A History of Marketing / Episode 50
My guest Tod Johnson, a market research pioneer who was among the first people to measure the Internet. He’s an inductee to the Market Research Council Hall of Fame and former chairman of the Advertising Research Foundation1. Tod is President and CEO of the Board of the Metropolitan Opera and is a member of the board of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Tod led The NPD Group for over 50 years, building it into one of the largest consumer research firms in the world. NPD became the company retailers like Mattel and Hasbro relied on to understand what was selling. In 1995, he founded Media Metrix, essentially the Nielsen ratings of the early internet.
In this conversation, we dive into:
The era of pencil-and-paper diary panels, when consumer research meant tracking grocery purchases by hand and mailing the booklets back every month
Why Tod’s analysis showed that brand loyalty is mostly a myth, long before anyone in advertising wanted to admit it
How he accidentally discovered the internet was about to change everything
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And to Bill Moult, whom you may remember from episode 23 of this podcast, for introducing me to Tod.
Why spend a career in market research?
Andrew Mitrak: Tod Johnson, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Tod Johnson: Hey, thank you. Glad to be here.
Andrew Mitrak: I watched a speech you gave while accepting a lifetime achievement award. And at the start of the speech, you quipped that you’re tempted to aim for a second lifetime achievement award and do it all over again. I take that as a sign that you spent your career really doing something you love, and your career was in market research. So, what do you love about market research?
Tod Johnson: Well, I’ve always been a very quantitative-oriented person. I’ve loved numbers, I’ve loved facts supported by numbers, and I’ve always had an interest in psychology as well. In fact, I taught what today would be called cognitive psychology when I got out of graduate school for a while. Market research just puts those two pieces together very, very naturally. So it fit into what I really found exciting and wanted to do. I have to say, I never started out thinking market research was my career objective. I kind of fell into it by accident, but once I got into it, it was where I wanted to be.
Innovation and Innovation Models in Early Market Research
Andrew Mitrak: You were an academic doing quantitative analysis, and these were real-world business practitioners. Was this seen as new pioneering research that they could apply to their business? What was that dynamic like with them?
Tod Johnson: Well, the dynamic was interesting and different in those days. These companies had their own staffs oriented to innovation and development, and they were always open to new ideas. Today, that’s not so easy to get into a company with a new idea because there’s just too many of them out there. But back then, it was kind of open arms, wanting to explore new ideas. We were solving real problems like new product introductions with trial and repeat models, which hadn’t really been focused on much before, market structure work, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies had a curiosity to want to learn that.
The Era of National Purchase Diaries
Andrew Mitrak: Can you set a scene of what market research looked like at the time? Was it ever influencing a certain product launch, or a certain product strategy, or messaging or positioning type?
Tod Johnson: In those days, virtually every new product launch would go into a test market. We would set up a diary panel of consumers to record purchases in the appropriate category. We would do the trial and repeat analyses that would predict the long run success or failure of the particular product. That would be the most common application. On a national basis it would be more about consumer trends in those categories uh and how they were structured and what was changing.
The other thing that was very good, I’m now jumping ahead to when I became involved in developing NPD, was in the mid70s, General Mills started to diversify from CPG into a lot of other categories like food service, toys, apparel, jewelry, and I was fortunate enough to be the person they looked to to set up how to track those industries similar to how CPG had been tracked.
Andrew Mitrak: Amazing. They embraced the general in their name and kind of not so much the mills part of their name.
Tod Johnson: Well, the general went away about 10, 15 years later.
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned National Purchase Diaries. What was the actual purchase diary? You mentioned like purchase diary panels and what does it look like? Walk me through the nuts and bolts of what a purchase diary panel would look like.
Tod Johnson: Well, it would be a booklet which was about 20 pages and each page had a couple of categories on it like toilet paper, facial tissue, and paper towels might all be on a page, and they’d be structured in a way that if you bought one of those items, you answered some questions.
The panelists would get a new booklet every month and mail the old booklet back in to us, which we would code up. Back then, it was pretty easy to get good representative samples because women typically weren’t working. They were interested in doing projects and interested in helping, and we made it clear how they were helping manufacturers make better products for them by providing this kind of information. That relationship with the consumer in market research just doesn’t exist anymore, but it was what a lot of the industry was based on in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.
Measuring Product Success and Consumer Loyalty
Andrew Mitrak: The consumers were part of the panel who had these diaries. They would kind of punch in their purchases for the week?
