• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 21, 2012

Actually, it seems like former ARF Chief Research Officer Joel Rubinson had some news to make at OMMA Metrics & Research, and guess what, it’s a new ad industry research organization: ARO. Not to be confused with the ARF, ARO stands for Analytics Research Organization.

Interestingly, Rubinson made no allusion to the ARF in unveiling the new organization, and flashing its new website – www.thearo.org – which even uses the same “the” preposition before its name, just like, say, www.thearf.org.

Well, Rubinson didn’t say it, but then in a sudden outburst of auto-accident-infused-adrenalin, his partner and OMMA Metrics & Research chair Judah Phillips, pretty much closed the deal.

Phillips, acting even more animated and over-the-top than I remember him being on stage in the past, he said it was partly because of his near death experience this morning, when he got in a car accident on the way to the OMMA conference, but ended up in the hospital instead. He didn’t explain what exactly happened in the interim, but he did imply that it gave him license for raving about ARO.

“I was in a car accident this morning, so I’m a little big adrenalized,” he said, in between pitching the benefits of ARO to the room.

It wasn’t 100% clear what ARO is, aside from sounding like a metaphor for targeting (you know, an arrow), but Philips did say it was a “501c3,” which I took to be some kind of business or non-profit corporation.

What Phillips did say was what ARO is not. Or at least, what it’s not “meant to compete with.” He then rattled off a number of organizations, including the IAB, but unless I misheard his ranting, I didn’t hear him say it was not meant to be like the ARF.

“How about the World Wrestling Federation,” Rubinson quipped, at which point I nearly expected his ARO partner to leap on stage and pin him to the mat. As it turns out, it was more like a carefully rehearsed wrestling tag-team move, because that’s when Philips body slammed other ad trade organizations for focusing on something as trivial as “improving tags.”

“They’re all talking about nothing that I really care about, because they’re not talking about reducing costs and increasing revenues. They’re all talking about improving tags,” he chided.

How much Philips car accident played in his behavior, I’m not clear of, but clearly he is quite passionate about the prospects for ARO. So passionate, in fact, that he’s willing to give it all away “for free.”

“I’m going to give you guys what you pay Forrester for, for free,” he said, adding, “If you guys want white papers, I’ll write them for you – for free.” That quip made me wish that Phillips was also willing to write Raw Blog posts for free, because somehow, I don’t feel I’m doing his act justice by just commenting on it. I almost have to be inside Phillips' head to appreciate what he’s doing.

You can check out ARO’s actual mission at www.thearo.org for yourself, but some of the other takeaways from Phillips rant, include:

“It’s laser-focused on the heart of analytics. And I mean the business heart.”

And…

“We’re going to crowd source it and see what everybody else wants to do.”

Somehow, it all relates to the subject of data science, Phillips said, surveying the room and asking how many “data scientists are here.” (He counted about three.) But then implying that it’s not so much about the science of data, as the “art.”

And somehow, the whole proposition hooks into a concept Phillips claimed to have coined: The Analytical Economy.

Maybe he should hook up with Rex Briggs.