All Posts By

Pete Doe

Sep 17 2018
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Regression to the Mean: What is it and Why Does it Matter for TV Advertising?

By | clypd Blog, Research | No Comments

What can Magic Johnson teach us about advanced TV advertising? He has appeared in many commercials over the years (including AT&T, Coca Cola and MasterCard), but it is his sporting career that gives us important insights into how performances vary and how even hall of famers struggle to maintain the same level of results year after year. And this struggle to maintain performance applies to many things, including TV shows.

Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson burst onto the scene in 1979, becoming the first and only rookie to win the NBA Finals MVP award. He also holds the NBA record for assists per game (APG), averaging 11.2 across his career in regular season play. When we look at his APG stats by year, we see he improved through the first few years of his career, then hit a high point, culminating in a league-leading 13.1 APG in 1983-4. Heading into 1984-5 it would have been natural to think that he might continue improving, with an APG of 14 or even 15 as the logical next step. But it didn’t happen like that: Magic performed well in the following years, but he never got above 13 again. Read More

Oct 24 2016
1

Forecasting Audiences: It’s Essential, But No One Said It Was Easy

By | clypd Blog | No Comments

Linear TV is a futures market: deals are agreed ahead of campaigns being aired, usually with an agreement that a particular audience level will be delivered. For this to work as efficiently as possible, good audience forecasts are essential. Where forecasts are wrong, the media owner either over delivers, effectively giving away audiences for free, or under-delivers, requiring additional inventory to be added to the campaign for free.

Forecasting is a lesson in humility because no one gets it right all the time (Exhibit A: the media’s current favorite geeky guru, Nate Silver, who failed to predict that Donald Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee). No forecast is perfect and no forecasting model is good for all time, because the landscape is always changing.

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Sep 16 2016
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Can We Trust Political Polls and Why Do We Still Use Nielsen Ratings?

By | Ad Tech Musings, clypd Blog, Industry Chatter | No Comments

The answers to these questions have a common origin that takes us back 80 years to 1936. Commercial consumer and social research was a new business then – AC Nielsen had been founded 13 years previously (in 1936 it was about the same age as Facebook is now) and Gallup inc. was just one year old. As it turned out, events in 1936 would soon make Gallup front-page news.

Like 2016, 1936 was a general election year in the US and there were opinion polls. One organization that considered itself expert in this field was The Literary Digest, a magazine that had been in the polling business since 1916.

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Mar 10 2016
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Beer, Diapers And The Programmatic TV Challenge

By | clypd in the News | No Comments

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in programmatic TV and video.

Today’s column is written by Pete Doe, chief research officer at clypd.

About 10 years ago while working at Nielsen, we began creating integrated data sets linking consumer and media behavior to help agencies plan better campaigns and media owners better understand and monetize their audiences.

One sunny spring morning in New York we met with a cable network to present some results. We had fused Nielsen currency ratings with consumer panel purchase data, revealing that the network’s highest indexing product categories were beer and diapers. I felt slightly nervous that insight might be an example of “Twyman’s law,” which states that if a research finding looks interesting, it’s probably wrong.”

Read the full piece here.