Jed Meyer: Keeping Track of a Deluge of Data

At Omnicom’s Annalect Group, finding the meaning behind a wealth of ratings numbers

By Jon Lafayette -- Broadcasting & Cable, 8/20/2012 12:01:00 AM

B&C's 2012 Digital All-Stars


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.”