Summary:

Scott was the magazine industry’s leading researcher, having led research at both Time Warner and Condé Naste. In this episode, he shares stories from the golden age of magazines – with important lessons for the future (particularly around the importance of ‘context’ which magazines did best). He also discusses the ARF and its future direction. Another episode you won’t want to miss!

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. Today I’m interviewing Dr. Scott McDonald, who is President of the Advertising Research Foundation, the famous ARF.

Now in his previous life, Scott was our industry’s leading researcher in the magazine industry. Over the course of his career, he led research at both Time Inc. and at Condé Nast, the two leading magazine publishers. So today we’re gonna learn a thing or two about research for the magazine industry and its lessons for the larger media industries. And trust me, I think you’re gonna be surprised by just how relevant a lot of these insights are, not only in understanding the past but also in terms of understanding the future and where we need to go. We can learn a lot from this era. And of course, we’ve learned a lot about the era of itself and about Scott, Scott McDonald’s. So without further ado, welcome to our show, Scott.

Dr. Scott: Thank you. Thank you, Duane.

Dr. Scott: Well, there’s a part of it that was kind of pure random accident, I would say. I’d start by saying that I’d gotten hooked on quantitative research before going to graduate school. And actually one of the reasons that I decided to go get a Ph.D. was that I was pretty interested in just the quotidian problems of how you gather data and accurately reflect it back and summarize it and analyze it.

 

And I got into that again, through almost an accidental kind of… I needed a job when I graduated from UC Berkeley and I went to the hard posting, you know, billboard down the basement of some building there where you could look for jobs, where they were looking for anyone to help on a project and I ended up signing on with a little research institute that did work on educational program evaluation.

 

I was the only person in this relatively small firm that actually liked going out interviewing people and then trying to distill and summarize that. Part of that was… I got to drive to every school district in the state of California, so it was all very beautiful sort of road trips in different parts of California. But it got me to a point of really liking doing applied research. Research that mattered in the decisions in business or government. Doing projects for the California Department of Education, for Bay Area Rapid Transit, things like that.

 

So I was already considering a non-academic track, even when I started graduate school. Now, you know, spending five years at Harvard, they obviously do a pretty good job of encouraging people to stay in academia and they give you opportunities to not only do research there, but also to teach. And Harvard undergrads are fun to teach, I gotta say.

 

Some of them that were in my classes remain good friends to this day. So it was a difficult kind of fork in the road. I was planning to go out to practice my sort of job pitch skills at a couple of academic departments. And in fact, got a very attractive offer from the University of Arizona, as long as I was willing to go there immediately and start teaching three classes a little sooner than I thought I was ready to take that on, ‘cause I still had work to do on my dissertation.

 

Quite out of the blue, I got a lead on a potential job, a kind of serious quantitative applied research job at Time Magazine in New York.
There’s a theory in sociology called “the strength of weak ties”. It was at that point, I think, kind of a minority view about how people got jobs that just had to do with social networks, and this was back before we actually had electronic social networks. So people studying networks had to deal with like, you know, the classic work was 19th century English parish records where, so, and so vacated a job and it created opportunities up a chain of command. So people who studied how those networks worked, thought that there were “the weak ties”: not the people you knew really closely, but the next ring or the ring out from that in terms of who they knew.

 

My thesis advisor’s wife had gone to high school in Illinois with a guy that was involved in research at Sports Illustrated, part of Time Inc., and when Time Inc. came to the point of being frustrated with their understanding of readers per copy, and why Time Magazine -the larger news magazine- had kind of equivalent audience size to Newsweek, smaller circulation magazines -Newsweek had higher readers per copy in the audience surveys-. They found that the usual research folks that they would recruit mostly from ad agencies, didn’t really have enough academic background to be able to try and tackle those kinds of questions. And so they decided to reach out and try and bring in some scholarly hires.

 

And that is what resulted in this kind of random note: “are you interested in interviewing for a job at Time Magazine?” It really came through the weak tie of my thesis advisor’s wife’s high school acquaintance in Illinois. Classic example of weak ties.

