Joe Abruzzo - Media Edge

Joe Abruzzo makes media research interesting. While that might sound like describing a blind date as a "nice guy," in the media world, where creating the best buys for clients is a life and death issue, being an "interesting" research exec makes Abruzzo the guy with the biggest pecs at the party.

As executive vp, director of marketing and media research for Young & Rubicam's The Media Edge, Abruzzo spins numbers, data and information into a series of media modeling products that clients ranging from Sears to AT&T use to make their media placement reach who they want to reach for the best price possible.

A subdued, unflashy man, Abruzzo's office, at first glance, gives away almost nothing about the man. No plants, no pictures; clean and tidy. But a closer look shows hundreds of floppy disks on his desk that hold the promise of something interesting, and as he launches into descriptions of what he is up to at The Media Edge, he boots up graphics on his computer that fill the blank walls of his office with magenta and lime-green hues.

"Joe really loves what he does and it shows," says Bette Blum, senior manager, media services (and a fellow 1999 All-Star) at Alamo Rent-A-Car, who worked with Abruzzo at N.W. Ayer in the early 1980s. The Media Edge does buying for Almo with the weight of Abruzzo's experience behind it.

"If he has to draw a chart or a graph to get across what he's thinking, how he got to his conclusions and how it can work for us he'll do it," says Blum.

A native of Queens and the father of two, Abruzzo has been doing marketing research since he was an undergraduate at Baruch College in New York City majoring in statistical analysis. Definitely a numbers guy, a statistical super freak if you will, Abruzzo sees patterns and shapes in reams of data that would make other people run screaming from the room.

"I'm big on exploiting information," says Abruzzo.

And Abruzzo does it so well that it takes on a different meaning altogether. Indeed, his explanations of his modeling are peppered with the word creative and his eyes turn up with his mouth as he almost snickers at the fun of it all.

"I really have the sense in working with him that he is genuinely concerned about his clients and what is best for them," says Gale Metzger, president, Statistical Research Inc. "He's a wise person and has some vision about what the numbers really mean."

"Joe has the ability to encapsulate client issues and develop modeling solutions that help grow their business," says Abruzzo's colleague Bob Igiel, executive vp and director of national broadcast, at The Media Edge. "He's a brilliant researcher."

Abruzzo's first media job was in the mid-'70s at Lever Brothers, while he was getting his MBA from Baruch.

Abruzzo learned how to analyze promotional tools such as couponing and giveaways attached to products and their effects on sales. "We were using statistical analysis to solving marketing related problems and right away I was using some cool statistical tools to do that research," says Abruzzo.

That experience proved a valuable skill in the media marketplace in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the media landscape was just starting to change with the advent of cable and the explosion of magazine titles. Media planning and buying was no longer limited to the big three networks or a handful of national magazines. Media in general was starting to become more complicated, and to make sense of it all guys like Abruzzo were in demand.

"There was a lot of upward mobility for people who had quantitative skills like mine," says Abruzzo. At the time, Abruzzo was using things like response modeling and time series analysis.

"It was the Hula Hoop of marketing analysis and statistics of the time in which we used math to understand repeating patterns in time," he says. Abruzzo, who went to work at Pepsi, has since worked his hip magic on newer, and increasing more advanced research hoops.

Those modeling skills honed after four years on the client side at Pepsi paid off in 1980 when Abruzzo got a call from a head hunter who asked it he would be interested in applying his modeling skills to a new ad campaign for AT&T from N.W. Ayer called Reach Out and Touch Someone.

At Ayer, Abruzzo joined something called the advance modeling group where he worked with people like Joe Dodson, who, at the time was a professor of marketing at Northwestern.

"It was really cool because I got to work with some of the smartest people in the business, "says Abruzzo.

In the years that followed at Ayer, Abruzzo delved deeper into modeling and started to play with and apply econometrics to determine, for example, how much long distance calling came out of every dollar AT&T spent on advertising (they found that each ad dollar spent translated into five dollars worth of long distance calling).

"We also started doing optimization models and advertising allocation models," says Abruzzo.

However, Abruzzo slowly stop being a pure numbers guy while working on the marketing and planning side where he he was increasing pulled into the creative strategy process at Ayer.

"It was great because you really got to be creative in trying to figure what advertising was all about--what kind of messages would lead toward a desired purchase behavior," says Abruzzo.

He eventually became the director of marketing and planning at Ayer. The job allowed Abruzzo to work with new products which exposed him to things such as charting opportunity identification stages for one client or a concept testing stage for another. He worked with clients as diverse as Doubletree Hotels, Folgers, Continental Airlines, John Deere, Burger King and even the state of Michigan tourism.

However, N.W. Ayer's management difficulties in the late 1980s resulted, among other things, in the spinning off of its media department into The Media Edge, which was eventually sold to its present owner, Young & Rubicam, in 1996.

At the same time, Abruzzo jumped to Nielsen Media Research, but quickly found it didn't offer the buzz he had enjoyed in the agency world.

"It wasn't a creative experience with free-wheeling thinking or problem solving," says Abruzzo, who left Nielsen and, after a brief consulting stint, was tapped by his old Ayer colleague Beth Gordon who, at that point, was running The Media Edge for Y&R.

Abruzzo now heads a department that includes A&E's former research head Lyle Schwartz, who does broadcast research as well; Cynthia Evans who works in print and out of home; a modeling research group run by Ephraim Goldstein; and a planning research group run by Fan Kennish.

"We've become more of a media consultancy. We do the research, but we have a lot of marketing information in our dozen syndicated services," says Abruzzo.

"What I'm trying to do is tie media back to the marketing of a clients product and trying to make advertising connect with the right consumer at the right time," he says.

Abruzzo seems well-suited for his job in that he works for a company that values research just as much as its traditionally more flashing media buying and planning sisters. Abruzzo's research gets equal billing rather than just 10 minutes at the end of pitch presentations.

As is often the case with successful executives, the higher they rise, the further they move for the pure skill that brought them success in the first place. With his strong department behind him, Abruzzo is now concentrating more of his energy helping grow The Media Edge Business. But he's unlikely to forget where he came from.

"Research is center stage with planning and buying. Here we are the main event and we have clients that appreciate the value of making better media decisions," says Abruzzo, like the research stud that he is.

COPYRIGHT 1999 BPI Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group