing focus on U.S. stakeholders and liaison with other major industry associations (4As; ANA; MRC; CIMM; etc.).” ARF will attempt to embrace the influences and focus of the other major advertising industry associations. “There is so much to gain with collaboration,” McDonald said.

  1. “Increasing international cooperation on common global issues.” McDonald has significant international experience and has worked closely with major industry research and marketing organizations, including the Print & Digital Research Forum (as Board Chairman), as well as ESOMAR, and i-COM. 

    He offered the possibility of “synthesizing and distilling international event learnings for ARF members and, as an example, mentioned the critical importance of privacy issues for many ARF multinational members.” Meyer noted the ARF’s mission of, “involvement in common global issues despite the logistical challenges.” 

  1. “Building the breadth, scope and immediacy of its extensive events program.”

Unlike some other industry research bodies, the ARF is well-funded and staffed. However, its conference business, which is a significant source of revenue, has faces increasingly aggressive competition. Repositioning ARF events and going to the next level will require increased resources.

This is one way McDonald believes the ARF can maintain its impartial leadership role in quickly “addressing current topics or the soup du jour” and issues that will come faster with more complexity. He says it will provide ad hoc research quality and insight opportunities as part of its evolving “neutral industry role.”

While the ARF actively encourages event sponsorships, it is one of the few organizations that do not allow so-called “pay-for-play” involvement for speakers.

The most recent example was the ARF’s cooperation with Green Book on understanding polling via its “Predicting Election 2016” workshop, which looked at the intersection of data science and survey research techniques that many companies are struggling with in their day-to-day marketing efforts. It was informative and fascinating.

  1. “Addressing best practices in data science (Big Data, modeling and analytics) versus traditional research methods and how they “should” be positioned, individually and in combination, to drive better marketing intelligence and solutions.”

McDonald indicated: “Improving the overall quality of everything ARF does will include the elements of creative, brand equity and traditional methods and approaches as part of the new agenda in addition to the data science, data fraud, analytic models and transparency dimensions. 

"ARF will continue to take a broad view of the needs and opportunities across the advertising industry to address ever more complex and increasing numbers of research quality and best practices fears. 

“There are scientific foundations to the research and findings essential to resolving member concerns when making marketing decisions.  Expanding the scope and delivering innovation and value to members will raise the equity of ARF.”

“And make ARF indispensable to our members,” added Meyer.
2 comments about "ARF Repositions, Goes To Next Level".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, March 7, 2017 at 9:07 a.m.

    Good to see this. Knowing Scott for all these years, perhaps the ARF, under his guidance, will  start paying more attention to what it all means--- less to the purely theoretical and more to the practical implications.

  2. James Smith from J. R. Smith Group, March 14, 2017 at 12:07 p.m.

    Agreed Ed.  I'd hope ARF makes significant progress in best practices for data analytics and slants more to "applied" research and offers more significant assistance/tools/data to the higher education folks. Whether its a business program or communication program, both the AMA and the ARF need to help these programs pivot more toward applied research and less on theory.  Theory will proceed via its own interia. It would be nice to see ARF encourage more private/higher ed partnerships...but that's another topic.

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