 

That was kind of the fork in the road: go teach an academic sociological position at the University of Arizona or move to New York and start focusing on media subjects. And I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to move to the big city and work in a media context, even though it really wasn’t literally what I’d focused on in my graduate studies.

Dr. Scott: Yeah, there was some of that. I mean, I enjoyed the work at Time Inc. Although I think about a year and a half into it, I started feeling restless and was considering again another academic position and got offered one at the University of California at Irvine.
But at that point, they must have noticed that I was feeling a little bit frustrated at Time Magazine and they offered to sort of move me over to Time Inc., the parent company, and established the first Consumer Research Department at Time Inc. So that was the same department that some years later Betsy Frank took over.
I think she was working on TV during those years, but when she left TV, she came to Time Inc. and was effectively running the same department. Ian Lewis also. I think it was my immediate success when I left that position.

Dr. Scott: Usually you don’t get a second chance for a tenure track position. It feels very fateful when making that decision. It’s interesting because I was so mindful of that, that that became the main point of negotiation with Time Magazine. As I look back on it, one of the smarter things I did early in my career.

I was nervous about abandoning academia altogether and I kind of liked it. I liked the values of academia. I liked teaching. I could imagine myself doing some teaching on the side while I was working in business. I liked working with real data. I liked working in applied settings. I was happy with that. But in negotiating with Time Magazine about this initial job, I wasn’t haggling about the salary, that seemed okay. The main things I wanted them to put in writing as part of my job offer letter had to do with them giving me permission to publish, to be a speaker at industry events, to be able to speak at forums like APO, the PAA, the American Statistical Association. Soon I was to discover forums like the ARF, the Worldwide Readership Research symposium.

All sorts of other stages in which you have an opportunity to try to lead the profession and put out work that moves the field forward. And I was very concerned about being cooped up in a corporation where they really didn’t let you out for that. So that was my main condition. Apart from a delayed start date, that would allow me to actually finish the first draft of my dissertation before I moved from Cambridge to New York.
I wanted a guarantee that I was going to be allowed to participate as a professional in the broader field and not be locked up inside of the high keep of the Time and Life building.

Dr. Scott: Yeah. And before that, even at NYU. I taught Media Sociology at NYU for five years. And then took a bit of a break and then started to run teaching a course with David Poltrack. For part of the time also with Horst Stipp at Columbia Business School. And that gig went on for nearly 20 years.

I’ve always found teaching to be very, very useful in helping you consolidate your view of the field, keeping up with the field because it’s a very dynamic field. Media research changes as fast as media do.

One year something like say, programmatic, buying is a concept that people are talking about, the next year it’s 50% of the market in digital. I mean, the pace of change is phenomenally fast and that has to be reflected in teaching. But teaching also requires that you not have a lot of presuppositions about what your audience understands, so you have to try to explain from first principles. And I think it always makes people better at their day jobs if they’re kind of flexing that muscle in a classroom as well.

Duane: And what a contribution to the industry as well.

So Scott let’s go back. So you joined Time Inc. Now you coming from this academic background – you would’ve been the odd duck in the organization, right?

Dr. Scott: Definitely.

Duane: [laughs] What was that like?

Dr. Scott: You know, I made it pretty much a badge of honor. I mean, the deal that I struck with Time Inc. about that first job obliged them to put me through the equivalent of a tenure review at five-year intervals where we’d convene a body of a couple of outsiders who would evaluate the work I’d done for, conferences, for publications, for things of that sort and make that a formal part of my job review.

And that was just so completely weird [Duane laughs] that it definitely set me apart from any others, but it actually built credibility because they understood that I wasn’t there just to do the bidding of some constituent within the corporation or not. And I think this is really important for any researcher in any organization to the degree that you can report to kind of the President’s line of control, rather than be under the thumb of Marketing, under the sun of Product.

In the studio system, in media, if you’re working just for the sort of content side or you’re working only for the marketing side, you’re under a lot of pressure to go along with what they’re trying to argue for and what you really want to do if you’re a strong researcher, is you want to try and go for whatever is actually the direction that the data are pointing you.

