Colleen is a remarkable Legend who survived and thrived as MTV Networks evolved into Viacom, then Viacom-CBS and now Paramount. Colleen shares fascinating insights about bridging data science and consumer insights, Paramount Plus’s global expansion and so much more.

Colleen is a remarkable Legend who survived and thrived as MTV Networks evolved into Viacom, then Viacom-CBS and now Paramount. Colleen shares fascinating insights about bridging data science and consumer insights, Paramount Plus’s global expansion and so much more.

Transcript:

Duane: Legends of Media Research is a podcast series featuring interviews with the media industry’s leading researchers, where we go behind the scenes sharing stories from their greatest achievements and challenges. Brought to you by MediaScience, the leader in media and advertising innovation research. Stay tuned at the end of the podcast for more information about MediaScience, but for now, I’m your host, MediaScience CEO, Dr. Duane Varan.

Welcome to another exciting episode of Legends of Media Research. We’ve got a great show for you today as I interview Paramount Chief Research Officer Colleen Fahey-Rush.

Colleen is someone that we’ve all looked up to for many, many years as she was Research Leader at VH1, then MTV Networks, which became Viacom, which became Viacom CBS, and now Paramount. I mean, she has survived and thrived across many mergers, acquisitions and reorgs, which is quite a feat. It tells quite a story.

So Colleen, welcome to Legends of Media Research.

Colleen: Thank you, Duane. Thank you. It’s very nice to see you and to be here today.

Duane: Colleen, let’s dive right in. How did you get your start in this industry? 

Colleen: Well, my first job was actually as an intern between my junior and senior year of college. I went to Cornell and I got an internship at the CBS Television Stations that owned and operated Television Stations Group.

And that was my start. They actually asked me back in the following spring to take a full-time job upon graduation as a junior analyst. And I had actually already accepted a job. I had gone through the whole on campus recruiting thing at Cornell and had gotten a job in insurance in Philadelphia.

[Duane laughs]

So suddenly I was like, I had to make a decision. Like, I didn’t know that they were gonna offer me something to return to, and I had already accepted something else. Honestly, I didn’t even [laughs] -it was actually not even insurance, it was reinsurance.

[Duane laughs]

Which is like briefly real. And it was the same amount of money. Philadelphia’s obviously a cheaper city than New York.

I grew up in Cleveland, so I was perfectly happy to work in Philadelphia or New York. But when push came to shove, I decided that I’d love to give media a try and live in New York city, and that’s what I did. I started at CBS as that junior analyst and I’ve always been in media research since, it just worked for me.

I just really have always liked being involved with data and insights and working with so many other functions in an organization. And I’ve just stayed with it ever since.

Duane: Did you go from that first job at CBS straight into the Viacom family?

Colleen: No. So I actually -I was in the owned and operated stations group for a few years, and then I moved to the network group.

I was analyzing this new thing called cable [laughs] and I was in that group for a few years. And then I started actually taking advantage of their tuition assistance program at CBS. And I pursued my MBA part-time at night at NYU. It took me like four and a half years ‘cause there was a couple of semesters where I just ran outta money.

One semester I was getting married and I just didn’t really feel like worrying about exams while I was trying to get married and go on a honeymoon. So I did that at night and I finished up and then about a year later I got another job. I went to Telemundo and it was Spanish language television. It was a completely different type of thing, and it was so interesting. I loved it.

I learned a ton about the US Hispanic market and my role was actually very much in the consumer insights part of research. I had spent the first chunk of years at CBS working mostly with ratings, some primary research, because we also did a lot of news research back then for the owned stations.

Because local news is a really important part of the equation. It’s really sort of the brand of any local station here in the US. So that was really sort of my start in the primary research part of my career, was at CBS. But then when I went to Telemundo, it was a lot more consumer insights, research and Nielsen stuff to really position Spanish language television, as a very important part of the equation for an advertiser.

