• Ad Age, Tuesday, December 5, 2006 11:15 AM

To the advertising industry's everlasting shame, it has been incapable of reliably measuring the relationship between marketing and sales. But now the industry's top research provider is banking on an agency executive--one who has been critical of its progress--to connect the dots. That is what's riding on Jon Mandel, the head of WPP Group's MediaCom, who was tapped last week to head the Nielsen Connect unit.

His main mission is to find useful new links within a marketing-metrics-and-analytics behemoth that includes Nielsen Media Research TV ratings, ACNielsen retail-scanner and consumer-panel data. He won't be the first to try and make sense of the sprawl to create a single source of marketing knowledge.

Yet some industry insiders are giving him decent odds of success--and the industry desperately needs him to succeed. "There's such a plethora of information within this place that can all be cross-connected," he says.

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