And that isn’t always so easy. I have to say, ultimately when I left Time Inc. to go to work at Time Warner Corporate, as we were moving quickly into the digital era, I had a great opportunity to study how this was changing consumer behavior with media and how it would change the kinds of approaches to bringing media to market.

There’s a lot of contending factions and research really should be the way of representing the consumer in that, but it always can get very political and make it difficult to be heard and have people take the information too hard.
I wasn’t always successful at that at Time Warner. That was actually one of the reasons that I left after 18 years. But that was always the attempt.

 

Dr. Scott: Yeah. And it was built really on the idea that research needs to speak truth to power. Your job is to try to represent reality as best you can. I think it’s the mission of science and to the degree that we represent science and scientific method in whatever our field of endeavor is, whether it’s media research or any other endeavor.

You need to try to get it right and you need to be open to revising your point of view if you get new data that comes in and it would point you in a different direction. That’s really the activity that we’re engaged in.

You’d started out by asking about how weird it was to come in from a field like sociology. I still consider that that’s what I do. It’s always what I’ve done. It’s just in a media research context. Sociology’s a very porous field in some ways, it touches lots of other areas of the social sciences and applied research as well. From my standpoint, I’ve always done applied sociology.

Duane: So we should probably pause for a second, Scott, ‘cause what I’m realizing as we’re talking, we’re about to talk about the rest of your career in the magazine industry, and I’ve suddenly realized that a lot of the audience won’t know what the magazine industry really was like.

I mean, particularly as an industry, not just as a medium that you see kind of like at the supermarket checkout, but I mean, in its day, just how amazing and how powerful – and a lot of the insights that we have from what was the magazine industry in terms of where we’re going, the passion that people had. When we think of magazines again and their heyday, people had a passion for magazines that was greater even than the passion that they had for most TV shows.

When you think about the context of advertising in magazines and the way ads worked and the high regard that people had for ads, not like what we think of today, where we’re thinking about getting rid of ads from our experience. Maybe you could tell us a little bit, describe for us what the magazine landscape as an industry was like at its peak.

Dr. Scott: Sure. Magazines were, in some ways, the first mass media. Newspapers were always very local and very important. You had multiple newspapers in each city. Beginning really in the late 19th century, magazines became a key part of a national medium.

So national advertisers wanted to be in those and they really built around particular points of passion that people had. There would be home-making magazines. There would be news magazines. There would be sports magazines. Big visionaries, like Henry Luce, who founded Time Magazine and Life wanted to create more of a kind of national dialogue around current events and news, facts and opinion.

A somewhat more high-brow approach to reporting what was taking place in the world anywhere at that time, augmented a lot by photography, of course. Photography was always very, very important to that magazine experience, but the titles for which Condé Nast became very famous, titles like Vogue, Gourmet, GQ, Vanity Fair and of course, The New Yorker, all represented not just a media product, but a kind of a lifestyle that people would aspire to. It meant something that you were in the audience of one magazine versus another. It was a form of proclaiming your identity and in the heyday of magazines, that was very, very true.

The editors of those magazines were tastemakers. In the context of advertising, it’s quite interesting because the ads in each of these sort of vertically specific magazines always felt like they belonged there. They were part of the benefit of the magazine.

September Vogue is the classic case. It had the same amount of editorial pages every September, but a really successful September Vogue was like a phone book. It was very, very fat with ads and those ads were part of the value. So think about that in the context of how we think about advertising now.

Advertising right now is mostly thought of as this, at best, an annoying interruption. People worry about overdoing frequency in TV advertising showing the same ad too many times, same thing in all forms of digital. It’s a model that we inherited from TV that’s highly interruptive. You’re doing one thing and then the ad’s coming in and interrupting you. You gotta wait five seconds to be able to swat it away. It’s that irritating model, kind of hostile model. Very, very different in the context of magazines, because they were part of the value proposition and part of the enjoyment. Some of the most beautiful ads that you could kind of project yourself into. “I really wanna be on that beach”, “I’d look so good in that dress”.