If you’re only advertising in English, you’re missing out on a whole lot of [00:05:00] amazing consumers. And so it was a lot of educating advertisers about the US Hispanic market. Not being Hispanic, it wasn’t like “pay attention to me”. It was like, “hey, you should know about this market because they’re a huge opportunity for you”.
So I really enjoyed that. I really like -just meeting and getting to know a lot of different marketers in the business and really talking to them through very different lens. It was very interesting to me and I loved it. After that, I actually went to Jay Walter Thompson. I had never worked at an ad agency and I felt like it was time for me to make my next move, and I got this role at Jay Walter Thompson and I was very, really excited about it.

It was great because it was just a completely different part of the ecosystem, right? I had always been at a media company first, you know, CBS then Telemundo, but working at an ad agency just gave me a very different perspective.

I ended up leaving Jay Walter Thompson after about a year because I got this amazing opportunity to go head up research for VH1, which is when I joined Viacom. It came out of the blue. I wasn’t looking, I think I got headhunted for it. And I took it. I felt really bad about leaving J Walter Thompson. It was actually even under a year and I was like, “oh, that’s not gonna look good”.

It was too good of an opportunity to pass up, and that was my start at Viacom. So I was heading up research for VH1…

Duane: And that was the period where VH1 began experimenting with new innovations.

Colleen: That was when we had a breakout hit called Popup Video. And then we had a big hit with Behind the Music.

And we really leaned into the whole nostalgia thing with “before they were rock stars and where are they now?” and shows like that. And, you know, VH1 was a little bit like the big sister to MTV. MTV was really targeting teens and VH1 was really more for people in their twenties and thirties. So we showed a lot of videos and we developed some shows and it was a great, really, really fun, exciting chapter.

What was also great about that chapter is that there were a lot of fellow female department heads, a lot of women in leadership roles. And that was also a terrific chapter to be along shoulder to shoulder with all of those women. Like Lee Roland and Laura Nelson and Christina Norman. And just forging ahead with VH1.

So Viacom then bought CBS cable. So they tucked CMT, Country Music Television, into the VH1 team to really bring CMT along. Didn’t know anything about country music, had never been to Nashville, suddenly was getting completely immersed in that world, which was really interesting and fun.

Then we launched VH1 Classic and we also launched Logo, which was the very first channel for the LGBTQ population. And that was a great, great piece of business to become immersed in, to do the consumer research for. That was also a really great chapter. Then I actually took on sort of a precursor to my current role, which was really much more of a portfolio role.

Overseeing all of the brands at Legacy Viacom. So MTV and Nickelodeon really in service of Judy McGrath back when it was called MTV Networks, that part of the portfolio. And that was really where my remit expanded quite a bit and was really guiding senior leadership on how the whole portfolio was doing.

As you know, Viacom’s changed a lot over the years, we’ve had a couple of different CEOs, and most recently, about two and a half years ago, we merged with CBS. So it’s kind of great that it came full circle. That CBS is back part of my life again, because I’m, as Chief Research Officer, overseeing, like I said, the whole portfolio, which includes CBS now and Showtime and the stations group that I got my very start at.

So it’s, you know -now we’re called Paramount. It’s a very big portfolio. We we’ve got Paramount+. We re-launched CBS All Access as Paramount+ a little over a year ago. We bought Pluto, which is an ad supported streaming service, which has been a great, completely different business for us to learn about that consumer and how much they really like that sort of lean back.

It’s almost like watching cable, is how people describe it. It’s a very lean back experience and a ton of channels. And it’s the biggest one in the US. So it’s doing really well, just fun.

So that’s where we at. That’s where we’re at today.

[music]

Duane: Viacom went through so many changes through all those acquisitions, mergers and reorganizations. How did your job change for you and your team? How did you and your team adapt and respond to the constant change across these different chapters of that evolution?.

Colleen: Yeah, I think that one of the reasons that I’ve stayed with this company is because the company has changed so much and the industry has changed so much during this period of time that I’ve always been completely challenged.

I’ve had to figure out new things all the time, and so have all of our teams, Whether it was new audiences or programming to new platforms, right? In the very beginning, we were just linear channels. And then we invented digital versions of ourselves, right. Lots of websites and then apps.

