Having Fun And Success With Numbers

摘要

Two years ago, Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer of media holding company GroupM, became-somewhat reluctantly-the public face of advertisers' and media agencies' efforts to push for revised Nielsen ratings for TV commercials. While a change in TV marketers' currency would have been big news that year, Scanzoni's shift to focusing on the performance of TV commercials wasn't a spur-of-the-moment thing. It had started more than 20 years before, when buying TV commercials for advertisers was thought to be akin to race-track handicapping. Back in the late 1960s and early '70s, TV buying was about picking new shows-hopefully at small, under-the-ra-dar prices-and then watching the ratings race ahead. "Back then, you could make huge swings by picking the right shows," Scanzoni says. 'You could over-deliver [by a lot]. It was much more about arbitrage: 'Do I buy now-or later?'"