Those kinds of invitations to put yourself into the picture were kind of how magazines work psychologically. And how magazine advertising works psychologically is really very, very different from that interruptive model, which is now kind of metastasized into privacy invading, tracking you from place to place. You buy something in a store and half an hour later, you’re getting hit with an ad that’s targeted to you because of that. People are talking about it as “surveillance advertising”. This is the unfortunate consequence of moving too far away from that magazine advertising model, in my view, and treating audiences as just being the composite of these digital attributes that are gathered from your browsing activity view.

Dr. Scott: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s one of the ironies. We’re having kind of contextual advertising coming back and people trying to find ways of folding that into digital advertising, but it was always there in magazines.

The sad part is that even though there was still consumer demand for printed magazines persisting as late as 2010 from the data, I can see that the magazines started going under because they were abandoned by the advertisers, and their revenue model depended heavily on that. So only those that could manage to charge subscribers a lot of money like The New Yorker survives, because people will pay $150 a year subscriptions for it. And you see what’s happened. If you buy the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, you see these publications survive because they charge a lot more money.

That tends to skew those magazines way upmarket. It’s in my view, probably not the best thing for democracy, to put such a high tariff on quality information and leave everybody else to whatever they can find on social media. I think we’ve lost a lot in permitting all advertising to go to this sort of highly specific tracking model.

There’s an interesting anecdote about what I’d said before, about how the ads in magazines kind of belong there because they are contextually relevant. We had one episode that was quite amusing when I worked at Condé Nast where the head of corporate sales struck a big deal with McDonald’s and a McDonald’s ad ran in all the Condé Nast titles, including The New Yorker, Vogue, GQ, Architectural Digest, all these very sort of high-end glossy magazines, and we got complaints from consumers [laughs]. It offended their sensibilities to have a McDonald’s ad.

Dr. Scott: It wasn’t like there was something wrong with the product, but it was like “what’s that doing in my magazine?” [Duane laughs]
It was a transgression against the kind of expected “who gets invited into this room” kind of sensibility that attaches around those magazines

Duane: Sorry, that was a little bit of a digression. Let’s go back to your career. So you were at Time Warner, you had moved into Time Warner corporate, and you were now building this new research unit there.

Dr. Scott: It was great fun [laughs]

Dr. Scott: The growth of digital media in the 1990s was quite profound, and Time Warner was trying to be kind of ahead of the curve. Some of those were misplaced efforts like the full-service network, which was a precursor to video on demand, but the technology wasn’t quite ready yet. It wasn’t scalable but it was still fun to do work on it and try and understand how it would start affecting consumer choice and how even simple things, like I learned about usability testing through trying to help develop the first remote controls for television sets that could accommodate kind of complex things that weren’t just about changing the volume in the channel. Or trying to design IP telephony about five years before it was technically feasible to make that offer.

If you’re designing this system, what’s the value that the consumer will place on call waiting? [laughs] But call waiting doesn’t exist yet. It’s just a concept. Or being able to store voicemail. These are things we of course think of as trivial right now, but they didn’t exist.

They were part of a challenge to research to try and figure out what’s the incremental amount that it’s worth. Should we put this feature in or not? And how would you know that? To the researcher, the applied researcher that I was, these were great and interesting problems, but the biggest problem –and it really had to do with my decision to leave Time Warner, really just had to do with the fundamental problem that as you expand the volume of choice you end up –you know, with the worldwide webs advent in 1994, you could basically navigate through pretty slow, baud rate dialogues, but you could access websites all over the world. And suddenly you just had this problem of managing an enormous amount of choice.

The management at Time Warner was pretty convinced that the model for that, for helping consumers manage that choice was through the metaphor of the shopping mall; that you kind of aggregate these things and you have anchor stores and big brands that people would come to, and all of our research really concluded over and over again that the mall wasn’t the model. That the choice was really important and what you needed was effective search.

The search engines then were pretty bad. They would not give you very relevant results. The algorithms for identifying the questions that you… right now, you would type into Google and get a good response on; didn’t exist then. Google didn’t exist then. But as soon as Google did arrive on the scene and provided like the early example of highly relevant search, it blew everything else away, at least in the research that we were doing. But that was a case where it just was impossible to convince the management of the company, so they persisted in what was, I thought, a strategically disastrous direction.