And then we were getting very much into finding our way onto social, because you’ve gotta meet the consumer where they’re spending their time and that’s increasingly in different places and spaces. And so you have to create a version of yourself that’s appropriate for Facebook and then Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok and all of the places and spaces.

We’ve just had to, you know, over the years, we’ve obviously expanded our teams to meet some of these challenges, to be on more platforms. We’ve had to hire an expanded array of types of talent. It used to be just traditional media researchers, but we’ve got loads of data engineers and data scientists.

And of course, at the core has always also been a lot of consumer insights executives to really usher in all of the research to support programming and development and marketing and product. So that you know who your consumer is, what they think of what you’re doing, what they think of what your competitors are doing, and also who they are.

That’s also a hallmark, I think, of Legacy Viacom. It has been all the way back to the beginning of when Nickelodeon started. It was a group of people who were making a cable channel for kids and they had the wisdom to say, “well, we don’t know what it’s like to be a kid because we’re not, so let’s go talk to kids and parents”, and that’s really sort of the origin story of a really strong consumer insights practice at Viacom over the years, which then when they launched MTV and VH1 and Comedy Central and BET and all these channels, we needed to make sure that we had people who were very passionate about learning about those consumers so that we could not just know what they thought of what we were doing, but what kept them up at night.

What was it like to be a teenager today or any of those target audiences so that, you know, everybody, whenever they started a new job, they’re like, tell me everything I need to know about my audience or my customer or my consumer, whatever it is that they did.

And you need to be able to tell ’em so that they could make the right stuff, and I would say that the teams have taken shape and morph and evolved over the years to really be able to meet all of those challenges, to support all of the different stakeholders for all of these different brands. And increasingly, like I said, we’ve got many more data engineers and data scientists who weren’t part of the equation at all 25 years ago.

But when you’re running direct to consumer services like Paramount+, and BET+, and Nain and Showtime OTT, you’ve gotta stand up a very strong data practice, because you’re working with a whole bunch of first party data. You need to, you need to architect it and engineer it and run it in a very privacy compliant way.

And we’ve always done that really right and well, because of our roots with Nickelodeon. Those are some of the challenges, you know, how we’ve met some of the challenges and then there’s another part of the organization that’s very focused on supporting ad sales and ad sales is a pretty different stakeholder than people that are making content through marketing content.

They’re also trying to convince marketers that they should be spending their money and use their campaign dollars and our channels to reach their target audience. That’s another really important part of the equation, of course, and a really interesting one because that’s evolved a lot, right? A lot of, you know, it used to just be linear and now it’s completely multi-platform and helping marketers really reach their customers on our websites and our apps.

And now on Paramount+ and all of our ad supported platform.

[music]

Duane: Now, Colleen, many women in our industry look up to you. You’re a role model for so many, but I know from our conversations that you’ve also had your role models at Viacom. What’s that been like?

Colleen: For me, being at Viacom and now Paramount, there have always been a strong slate of many female leaders. From Betsy Frank and Judy McGrath and Christina Norman and Katherine Houser and Carol Robinson and Cyma Zarghami and Sarah Kirshbaum Levy and Joanne Ross at CBS, have sales.

I’ve just had so many women modeling great leadership, and I really just don’t know what it’s like to not have that. And so I feel very fortunate that I’ve worked at a company that’s always valued having women in very senior roles, running businesses, running business units. And it’s one of the things that makes the company so great.

[music]

Duane: Colleen, we’ve collaborated together now for over two decades, and I’ve always been amazed at how well you’ve managed to adapt to the changes in your environment. I mean, in your case, there’s been constant, you know, tension between centralizing and decentralizing, all the mergers and acquisitions and reorgs, but like many of our other [00:16:00] legends, you’ve also had to navigate through a constantly changing media landscape. I mean, it’s such a challenge. How do you navigate, adapt and survive all that change?

Colleen: You know, I think that no matter what you do in the industry that you work in, whether it’s research or any function. You just need to commit to being a student of the industry.

