• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, January 15, 2014

Gary Reisman of New Media Metrics started his career at the agencies in direct marketing and integrated communications. This provided him with a strong background in sales and sales-oriented analytics. From there he moved to Turner in strategic marketing, and then to New Media Metrics. In my interview with him, Gary talks about his company, lifestages and attachments, research results, metrics, brand essence and the proliferation of devices. Videos of the interview can be viewed here.

And here’s an excerpt:

CW: What is New Media Metrics?

GR:  We own a patented approach to predict consumer Emotional Attachment (EA™) to brands and to media properties. The genesis of the company was to help marketers find better return on investment opportunities by leveraging the emotional attachment that they built for their brands.

Too often clients spend so much time and money developing equity in their brands, but not often enough in leveraging the equity they built to increase revenues from people who are either highly attached or who are moderately attached to their brands.

At the same time, we set out to prove that Emotional Attachment (EA™) is predictable of media behavior. That’s where it got really interesting, because in today’s marketplace it is really important to pull consumers through platforms. Really, the only way you can be assured that someone will pull a media property, whether it is a television show, a publishing franchise, through different platforms is to have people who are highly attached to that media property because they then pull that property to them and they follow it wherever they want to go.  

 CW: Are there different forms of attachment? How do attachments for certain consumers change over time?

GR:  People are attached to different brands and different media at different levels. … In a very complex world, where there are thousands of brands to choose from and thousands of media to choose from, the only way for a consumer to survive is to pull to them the things they are most attached to and are therefore most relevant and valuable to them. What we are doing is quantifying what those relationships are. It is really by a case-to-case basis, brand-by-brand basis, media-by-media basis, consumer-by-consumer basis what they are attached to.