For me, a merge with AOL was kinda like the last straw ‘cause AOL was built around a similar kind of aggregation model. It indicated to me that I just wasn’t getting through and it was time to go, which proved to be financially very lucky for me because all my stock options that I’d accumulated from all those years of working at Time Warner were suddenly exercisable and being prized a lot in the sort of big boom time around 2000 when all this happened.

So it was a good time to make an exit, but it also was a bit of a frustration because what I was trying to do professionally was to get Time Warner to go a different direction from the one that they ultimately took.

 

Duane: You were talking about the mall metaphor and the full-service network. Just for the benefit of the audience, who may not have seen what that looked like, it was such a beautiful experience. Even today with the benefit of hindsight, when you look back and think about what technology could do in that era, you’d go like –the way the interface worked.

You would have this very media-rich experience where you’d be going for a walk, as you say, in an outdoor mall, and you’d walk past the Disney store and suddenly the tile on the floor below you would light up. And you would tell you were in front of the Disney store and you’d continue walking. I mean, a beautiful experience, but pretty impractical [laughs].

Dr. Scott: Yeah. It wasn’t scalable at all. It really didn’t map to what people were finding the most exciting about the growth of digital at that point, which was this sort of unfettered choice.

Duane: Yeah. So it’s interesting, when you don’t know the future, you’re trying to grapple with what it might look like, you know? A mall kind of like makes sense, I guess, in one sense, but of course it didn’t turn out to be the metaphor that works [laughs].

Dr. Scott: Right, right. It is interesting though, that we understand these things a lot through things like metaphors. I guess that was sort of a meta lesson for me and all of that. If you wanted to throw in the mall metaphor, you needed a different metaphor to help people understand it, you know?

Duane: Right, right.

So you made the transition, then you left and cashed out, so to speak, and went to Condé Nast. How did that happen? And what was that like? What was that experience like for you?

Dr. Scott: People said it was gonna be a big culture clash. Condé Nast was a private company –very fancy company with iconic editors, iconic magazine brands. It was facing the same issues of the transition to digital. I had a great time there. It was very welcoming and here I was able to take some of what I’d already learned from Time Warner and insist that my line of reporting went through to the President of Condé Nast.

The owner of Condé Nast, S.I. Newhouse was surprisingly interested in how everything worked. including, say, my new stand forecasting model. One of the advantages of doing work in magazines is that you at least, prior to the advent of the iPhone, when all attention sort of went to these little screens, people would fill their time at supermarket checkout, kind of browsing the magazines that were on display there.

You could observe that, you could time it and you could understand something about how their eyes moved across the surface. These were all things you could study directly, but you also had an expected number of magazine copies that you could sell at the newsstand every week that would be, from a statistical standpoint, kind of like your baseline. And then you could take measurements with alternative cover subjects or cover treatments and look for the deviations from that baseline that would be indicative of a strong sale or a weak sale.

 

Dr. Scott: Exactly. The reason that Condé Nast wanted to hire me was because I’d done some sort of pioneering work along these lines at Time Inc. and at Time Warner. All of the work I did at Time Inc. and Time Warner was on the consumer side. It wasn’t really the advertising side of the business. So it was how do you stimulate consumer demand? How do you get consumer acceptance of products? And it had been very focused on supporting editorial decision-making.

And that again, I think is partly where my sociological background, this sort of, you know, Harvard PhD, helped quite a lot, because culturally, I was closer to the editors than to the ad sales people. We would see each other at Carnegie Hall or Bam or something – you’d bump into people in a cultural milieu in New York city. I kind of was a more natural fit with a lot of the editors, and that was actually kind of an asset in an editorial, creatively driven company like Condé Nast. It was a fun challenge to kind of build the science piece to support those editors.

Anna Wintour would create alternative Vogues. Any of my editors there at any of the magazines, the exception being The New Yorker, which we had sort of a different relationship with them; but the ones that relied heavily on newsstand sales, we had a common motivation.