You need to be eyes wide open and commit yourself to never stopping to learn. You have to read a lot, you have to say “okay, what does this mean for my company? What does this mean for my function?” I suppose in the old days, you used to be able to just sort of get to a certain point in your career and just sit back and enjoy.

[Duane laughs]

That’s just not the way the world is anymore. You have to keep up and you have to remain agile and optimistic. I think it’s also really important to be a communicative leader with your teams so that they know what your thinking and what your goals are and what your priorities are and what you’re really trying to like help the company accomplish and how research intersects with those goals.

I think it’s also really important to forge really good relationships with all your internal stakeholders, right? Those relationships are the ones that get you through in and out of every single week and month and quarter and year. And that’s also where it’s really gratifying -is when you are working with smart, energetic, passionate people and you’re all rowing in the same direction, trying to succeed, and help the company succeed.
Honestly, that’s what I think I’ve missed the most about, you know, during COVID is just being around my coworkers. And now that we’re beginning to get back into the office, it’s such joy to just the physical energy that I don’t even think I realized how much I draw on that, how much we all draw on that.

So I guess that’s a little bit about how I’ve sort of continued to thrive and succeed in my journey.

[music]

Duane: You’ve always led what was among the largest research teams in the industry. I mean, I think that’s probably something the audience may not know just how larger research teams have been. And that tells a story. I mean, it’s not easy persuading management to get and retain those positions. And there are clear logistical challenges in managing such large teams.

So in itself, just the continued existence of such large teams is such a reflection of your success. What are the secrets behind how effective you’ve been as a leader?

Colleen: Well, I think that my overall philosophy about research in the organization [00:19:00] is that it’s very important for it to have a seat at the table, to be a part of the strategy team of whatever brand or business unit that it’s a part of, and always fighting for that through every reorg or consolidation or merger. I think has been something that I very steadily have represented.

I think that research is at its most effective when it is part of the strategy team and not some backroom operation, like a drive up window at a fast food restaurant. You don’t want research to be saying “would you like fries with that, sir?” You never just wanna be an order taker. You wanna be at the table where the discussions that are being had around business opportunities or business problems that –you’re sitting there, you’re the voice of the consumer, you know, everything there is to know about all of the data and you’re turning business problems into research solutions.
That’s a powerful place to sit and that I’ve just always very passionately wanted and fought for research to have and maintain that seat at the table. So that’s sort of my philosophical leadership point of view, but I think that my style as a leader is, I think I mentioned before, I try to be communicative, right?

I have these town halls where everybody from intern to EVP is invited. And I just address what’s going on at the company. I’ll have a special guest. I’ll talk about the news of the day. I think being visible is important to your teams. That’s definitely something that I’ve been pretty intentional about.

I think that bringing people together from across the company in a variety of different form factors meeting –form factors and meetings so that they can be exposed to each other’s work is another thing that I’ve championed and framed out and run because we’re all doing similar work or for different parts of the company.

And if somebody’s done something that’s, you know, methodologically very interesting or just navigating a political situation, that sounds maybe similar to what you’re dealing with. There’s a lot to learn from your coworkers. And I think that that’s a really important thing to pave the way for.
I try to be the glue across all of these groups and celebrate what they do and champion what they do and make sure that these various teams are aware of the other work that’s happening in the company, because they get very inspired by each other. They draw a lot of energy from each other. Years ago, there was some really interesting research that the Nickelodeon team did about SpongeBob because SpongeBob had been around for like 10 years and they were like, ‘well, we want 10 more, so let’s make sure we do a really deep dive into what it is about SpongeBob that’s so magical for people who watch it’.

And by the way, it’s not just kids. There’s loads of adults that love SpongeBob and always did. And I had to set up, you know, an offsite for everybody in research to attend. And that was one of the presentations that was shared at this particular offsite.

And the people that worked at Comedy Central in the audience were like, “wow, we should do the same thing about South Park, because it had been a very successful franchise and we wanted to keep being successful”. That’s just one example of the power that you can unlock by making sure that people are being coming together and being exposed to each other’s work and being inspired to then go and do something that is gonna help the piece of business that they work on.

