Sales Office By Alex Corteselli

Help Wanted: Next-Gen TV Researchers

Alex Corteselli, VP of Cox Reps and chairman of the Council for Research Excellence's education committee, says there is an urgent need to recruit and train the next generation of researchers. He notes how essential this is for an efficient marketplace, for both buyers and sellers, and how this challenge has been neglected. His committee is spearheading an internship program, and he explains how companies can become involved.
By
TVNewsCheck,

Many readers of this column may know me from the hat I wear as an executive at Cox Reps. These days, I'm wearing the additional hat of chairman of the Council for Research Excellence's recently formed education committee. And I'm writing to address TVNewsCheck readers about the urgent need to fill the huge void of audience researchers. The media and advertising industries need to step up their game in researcher recruiting and training.

The Council for Research Excellence (CRE) is a diverse group of senior research professionals from throughout the media and advertising industries dedicated to advancing the knowledge and practice of audience measurement methodology.

Story continues after the ad

The CRE has commissioned a number of studies during its five-year history -- including major research into video-consumption habits, survey-response bias and the use of set-top boxes in audience measurement, among other efforts. I'm proud of the work my CRE colleagues and I get to do, and I'm excited about my new challenge spearheading the CRE's industry-education initiatives.

And a challenge it is. At the 4As conference earlier this month, among the most pressing industry-wide tasks cited by agency chiefs was the imperative of recruiting bright young talent into careers in advertising and media.

According to press reports, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell labeled the ad industry's current recruitment efforts "criminal neglect." Omnicom Group CEO John Wren said, "We've gotten way too comfortable poaching ... Omnicom has gone to campuses, but we don't stay there ... We pretend to stay there, but we don't."

The problem is even more acute for those of us in the industry's research branch. Attracting bright young minds with a facility for statistical methodologies to join our industry can be a daunting task when Wall Street beckons.

This is, of course, the "Sales Office" column, so why am I writing about the need for better recruitment into research?

Put simply, in our business high-quality audience research is essential to an efficient marketplace for buyer and seller. As an industry, we need to recruit not only promising young sales talent, but talent for other industry disciplines – including the young talent needed to develop and evolve the crucial currency that is audience research data.

At CRE, our mission is to help inspire the next generation of researchers to join the profession and help them obtain the training to allow them to excel.

And in this effort we do have some weapons at our disposal: This is a truly exciting time for audience research; there is of course a heightened focus on the discipline today – fraught with (or possibly advantaged by) challenges and urgency.

We're currently evolving a game plan. A cornerstone of it is CRE's decision to create an internship program – the first-ever that we're aware of solely devoted to media research. It will provide an opportunity for students and help address the challenge of recruiting young talent.

Internships will be offered for summer 2011 through CRE member companies, and we have issued a call to these members to carve out internship positions. We also are encouraging non-CRE member companies to participate.

These internship positions must include some "thought" work; we're asking participating companies to enable students to experience the research process and to keep filing/data entry tasks to a minimum.

We believe CRE's organizational focus and talents can help ensure an enriching program for participating companies and a valuable experience for students.

More about the program can be found in the coming days and weeks on the CRE website: www.researchexcellence.com.

CRE seeks to support continued excellence in research not only by helping to inspire the next generation of researchers to join the profession, but by offering continuing training for those already working in the industry.

To this end, we're considering remote learning sessions for teachers -- to help train the trainers. We also are looking at workshops for students, faculty and industry professionals, including the preparation of training materials. In addition to the planned internship program, our outreach effort will be expanded to college career days.

But as a first step I'd like to encourage TVNewsCheck readers who are interested in learning more about the CRE Internship Program to contact us at info@researchexcellence.com.

If you or a colleague may be interested in establishing a research internship for this summer please contact us by April 14. Of course, we hope to make this an ongoing program, so even if you don't have anything in place for summer 2011 we hope to hear from you.

Working together, employers in advertising and media can help ensure a vital supply of fresh energy and thinking for the field of audience research. Or at least we can help ensure we won't be forever accused of "criminal neglect."

Alex Corteselli is VP, Cox Reps and chairman, education committee, Council for Research Excellence. All about sales and advertising, Sales Office appears once a month in TVNewsCheck through the cooperation of the TVB, which solicits the columns from its staff and members. To see all the columns in the series, click here.