I wanted to perfect the forecasting model and they wanted to sell more copies at newsstand. And so it became a fun partnership and something that I feel quite proud of. Like I say, it was very much undone by the rapid expansion of the iPhone, which changed behavior in a significant way.

That became then a subject of study later on as to how to respond to that. But for quite a long time, that was a major focus. I also got to work on advertising-related issues on how advertising works, so some of the things that I was talking about earlier with regard to the differences between the sort of invitational model of magazine advertising and the interruptive model television advertising grew out of that advertising side of my career at Condé Nast.

Dr. Scott: Yeah. Well, S.I. Newhouse did arrive early and they didn’t like to leave him unsupervised for very long so you’d show up at the office at like 4:30. So it wasn’t that unusual to have 6:30 meetings. Like I say, I would be out seeing a concert or something in the evening or a play. Condé Nast wasn’t always great for me getting enough sleep, but it was still a fun place to work and kind of enjoyed the experience.

Dr. Scott: I certainly tried.
[laughs]

Dr. Scott: Well, ultimately, with the growth of the smartphones and the growth of social media, eventually then you started having sort of social media stars and social media influencers. It pulled some of the exclusivity of editorial power as a tastemaker, as king acres. Some of that got leached out as social media and sort of social media influencers grew. And as I said, the advertising dollars were chasing that. I mean, you can sort of see the massive movement of dollars to Facebook, to YouTube, to all of these sorts of other players and directly out of magazines.

Eventually, most magazine companies depended disproportionately on advertiser support. They weren’t as expensive to consumers. I think when I joined Condé Nast 90% of the revenue came from advertising. One of the strategic goals there was to adjust that and make that less true, but the 90% is a pretty hard place to start from if you’re trying to diversify your revenue stream and move toward more consumer support. So yeah, ultimately there was enough financial pressure that everything started shaking out, and that was sort of the end of what we now describe as the golden age of magazines.

By that time it was pretty much time for me to retire and step back. My timing was, in that respect, pretty, pretty lucky. A good 14 years at Condé Nast. So it was a good long run there.

Dr. Scott: Yeah. I mean, the something that happened was the position opening to lead the ARF and I’d been involved with the ARF for pretty much since I started in the business, and always viewed it as an important organization for helping to improve the practice of advertising and marketing and media research.

In part, it’s a forum, a place where people can argue about different views and where you can do some work to try to sort out the wheat from the chaff and identify best practices and make the industry smarter. So to me, it was an important opportunity and I think at the point that I took it on, it was kind of a need of refocusing on its original mission, which is to bring the discipline of science to the practice of marketing and advertising. Science means something really specific to me; I don’t mean it’s like guys in white lab coats, I mean science means falsifiable propositions.

It means a very empirical frame of mind. It means trying to establish with as much rigor as you can, what are the facts. I was like the saying from Daniel Patrick Moynihan that you’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. So I think organizations like the ARF, which make the pursuit of science in the practice of advertising and marketing their central mission, this is a good thing, this is something that we should champion and try to build upon. So for me, that was enough reason to kind of come out of my semi-retirement.

Dr. Scott: Very much, very much. The 17th century was the place where Western civilization basically embraced science. I mean, at the start of the 17th century, I think it was like Macbeth was written in, I think 1603. And so there was all this magic, there were like witches, it was widely believed at that point that a murder would start bleeding at the eyes at the site of the victim. There were all these sorts of things that seem preposterous to us now but Jordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for the heresy of persisting in claiming that the Sun did not revolve around the Earth. We now, of course, know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but he went to the stake for that.

And 50 years later, by 1650, that had all collapsed. And the power of the dogma of traditional Catholic thought was broken by the 30 Years War. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Religious tolerance. And from that point forward you had the Enlightenment beginning. You had the notion, particularly in England, which had this sort of empirical variant of Enlightenment thought that you build sort of a body of information by, you know, advancing hypotheses and then testing them using experiments, and using the methods of science. Every hypothesis has to be falsifiable. You can’t advance something as a serious hypothesis without it being something that can be disproven and incrementally, you’ll take advantage of all the diversity of human intelligence and human endeavor and make incremental progress in what you know, and what you can do. And that’s kind of what we live on to this day.

