[Editor’s note: Since this interview, Kristin Dolan was named CEO of AMC Networks, where she began her career in 1989. UAlbany Magazine profiled her impressive career in media and entertainment in our Spring 2015 issue.]
There’s a shake-up happening in the television landscape and the likely result will be a better TV viewing experience for everyone. At least that’s the aim behind a tech start-up called 605, an advertising measurement and attribution company founded by Kristin Dolan ’88.
“It’s about making the advertising more effective. I hate getting ads for diapers. I mean, I’m 56,” laughed Dolan during a Zoom interview. “I'd rather see fewer, more relevant ads because it makes my experience better.”
The key to making the TV experience better, Dolan says, is to gather better data, glean better insights and deliver better outcomes. It's 605’s rallying call as they seek to revamp the television analytics landscape for advertisers, networks and, most importantly, for viewers.
Tens of billions of dollars are spent annually by advertisers looking to reach the vast viewing audiences of broadcast networks and cable channels. Placement of those ad dollars is based on viewership data and, for the past 70 years, one company has dominated the television audience measurement field: Nielsen.
The “Nielsen rating,” a statistical estimate of the number of households watching a given television program, holds significant sway over the rise and fall of careers and fortunes in the TV business. For some Nielsen critics, that is exactly the problem. The company uses a “panel” — a small group of viewers used to represent a larger group. In an August 2022 press release, Nielsen announced its U.S National Television panel grew to 42,000 households. That is a tiny fraction of the more than 120 million TV homes in the U.S. Some networks and advertisers decry this as not sufficiently representative, nor accurate, of actual TV viewership.
“Now it’s just scale. The tech is ready, the company is ready … So, now it’s just waiting for the market to kind of catch up and it's starting to hit.”
In August 2021, the Media Ratings Council, an industry regulatory body, suspended Nielsen’s accreditation for underreporting viewership during the coronavirus pandemic. That action reverberated throughout the TV analytics landscape and opened a crack through which entered throngs of new alternative measuring companies, including Dolan’s 605.
“Every night, [605] measures tens of millions of households’ worth of viewership data that comes to us in a privacy compliant way,” Dolan said while drawing a distinction between 605’s capabilities and Nielsen's.
“So, when an advertiser comes to 605 and says, ‘I want to know what my advertising did,’ we’re not saying here's what [thousands] of households did and we’re going to extrapolate up. We’re saying here’s what 44 million devices did and we're going to extrapolate up.”
But, measuring what viewers watched in the past tense is the old battle, said Dolan. The new frontlines in TV measurement, she adds, are attribution (knowing which ads worked and why), prediction (knowing the outcomes of future ad spending) and cross-platform unduplicated measurement (following unique individuals across linear TV, smart TV, mobile, computer, streaming and more.)
If it sounds complex, it is. 605 deploys a small army of data scientists and data analysts to decipher insights from an endless tsunami of data streams. Today, the company has more than 150 employees (17 PhDs and nearly half with multiple advanced degrees) working in multiple countries — a far cry from its humble start of four people gathered around a living room table in Manhattan. Dolan points out that 605 is perfectly positioned for success.
“Now it’s just scale. The tech is ready, the company is ready … So, now it’s just waiting for the market to kind of catch up and it's starting to hit.”
Since the early 1990s, Dolan, who majored in English, has witnessed and, in some cases, helped usher in a range of new technologies, from modem services and video-on-demand to IP connectivity and Wi-Fi — and now, advanced advertising analytics. In the interview, she remarked on the ebb and flow of tech developments and perhaps foreshadowed her return to her cable roots: “It’s been a pretty amazing ride, but I feel like it’s always cyclical. It goes from the technology to the content, then back to the technology, right?”
It doesn't take artificial intelligence nor an algorithm to know one thing: Wherever the future of technology and content go, odds are good that Kristin Dolan will be there working to make it better.
