media experts

American Demographics, April 1, 2003 by Joe Mandese

Byline: JOE MANDESE

Kate Lynch

In the six years since Kate Lynch left the United Kingdom and came to the U.S. to run the research operations of Leo Burnett's Starcom media unit, she has done more to change the way advertisers and agencies use media to target consumers than most researchers have done in their lifetimes. Lynch, now 38 and global research director of Starcom MediaVest Group, oversees a worldwide research budget of more than $36 million and has developed systems and methods that are routinely imitated, if not actually copied, by her peers.

Lynch left Leo Burnett's U.K. media unit to help the agency's Chicago office pitch Procter & Gamble's $1 billion-plus media buying account. P&G had made the development of an optimizer - a high-powered computer system that scientifically optimizes the reach of an advertising campaign to specific audience targets - a prerequisite for winning the account. All of the agencies in the review scrambled to develop optimizer systems, but it was Lynch and her boss at the time, the now-retired Jayne Zenaty Spittler, who successfully negotiated access to the raw Nielsen data that could make the systems work.

Burnett did not win the P&G business, but the move opened Nielsen's database for the entire industry to develop optimizers. Meanwhile, the early proprietary insights into optimizers that were gained by Starcom ultimately helped it win an even bigger prize, General Motors' $2.6 billion media planning account.

It was neither the first nor the last time that Lynch's research innovations led to major new business for the agency. In fact, her job currently focuses on developing client-funded research-only partnerships. Lynch has also developed a suite of media accountability systems that help advertisers tie product sales to media exposure, and she even created a system that utilizes biofeedback technology developed by NASA to measure the physiological responses of viewers to TV programming and commercials.

Lynch's current passion is developing a communications planning system that will enable marketers to optimize not just media schedules, but also their entire marketing mix. Her latest project: creating a TV commercial ratings system with Nielsen. "Nobody has billions and billions to spend on research," says Lynch. "So to do it well requires more creative approaches."

In Her Own Words

We've developed optimization/analytical tools to help us understand and predict how Americans watch TV - by age, sex, ethnicity and even their passions, so we can build the schedules accordingly. Looking ahead, I see innovation in entertainment - new forms, new sponsors, new ways to market - from the return of branded content, to the latest hit single from P&G and from Sony, to the much celebrated BMW films. We have already seen the start of this. I predict this will be the main source of income for the traditional media owners in the future.

In the next 25 years we will continually evolve the way we use what is left of mass media types - TV, print, outdoor, radio. Television will be able to provide information on how many people saw our ad last night, how many avoided it, how many need more info, and last, but not least, how many changed purchase behavior because of it. We'll stop moaning about the lack of perfect data and start using the good data with much more advanced analytics and data-matching techniques. Advertisers will court the most desirable consumers in much more direct, relationship-building ways than have been seen.

John Philip Jones

A longtime advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson, John Philip Jones is one of the world's most influential academics on the theories of how and when advertising works. His research proved that advertising doesn't work solely over long periods of time by influencing brand awareness and preferences, but that it often has a relatively immediate impact, which can be measured in terms of actual product sales.

Born in Wales and educated at Oxford, Jones initially handled market research at JWT and rose to be one of its top account management executives during its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. Since leaving the agency in 1980, he has been a professor and an academic researcher at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, as well as a consultant to top packaged goods brands like Unilever, Gillette and Nestle.

In the early 1990s, Jones conducted research using Nielsen's HomeScan single-source database, which links media exposure to product sales, and ultimately was able to empirically prove that a single advertising exposure creates significant incremental increases in product sales. This research led to a concept he dubbed "continuity planning," which recommends that marketers expand their advertising plans to reach as many people as possible with as much continuity as their ad budget allows. This theory, which ultimately was embraced and popularized by consultant Erwin Ephron [see profile] as "recency planning," is widely acknowledged as having done more to change TV planning and buying than any other development in the past several decades.