So that’s, I just –I think those are some of the things that I do as a leader that I think work and that I also, you know, just like to do.

[music]

Duane: What do you think your biggest challenges are in your day to day business?

Colleen: Just keeping up, man. [laughs] I just, there’s just so much –there’s just an incredible volume and there’s so much competition. The past couple of years have brought the launches of so many streaming services and we are very successful on linear, we’ve redeployed a ton of content onto our own –the libraries of our content onto Paramount+, including our movie studio, Paramount Pictures, making a lot of original shows like 1883, Paw Patrol the movie, which dropped in theaters in on the service same day.

Like there’s a lot of experimenting going on and now we’re moving into year two of Paramount+ existence and need to like grow it fast so that we can continue –so that we can overtake the next guy ahead of us.

Netflix has had –you know, they just had a rough earnings call. Their stock got completely punished, which was tough. The streaming space is very, very competitive. So I think, you know, that’s one of our challenges: is to win there. I think another challenge is, like I said, just the sheer volume of businesses and brands that we have and just making sure that they’re all getting what they need and they are. It’s just, kind of a fire hose all the time [laughs], it seems like so.

[Duane laughs]

Keeping up on everything there is to know about what’s happening competitively and…

Duane: All the new spaces and delivery platforms that keep popping up.

Colleen: And we also are not just a US based company, right? I mean, we are a global company and we’re seeing tremendous growth with a lot of the acquisitions and launches that we’ve done outside of the US.

And that’s really, you know, that’s also a really energizing part of my role and responsibilities, but there’s also –it’s also a lot, right? There’s a lot of countries outside of the US to keep track of how we’re doing and how it’s going.

[music]

Duane: I know that Viacom, now Paramount, was always a global distributor of its content, but, you know, before it was different because you were primarily distributing to market players, partners who knew their markets well, but with the global distribution of Paramount+, clearly a direct to consumer product, your international remit it’s a lot more challenging.

Suddenly you’re not just working with partners in other markets. Now it’s your responsibility to drive the key insights that drive that distribution to consumers in all these markets around the world and in these markets that are entirely different from one another and extremely complex.
I mean, this must be a huge challenge for your research.

Colleen: It is. And yes, so we do –there’s a lot of market sizing exercises that we’ve done in the past couple of years to understand what the opportunity is and how we wanna tackle that while we’re also, you know, running –we own a bunch of free to air channels.

We, like you said, have our cable brands exist in a whole bunch of other countries. So trying to optimize all of those businesses in all of these different countries… There are also very vibrant, very evolving, you know, fast evolving, video marketplaces in all of those countries. So we have great teams that are, that are focused on international trust. So that’s the good news.

[music]

Duane: What do you see as the biggest challenges for our industry in the immediate future?

Colleen:I think right now consumers are trying to figure out what’s the best way for them to have access to what they wanna watch, right? We know a lot of people are reconsidering, whether or not they wanna have a full on cable subscription, and there’s people that are cutting the cord and then getting something like YouTube TV, virtual MVPD and stacking a bunch of streaming services. And there’s so many more just in the past couple of years. Consumers are… I think some of them are feeling like “this is amazing”, and some of them are feeling like “this is overwhelming”. The prices keep changing and, you know, it’s a very dynamic space.

So I think that the biggest challenge for all of us right now is to make sure that the consumer feels really crisp and clear about why they should continue to wanna watch the shows on our channels in a linear fashion, subscribe to things like Paramount+ and BET+, and Showtime. And it’s just very competitive. I think that there’s, you know, there’s confusion and I think, you know, helping them through that confusion is the name of the game right now.

[music]

Duane: Now you are a founding member of CIMM, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, a fantastic opportunity for competing networks to collaborate around larger issues that they hold in common. You know, so CIMM is an organization that has gone through its own change and its own evolution. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about your experiences with CIMM.