Edit Article

Tags

Comments (3) -

formergm Nickname posted a year ago
|
Good luck with any meaningful investment in research talent. Why would an intelligent, motivated college graduate want to work at a rep or station that treats research people as expendable "back room" drones?
currentgm Nickname posted a year ago
|
if that's what you thought about the research department or how you treated research, there's a reason you're listed as - "formergm" - most of the GM's and Presidents of the Rep I speak with today started off as either a intern in the newsroom or research analyst at station or rep. It sounds like you got into the family business and daddy started you off as assistant to the general manager.......
Tones Nickname posted a year ago
|
Yeah, I'd hope most places don't treat their RDs that way. The good broadcast groups, in particular, value RDs at their stations and at the corporate level.

Today's Top Stories

Classifieds

The Market

Symbol Last Change (%)
Nasdaq 2874.04 -19.72 (-0.68%)
NYSE 7592.82 -42.99 (-0.56%)
S&P 500 1324.80 -5.86 (-0.44%)
Updated 05/17 1:04a ET Quotes delayed at least 20 mins.
Source: Financial Content

Ratings

Overnights, adults 18-49 for May 15, 2012
  • 1.
    3.2/9
  • 2.
    2.8/8
  • 3.
    2.5/7
  • 4.
    1.7/5
  • 5.
    1.6/5
  • 6.
    0.4/1
Source: Nielsen
Reviews
Opinions
Features
  • David Wiegand

    Fans of Sex and the City have finally gotten their wish: Their beloved sex-focused sitcom is back on the air ... sort of. The four women have become four men, of course, and the writing isn't as good. Oh, and the laugh track so annoying, it's offensive. And did I mention that the costumes would be considered fashionable if you were holding a yard sale? Men at Work on TBS is almost quaint, it's so old fashioned. If it had any meat on its bones, you'd be tempted to say it's the sadly ignoble epitome of TV's long-festering emasculated-men syndrome. But it's so much of a big, forgettable, innocuous shrug, it's not even worth any actual vitriol.

  • Mike Hale

    The USA Network's motto is "Characters Welcome." Apparently they're especially welcome if they resemble Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. Already stocked with Odd Couple knockoffs in Psych and White Collar, USA adds to its inventory Common Law, another comic crime-fighting show about mismatched partners. But this latest entry exhibits very little of that kind of spark as it tries to wring laughs from the juxtaposition of counseling and police work. It looks too flat and schematically plotted to succeed as the type of lightweight summer fun we’ve come to expect from USA.

  • Joanne Ostrow

    Johnny Carson: Fantastic entertainer, miserable human being. That's the lasting message of Johnny Carson: King of Late Night, the new PBS American Masters film, a rich history of a rare product of television who dominated the small screen for decades. Unprecedented access to personal archives plus all existing episodes of The Tonight Show (1962-92), distinguishes this film by Peter Jones. Telling interviews with family and colleagues, including second wife Joanne Carson, former Tonight Show executive producer Peter Lassally and a number of biographers sharpen the picture. The clips are carefully selected to illustrate specific personality traits, the performance highlights are given context and meaning beyond funny lines and memorable moments.

  • Hank Stuever

    AMC's The Pitch is a sharply-made if slightly off-putting reality series that follows different advertising agencies each week as they compete for new accounts. The inspiration for the show — made clear by its own ad campaign — is to harness some of the verve generated by the network's acclaimed Mad Men. The Pitch has a way of making the ad world seem like a real downer — a repugnant exercise in egotism laced with depressing bouts of creative compromise.

  • Tim Goodman

    HBO's Veep stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as former Sen. Selina Meyer, who accepts the vice presidential duty and regrets it almost immediately: She has no real power and gets muscled by the Senate, Congress and the (so-far-unseen) president, who delegates all the truly crappy jobs to her. Louis-Dreyfus has found perhaps her best post-Seinfeld role and takes to it with such fervor — the constant swearing, the barely veiled desire to become president, the unhappy give-and-take with other politicians and a delightful disdain for average citizens — that you can't help but applaud what is clearly an Emmy-worthy effort. Her work alone makes Veep a gem, but there's even more to like.

This advertisement will close automatically in  second(s). You will see this ad no more than once a day. Skip ad