Created the currency for Spanish-language advertising
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It is hard to overstate the influence that Doug Darfield had over media in the U.S. Hispanic Market. Doug created the Nielsen Hispanic ratings, the currency by which Spanish-language television was sold. And Doug was also the person who discontinued them. It would be wrong, however, to day that Doug “is a numbers guy”. His strength is understanding the story behind the numbers.
Defining Moment – For Doug, his two defining moments were intimately related.
The first one came when Doug was the research director of an English-language TV station rep firm. He had just had “one of those” conversations with a client station when Univision called and asked him to come over for an interview. Two weeks later Doug was working at Univision, the leading Spanish-language TV network in the US. That first phone call put him squarely in the US Hispanic market.
The second moment happened with another call. Doug had been at the forefront of bringing Nielsen to the Univision. When his bosses saw the actual Nielsen numbers vs. what they had been using, the difference was astounding. His bosses were so concerned that they did not want to tell P&G, their largest advertiser. Doug got a call from P&G about an unrelated matter. But the P&G person asked directly about the Nielsen project. At that moment, Doug made the decision: he would go against his bosses fear and be transparent with P&G. The rest is history.
What changed that he could have never predicted – The most surprising was the transformation of “television” into “video” and the proliferation of screens. While that TV set on the wall still exists, it is no longer the electronic hearth that it once was.
Coping with that change – For Doug, coping with that level of complexity boils down to first principles (what are you trying to do) and to understanding the people behind the number, their story. This has distinguished Doug from his earliest days in research.
Advice to a CEO or CMO about hiring older people – People over 55 have seen a crazy amount of change in their lifetime. So, we are able to take data and make it into a narrative that drives action. And you can't tell stories if you haven't lived long enough to get some stories in your head in the first place. So don't worry about us adapting to change because that's all we've done for every second of our lives. And second, that experience of that level of change leaves us uniquely prepared to be able to explain what change really means and help people figure out how best to deal with it.
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