Colleen: Sure. You know, CIMM started… I actually don’t know what year it started [laughs] It’s been around for a while, but worked very closely with Alan Wurtzal, Kate Sirkin and Dave Poltrack and another people… We felt as though we needed to get everybody to participate in experimenting with different, smaller companies in the measurement space because we wanted for there to be more thoughtfulness and innovation, because we could see that linear television was by no means the only way that people –the only means by which people were watching video content, and we needed to understand those behaviors and be able to monetize them, which meant we needed to measure them.

We just did not feel like there was much innovation in the space, and so we just formed the formed CIMM and Jane Clark –we hired Jane Clark to run it. And a ton of really great work has come out of CIMM. And they actually more –a few years ago, tucked CIMM inside ARF, the Advertising Research Foundation and now John Watts leads it.

We are still incredibly relevant and vibrant and doing some really exciting projects every single year. The measurement space is, you know, it’s complicated. Like I said before, there’s all these places and spaces that consumers can spend their time and do, and we’re trying to make sure that we are taking advantage of those places as ad platforms as well.

So I think that, you know, by no means, am I alone. There’s loads of companies that are members of CIMM and are very active in all of these projects and subcommittees and things like that. And now more recently, we are moving into really trying to stand up a multi currency future, we call it, right?

Where depending on a marketer’s goals, they can work with non Nielsen data to plan and monitor and post their campaign. And we’re seeing a lot of openness from agencies and advertisers around this. I think it’ll take time, but it’s really interesting. There’s some really interesting ways of accessing thinking about data and personifying it and it’s, you know, it’s a very, very interesting space.

We’re very active as a company and then of course, CIMM is an important part of the equation there to help pull some things apart, find out where there are… where there’s noise. Explore different types of approaches to data, and some of it’s like super technical and I’m really glad that there’s other people [laughs] that get it, that are gonna be there to help me to focus on it.

‘Cause you can’t do it all by yourself. Like this is the kind of stuff that really benefits from lots of different types of points of view coming together to talk about this stuff and work through it.

[music]

Duane: You’ve long been a champion for new ad formats, even before new ad format research was really cool in hip [laughs] What have you learned over the years about innovation and ad formats?

Colleen: I think the Legacy Viacom always did a lot of experimenting to try to get people to watch the whole commercial pod, got involved in doing a lot of branded entertainment and sponsorships for big tent poles, like the VMAs and award shows to really embed a brand into a show in a way that made it unmissable.

Not skippable when DVRs came in the very first place. You walk a fine line with that stuff, right? Because there are certain executions of it in the early days that really bothered consumers. That was half the battle: to make sure that we were ushering that type of research into the equation to understand “were we doing this well? Is this a good idea or a good idea executed poorly?”

There’s a whole lot of different ways and times that things can go sideways when you’re experimenting with ad formats. And then of course, in the digital space, and in sociat, those are amazing sandboxes that offer all of us the opportunity to come up with even more ways of advertising and connecting with consumers. You know, partnering with marketers.

I think that my favorite is when we do sponsorship, I think that’s where the most creativity has happened. Some of the stuff that we’ve done with Pepsi over the years inside the VMAs, some of the things that The Kids’ Choice Awards have done with like, some of the consumer packaged goods brands. That’s where the people that are in our, you know, the integrated marketing groups and research for terrific partnerships to really sort of find out where you can take some of these things, and consumers definitely remember brands better when you really take those kinds of creative approaches. It sort of delights them oftentimes. And it’s, it’s not a typical sort of ad. So that’s been some fun stuff over the years.

[music]

Duane: Over the past few years, there’s been a real change in the research dynamic of our industry with a much stronger presence of data science and data analytics. Now you’ve been a really strong bridge between this data science community and your organization, and more traditional consumer insights with searchers.

How have you been so effective in bridging these cultures?

Colleen: That’s a good question. I think that there’s actually a ton of data science and data engineering that takes place when you’re running a massive centralized brand tracker for a portfolio of brands, right? You’ve got the consumer insights leads who are thinking hard about what to include in the questionnaire, how to ask questions in a way that people are remembering and thinking about the brand properly.

