B&C's 2012 Digital All-Stars
Jonathan "Jed" Meyer, U.S. director
of research at Omnicom Media’s
Annalect Group, has been a leader in
gathering and analyzing the deluge of data
delivered by an increasingly digital industry.
Way back in 1999 while at Nielsen, Meyer
became the second employee of Nielsen Net
Ratings, the partnership Nielsen set up to
enter the digital measurement market.
“I love TV ratings. I think it’s fascinating
to find what America finds interesting,”
Meyer says. “When digital came around, I
said ‘Well, this is clearly where the future is
going,’ and so I really wanted to be involved
in that from a Nielsen perspective.”
Returning to television from measuring
websites, Meyer helped Nielsen get into
the set-top box data business by helping to
set up Nielsen Digital Plus. He negotiated
Nielsen’s first set-top data deal with Charter
Communications.
His next mission sent him to China to
manage Nielsen’s media
business in that
giant developing market.
When he arrived,
Nielsen simply measured
where commercials
aired on television
and radio while another
company did traditional
audience measurement.
“We did something
innovative, which was
really neat in terms of
using data from set-top
boxes to create ratings
and looking to expand
that to other platforms beyond just TV,”
Meyer recalls.
Upon returning to the U.S., Meyer was
looking for something new and entrepreneurial
when he met with Omnicom executives
about Annalect, which has built a data
management platform
that weaves numbers
from disparate sources
to meet specific objectives.
He signed up
three months ago.
Meyer’s current role is
to bring data from new
sources to the Annalect
platform. “We’ve been
looking at traditional
media research in the
same way for so many
years. This is research
2.0,” he says. “For me,
to see all of this firsthand
from the client’s point of view is really
exciting. To see the challenges that they’re
grappling with as they think about all these
devices and all this technology and how to
make sense of it, I just think we’re going to
bring a great solution to them.”
