Bill Harvey, the media research innovator who invented Arbitron’s Area of Dominant Influence and later founded RMTLabs, spent more than 35 years shaping how the industry measures audiences and ad effectiveness, and died Sunday at 84 after a short illness.
His influence traces back to the early 1970s. As head of strategy for the American Research Bureau, the precursor to Arbitron, Harvey developed the concept of the Area of Dominant Influence, establishing a geographic framework for defining television markets. He also worked as a media research executive at Grey Advertising, Kenyon & Eckhardt and Interpublic, developing early media optimizers.
Harvey’s ties to Arbitron continued well beyond that early work. He later consulted with the company on ScanAmerica and the Portable People Meter.
With IBM and Leonard Matthews, former CEO of Y&R and Leo Burnett, Harvey went on to found Next Century Media, an interactive media advisor to advertisers, agencies, entertainment companies and media companies worldwide. The firm helped lead the development of addressable television advertising and interactive media measurement standards, working with organizations including the ANA, 4As, ARF, IAB and CableLabs. Harvey originated and drafted the CASIE Principles, which helped establish industry privacy standards, and the firm invented and patented a system for targeting television commercials to individual homes and people.
As senior vice president and general manager of OpenTV Research, a unit he conceived for OpenTV, Harvey led the landmark Aurora trial of SpotOn addressable commercials for Comcast, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson and the US Army.
He then founded TRA to make single-source research economically scalable, pioneering the use of naturally occurring data at scale by connecting set-top box and digital clickstream data with household-level purchase data. TiVo acquired TRA in 2012.
Harvey most recently served as founder, chairman and chief research officer of RMTLabs, a company he co-founded to make human motivation measurable and actionable for marketers, building on decades of his research into how advertising connects with audiences.