For instance, Pluto. Are they thinking of the planet [laughs] or are they thinking of the free ad supported streaming service? When you’re asking them about Pluto, like doing a lot of verified awareness types of questions in certain places. Anyway, those folks are partnering with our data engineers and data scientists in the construction of an instrument.

And then the engineers and the scientists are creating ways of extracting data and also building apps as front end for the consumer insights leads to then pull the data back out. So it really is this hand and love partnership between two very different types of researchers. But they’re all like working on the same product and they’re, you know, they’re collaborations that never really needed to exist because we always farmed out a lot of our research.

But when you take some of it in-house is where you really are getting these different types of [00:36:00] researchers to work together. And they had a really strong appreciation for what they each bring to the table, which is great to see. When something breaks, there’s that partnership paves the way for people to feel inscented to fix it, because they know other people are relying on that.

It’s another nice thing to when you’re bringing groups together. But I think also there’s always been the quest, and I think it’s always very important, when you’re developing people from being more junior to becoming more senior, you have to be very good at synthesizing data from different inputs.

You can’t answer a question or address an issue by only looking at one thing. If you’ve got five things that can help you create an informed –like, here’s everything you should know about this before we figure out what our next move is. It shouldn’t be based on just one data set if you’ve also got some consumer attitude stuff that you’ve gathered yourself or that you, you know, maybe you licensed some stuff. You really need to be able to synthesize things across a variety of inputS and I think that’s also what makes for successful researchers or people that are very good at doing that type of synthesis and communicating it in a way that your stakeholders feel confident in making decisions and building strategies. And that’s also, I think, what cements research, having a seat at the table –at the strategy table.

[music]

Duane: All right, Colleen, we’re down to our final question, which is something we ask of all of our guests. So here you go. What advice would you give to this new generation of media researchers?

How have you been so effective in bridging these cultures?

Colleen: I probably, I have a few pieces of advice.

Duane: Yeah. Go for it.

Colleen: Okay. So I think that one of them is be a student of the industry that you’re a part of. So that, you know, you’re reading and know what this company and competitive companies are doing, what they’re saying in their earnings calls, what their stated strategies are, how they’re progressing, because having that worldview makes you much more valuable in your job.

Another one is don’t just tell me the “what”, tell me the “so what”, and you gotta be able to do it in email format that is as big as an iPhone screen. Because nobody’s gonna read very far down. You have to have the ability to concisely communicate well. That’s not something that I take for granted and the people who are really good at it are valuable.

I think another one is to not keep people waiting. No news is not good news. When you’ve been asked to do something, you need to keep people updated about how things are coming along, because I think that that just gives people confidence that you’re good at what you’re doing and you’re on it. I don’t know, those are just a few of the things that I think are important to doing well.

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Duane: Thanks so much, Colleen, what an exciting career.

Colleen: It has been a great ride and I feel very fortunate and I hope I just get to keep going because I’m loving it and I just think this is such an incredibly interesting industry and the people are amazing, and it keeps challenging me. I’m just excited to see what comes next.

Duane: Well, thanks again, Colleen for sharing and thank you, the audience for joining us today. Remember to subscribe or follow this podcast series so you don’t miss an episode. Tell your friends and colleagues about us and share your feedback with us.

And stay tuned at the end of this episode, for more information about MediaScience. Otherwise, I’m Dr. Duane Varan, CEO of MediaScience, thanking you for your company today. Don’t miss our next exciting episode of Legends of Media Research. Thanks again.

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Female Voice: Almost every major innovation in the TV advertising industry over the course of the past decade was first tested by MediaScience researchers.

Whether you’re talking about video ads on mobile phones or limited interruption ad pods, or program context effects or brand integrations or pause ads or picture and picture ads or six second ads or interactive ad formats [laughs]. I mean, the list goes on and on, all were first tested by MediaScience.

MediaScience is the leader in media innovation research. So when you are looking for media or advertising innovation research, collaborate with MediaScience.

Learn more at mediascience.com.

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