The things that we marvel at are the fruits of that kind of scientific advancement. And I think it’s super important and it’s even more important in an era where we’ve had, in some ways, an effort to kind of repeal the enlightenment. Leadership in the United States, that demeans expertise, demeans science, tries to treat facts as relativistic and they’re not. That kind of coincided with my taking on the reigns of the ARF so I get on my higher horse a bit, but in our domain, in our area of study and activity, I think it’s just incredibly important that we honor those traditions of the Enlightenment and that we stand up for the principles of science and it’s not anything goes.

[laughs]
I mean, some things are right, some things aren’t. As best we can tell.

Dr. Scott: Well, I think part of it certainly is around sort of restoring the central position of the ARF’s mission.

I also see the ARF as being pretty unique, almost the only association of its type that stretches across such diverse constituencies. I mean, it is by design sort of about 25% marketers, 25% ad agencies, so those two are the buy side. And then you’ve got about 25% media companies, which now include the tech platforms, and about 25% research companies, which includes everyone from big guys, like Nielsen, to companies like MediaScience or brand consultancies, or ad tech companies that are offering services to the buy side.

It’s very contested terrain, which is why you need a true north-like science, but managing that balance is, I think, part of what’s unique and important about the ARF. I also wanted to restore research as a core function of the ARF. It has historically conducted its own research. I think it also can beneficially bring research wherever the ARF thinks it’s good stuff to bring it to the attention of the membership. It doesn’t have to invent all of it itself. So that was one of the main things that I wanted to address.

The ARF didn’t have a funding mechanism for research. Projects would happen because they were able to attract sponsors, but sponsors usually have a dog in the fight. They’ve got some point of view and the whole point is to have it be objective and neutral with regard to those sort of dogs and fights. We kind of instituted what we love and then called the tie.

It’s actually a bit closer to like a 401k plan where a fraction of every company’s dues to the ARF goes into the reserve fund, and each year companies kind of allocate what percent they want to go: to cross-platform audience management, or attribution advertising effectiveness, or advertising creative, or consumer trend research, or organizational research.

We’ve got these sort of broad buckets that we’ve learned from members are the things that they’re most focused on, but we ask people to kind of allocate their 100 points and guide that investment decision with regard to research. Then we’ve got a bunch of other mechanisms that we’ve revitalized that are our listening posts to find out what are the pain points in the places where we can beneficially do work on subjects of interest to our members.

I’ve just tried to make it a lot more member-focused, but where research is the product. And some of that research we can do directly through the council programs; also kind of expanded our remit a bit by bringing in two organizations, first CIM in 2018, the Coalition for Innovative Media measurement that does a lot of work on assessing innovations in media measurement. Very, very technical and very specific, but that became a place where you could kind of go deeper in that important part of ARF activity. And then in 2021, the Marketing Science Institute, which is this venerable organization to build closer alignment between the work that’s done at business schools, at leading business schools, and what marketers need.

MSI has a great tradition. They’ve done pioneering work on brand management, things like conjoint analysis got invented there [laughs], so they’re like important methodological advances that you can credit to MSI, so it comes into the ARF as kind of our more marketer-oriented sort of academic division.

These are both organizations that have missions aligned with the ARF’s mission, so that’s the other thing that I have tried to do. It’s just to figure out ways that the ARF can work on things that benefit the industry that are true to its mission, but that are kind of weakly correlated with our main revenue sources so that we kind of diversify revenue.

We’ve launched a certification program with NYU. Have teaching students, upskilling students, many of which work for ARF member companies already. But teaching them about the newer developments in digital marketing and newer research techniques, and offering a certification program, so any revenue that we make there is through tuition. That kind of stuff, where it’s useful for improving the ARF as a nonprofit business, but also pushing on the sort of mission-specific goals. 

Dr. Scott: Yeah, well, you know, the pandemic was paradoxical. In some ways we’ve done pretty well in the pandemic because there, our members just needed help a lot more and we’d already moved. I mean, one of the other things that I really tried to do as quickly as possible was to reduce the ARF’s dependence on big New York-based conferences as the main thing that it did. I think it was too big of an emphasis and a lot of financial risk if you’re making big guarantees to big Midtown hotels.

