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Bill
Harvey
has spent over 35 years leading the way in the area of media research with special emphasis on the New Media. As the 24 year-old strategy head of the American Research Bureau (now Arbitron), he invented the Area of Dominant Influence or ADI, an audience-based definition of television markets that Nielsen emulated as the DMA, and which was called by Sales & Marketing Magazine "the most widely used marketing tool in the world today". ADI has profoundly influenced the advertising and television industries. |
Harvey benefited from entering the advertising business exactly as the first mainframe computers were being turned to the task of media optimization. This led him to become one of the early pioneers of optimizers - and a media researcher who had to also learn about media effectiveness in order to program the optimizers. Media effectiveness as a subject falls between media research and advertising research and so Harvey was one of the few media researchers who crossed the line to combine both disciplines. He was most fortunate to have been tutored and mentored by some of the giants in the advertising and research industries including Mike Drexler, Erwin Ephron, Helen Johnston, Timothy Joyce, Burt Manning, Len Matthews, Hal Miller, Ed Papazian, Sandy Reisenbach, Jim Rosenfield, Arnie Semsky, Lester Wunderman, and too many others to mention here.
Bill has authored Mind Magic, a book on self-transformation, which has been used as a course text at thirty-four universities including NYU and UCLA. A popular speaker at media and futurist conferences around the world, he has written, and been the subject of, numerous articles in a wide range of consumer and media trade publications. From 1979 to 1999 his monthly newsletter, The Marketing Pulse, helped decision-makers at leading advertisers, agencies and media companies understand important trends in media technology. That newsletter in 1979 accurately predicted the 3-network share of audience as it would be in 1990, and made many other projections that turned out to be prophetic, including predicting permission marketing. In January 1999 that newsletter merged into The Myers Report. He is also co-producer of three TV programs: “The Pope at Castel Gondolfo,” “The New Television,” and “Cable Convention News.” Bill is listed in Who’s Who,Who’s Who in Advertising, and Personalities of America. Among other creative projects which Harvey has worked on: the Agnes Smedley Movie, the first co-production between American filmmakers and the Peoples Republic of China. He was also on the Board of Directors of WinStar, a billion-dollar communications company that acquired Fox Lorber.
In 1972, Harvey founded New Electronic Media Science (NEMS), a marketing media research consultancy that has served nearly 70 top advertisers and agencies, all major MSOs, virtually all major networks and all major Hollywood studios in the area of New Media. NEMS consulted for QUBE and numerous other early trials, for AT&T in the development of the 900 Number, had its first online service in 1972 and put the first online questionnaire on Compuserve for World Book in 1982. NEMS created the International Research Services (IRS) service which worked with research companies in 34 countries, and compiled and harmonized ratings data from these countries into comprehensive reports, for a number of Hollywood studios and networks. NEMS had clients in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Japan, Australia, and a number of other countries. The company is credited with coining the term "New Electronic Media" many years before it came to be an industry standard (other terms coined include "audiotex", "clickstream", and "clickthrough").
More recently, in conjunction with IBM and Leonard Matthews, former CEO of Y&R and of Leo Burnett, Harvey founded Next
Century Media. Next
Century Media began as the leading interactive media advisor to advertisers, advertising agencies, entertainment and media companies worldwide, and has now evolved into an enabler and service provider for addressable TV commercials and TV clickstream measurement. NCM has led the development of addressable television advertising and interactive media measurement Standards, working with the ANA, 4A's, ARF, IAB, FAST, Audit Bureau, NACHO, CableLabs, and CASIE. Harvey was the originator and drafter of the CASIE Principles. In 1995, in cooperation with Arbitron, NCM published The CyberMeasurement Index, the first compilation of Internet clickstreams to a common Standard, in which AOL was a leading participant and 34 agencies subscribed to the report.
