Is TV Research a Dying Art on Madison Avenue?

Shari Anne Brill, one of Madison Avenue’s wittiest and most incisive TV researchers, was axed from her longtime post last month as senior VP and director of programming at Carat.

News of her departure (first reported by MediaPost) surprised research peers and media writers alike-and coming just months after Magna parted ways with another veteran research guru, Steve Sternberg, begs the question of what role TV research will continue to play for agencies.

Brill–who was honored as a Wonder Woman by WICT, B&C and Multichannel

News in 2006–spun the numbers for Carat and its clients for 10 years, estimating shares for new shows and developing new cross-platform measurement techniques. Her unvarnished analyses–such as when she said that NBC’s primetime Jay Leno Show “smacked of cost-saving and managing for margins”–made her eminently quotable.

But agencies are increasingly automating their analyses of ratings data with software that tracks any number of factors that a client might care to overlay. Carat did not return calls for comment.