It encouraged again, too much dependence on sponsorships, which can be corrupting too. We’d already moved away from that toward more digital distribution of content, trying to get content easily to our members in Seattle and in Atlanta and in Los Angeles. And, you know [laughs], just every place else.

The pandemic of course facilitated that because everybody changed behavior. They started relying a lot more upon Zoom and teams and, you know, digital connections to run their businesses at the same time that they needed objective information to help them cope with the disruptions of the pandemic and other things taking place at that time.

The fact that we’d already started to shift our content distribution strategy in that direction just meant we could accelerate that. Basically, we’re doing twice the number of events that we were doing pre-pandemic and are able to accelerate the amount of content that we move along but do it far less expensively and on a distributed model that doesn’t involve the expectation that people are gonna fly to New York for a four-day conference.

Dr. Scott: Well, I certainly wanna see… I mean, we’ve launched this certification program at NYU and I think that’s got great promise. We still kind of have to finish. We’ve got the first two electives launching in, I guess, the week after next. We’ve already run the foundation course a few times. We’ve had about 80 students go through it so far. And I’m interested in kind of building that out. I see this also because it’s a hybrid course. It involves one weekly meeting. It’s all virtual, but it’s one weekly meeting where students log in from wherever they are. And we’ve had them in China and in Mexico and Canada and Russia, and various other places.

I’m very interested in this sort of educational initiative as both a way of kind of engaging some of our members who wanna get more experience in teaching and in kind of upholding the values of pedagogical approaches that were sort of passed on best practices information. But I think this is also an opportunity to give the ARF more international, more global presence. I’d like to see where we can go with that.

We’ve also been interested in trying to improve some of the kind of plumbing and infrastructure that supports a lot of research. And in particular, we have an initiative “DASH”, ARF DASH, which stands for Device and Account Sharing.

You think of it as a universe estimate study. A syndicated universe estimate study on the relationship between our digital IDs. So that might be our devices, our browsers, any of the other sorts of digital signals and our persons and household’s identities. Any of us have multiple digital IDs and they kind of map up to who we are as a person or what household we live in and depending upon the scale level of aggregation of data, a lot of error and noise can occur there.

This is a study we’ve done in partnership with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to kind of create an industry-standard resource audited by the MRC that allows companies to, instead of doing a weak cut-rate universe estimate study of their own, to kind of buy into our million-dollar universe estimate study and take some of that noise and mess out of there.
This helps to sort of build a capacity, I think, for measurement companies. And again, it’s under the heading of things that are worth doing that improve the industry, but that also set up a different source of revenue other than member dues and conferences and publications, the other sort of main sources of revenue.

Dr. Scott: For me, it flows pretty directly from my own experience. You’re in this for the long haul and your identity as a professional needs to be a top priority.

Contribute to the industry, be present, give papers, share your intellect and your passion and be mindful of the fact that you’re building your own professional brand by your role, your presence, your visibility in the profession. It’s just super important that everybody think of themselves as being part of a profession that is yours to participate in for a period of time and then you’ll exit.

In the same way that the ARF was started by a bunch of, you know, smart people in the 1930s that I never had the chance to meet. If I have anything to do with it, it will be around long after I’ve left the scene. We’re all custodians of these institutions and of these professions. Make the most of it, but think of yourself in that context of being part of a broader profession. That would be my counsel.

 

Dr. Scott: Thank you, Duane. It was great talking with you.

Duane: Thanks again, Scott, and thank you, the audience for joining us today. If you’d like today’s episode, make sure you follow or subscribe to the series if you haven’t done so already, so you don’t miss a single episode. And tell your friends and colleagues about us so they don’t miss out either. And feel free to leave us a reviewer’s comment. We’d love to hear from you.

And if you’d like, stick around for more information about media science at the end of the episode. Otherwise, I’m CEO, Dr. Duane Varan, thanking you for your company today and inviting you to our next exciting episode of Legends of Media Research.

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