NEMS and NCM have long been leaders in the field of Media Effectiveness Measurement, the quantification of the higher order business effects of one medium versus another. Harvey believes that this is the Holy Grail within the marketing business: the ability to place an ROI value and not just an eyeballs value on a specific advertising investment. In the 70s, NEMS was highly active in this field, and among the notable studies conducted in that era was the measurement of a CBS Special sponsored by Ralston Purina, whose attitude shift and commercial recall scores tripled their scatterplan norms, and the measurement of the same ads in Black Enterprise Magazine versus Newsweek, showing again three times the effectiveness for an average ad among upscale Blacks if the ad were seen in the context of their own specialized magazine. Bill worked with Dr. Daniel Goleman on the application of brainwave measurements to determining the effectiveness of advertising and media. Today NCM provides a number of clients with media effectiveness research studies, the best known of which are the Sponsorship Effectiveness Index, and the Commercial Retention studies conducted with cable operators. Harvey is now the Co-Chair with Erwin Ephron of the New Media Model Committee of the Media Accountability Council of the Advertising Research Foundation, whose work is in creating the new Standard for evaluating media effectiveness across all media.
NEMS and Harvey have also been active in the development of Place Based Media. In the late 80s, NEMS was the quarterback of a multi-studio study of the feasibility of deploying giant TV or computer screens in malls and other public places primarily supported by the motion picture industry marketing budgets. NEMS has also been involved in numerous other research studies involving Place Based Media in the U.S. and Europe. Next Century Media has conducted studies of several important Place Based Media including mall video advertising for AdSpace, digital taxitop advertising for AdaptMedia, and others.
NCM consulted for such industry leaders as Microsoft and Amazon, and consulted on the development of websites for such companies as GM, Visa, Pepsi, Nissan, and many others, and for the clients of agencies such as BBDO, TBWA Chiat/Day, and Messner. Harvey was the Keynote Speaker at the first meeting of the Internet Advertising Bureau, and the speaker representing the advertising industry at the first WorldWideWeb Consortium Measurement Conference. At that Conference, Harvey proposed the cachebusting method that has now become the industry de facto Standard.
NCM has invented and patented a system for making TV commercials targetable down to the individual home and person, which has spawned an entire field with multiple companies competing to supply these important new advertising units. NCM has begun producing reports from the Interactive Index, a service for certifying and compiling the immense "clickstream" (potentially every button push on remote control channel changers and PC keyboards) databases of interactive media worldwide, in cooperation with top research companies such as Nielsen and Arbitron. General Motors was the first subscriber to the Interactive Index, which received letters of support from most of the top 20 agencies.
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Addressable
Commercials increase reach and frequency against targets
at same cost.
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Through his two companies, Harvey has been involved in every major New Electronic Media trial in the United States since 1975 and many other trials around the world. He has brought more advertisers and agencies into more Interactive TV trials than everyone else in the world combined.
Before joining Arbitron, Harvey was a media research executive at Grey Advertising, Kenyon & Eckhardt, and Interpublic, specializing in the development of media optimizers.
During
2003-2004 Harvey took a sabbatical from Next Century Media
and from Bill Harvey Consulting to accept the role of Senior
Vice President and General Manager of OpenTV Research,
a new unit he conceived for OpenTV, a Liberty Media Company.
As GM he generated the reports of the landmark Aurora trial
of SpotOn addressable commercials for Comcast, Coca-Cola,
General Motors, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson,
and the U.S. Army, designed new reports for OpenTV's use
going forward, introduced the company to potential research
company partners around the world, and spearheaded the
creation of a model privacy policy. Today Bill is the President
of TRA Inc., a New York based media research company.
Bill
Harvey remains active on three Advertising Research Foundation
committees and his current passionate media interests continue
to include maximizing and measuring Return On Marketing
Investment (ROMI), addressable media, measuring media effectiveness,
mobilizing set top box based audience data, and accelerating
the profitable and psychologically appropriate Business-To-Consumer
use of all digital media for two-way communications and
relationship building.
Bill is also a frequent speaker at annual conferences of the National Association of Broadcasters, the Advertising Research Foundation, INTV, the Media Congress, and the World Future Society and at numerous universities including West Point. |