Tod Johnson: No, they’d fill them in by hand with pencil.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you have any favorite examples of how this data was used? Especially in the early years of these manual diary entries.
Tod Johnson: New product introductions, which were elaborate test markets for the most part back then, was perhaps the most common use. The other use was it was a way to track demographics. It was a way to track loyalty. I can remember in the ‘80s, I did a lot of publishing about how consumers weren’t very loyal because we’d see their purchase patterns. That was at a time when advertisers and advertising agencies believed in loyalty. You were always talking about their loyal buyers. It didn’t really exist, but that was the basic premise. I know I was swimming upstream for a while with those publications, but today, everybody accepts that as the truth and the fact, and that there’s enormous brand shifting and much less loyalty than once was thought to exist.
The Growth and Diversification of NPD
Andrew Mitrak: You joined when it was a $300,000 revenue company.
Tod Johnson: $400,000. Give me the full credit.
Andrew Mitrak: sorry, I also want to give you credit because it grew to a lot more than that. How did the small kind of regional firm that was doing 400,000 revenue a year over the course of your next 30 years? It became a global market research firm that the world’s largest retailers rely on. What were the major inflection points as far as it growing? How did you grow it?
Tod Johnson: Well, I mentioned one, and that was General Mills taking us into a bunch of general merchandise and food service categories. Our toy clients encouraged us to get into Europe. We worked with everyone in the toy industry, whether it was Mattel, Hasbro, or Lego—all the big players, all the smaller players. Mattel had a huge variety of products; it owned Fisher-Price, so that was a whole different set of products. They were a great client, are a great client, and had a wonderful mix of products. The toy industry has evolved a lot—electronics came along, how kids use time, and the definition of toys has evolved quite a bit from there.
Managing Industry Rivalries in Market Research
Andrew Mitrak: It’s interesting because advertising companies or advertising agencies have this concept of conflict. So, if I work with Mattel, I can’t work with Hasbro—that’s a competitor. But a market research firm actually could be more neutral and work with everybody in that, right? Do you ever run into things like conflicts where, if we’re doing this survey for Mattel, that might lead to some conflict of interest to do it for Hasbro? How does that work?
Tod Johnson: That’s a very interesting question because in the CPG world, that conflict orientation tends to exist even today. If you work for Coca-Cola, you don’t work for Pepsi. If you work for General Mills, you didn’t work for Kellogg’s typically. Now, the company might work for both of them, but the individual people don’t.
When you got into general merchandise, the client was much more interested in being sure that they were working with someone who really understood their industry. To understand an industry, you don’t learn an industry just by working with one company in that industry. Each of those general merchandise industries—whether it’s toys or consumer electronics or office supplies, which all have very different distribution structures—also had very different product structures. It took a lot of learning to understand it, so they viewed it as a benefit to work with someone who really knew their industry.
The Birth of Media Metrix and the Internet Lightbulb Moment
Andrew Mitrak: Can you tell me about Media Metrix and the introduction of software meters?
Tod Johnson: What happened was one of the categories NPD was tracking was software. This is in the early ‘90s, and software back then was shrink-wrap that you bought in a store. Our software clients were saying the purchase data is really interesting, but we’re wondering if you could get us usage data.
So, we developed a piece of software which we had 300 panelists download onto their PCs to see if we could track their usage. After a couple of months, they all sent us back that database. And of those 300, literally three of them had really strange data included on it, which it took us a couple of months to figure out what it was. But what it was was their internet surfing, which we were capturing frankly by accident.
In other words, this is 1994. 1% of consumers were on the internet—three out of 300. That was the lightbulb moment—the internet is really going to grow and this is a way to measure it, just like television was being measured then or radio or magazines. That led us to say there was a bigger opportunity to measure the internet than there was to understand software usage.
The Digital Landscape of 1996: Universities and Search Engines
Tod Johnson: We kind of switched our focus and published our first internet ratings data in January 1996. Just to give you a feeling for what the internet was like then, the top five sites were AOL, WebCrawler, Netscape, Yahoo, and InfoSeek. In the top 20 sites, actually four of them were universities. The internet was a very, very different place, and we developed Media Metrix and what we called the PC Meter to track the evolution of that business.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s amazing. You shared a slide with me of just these top 20. So, you mentioned the top five. The EDU ones are the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Why were universities ranked so highly?
Tod Johnson: This is a little embarrassing answer to me because of my involvement with Carnegie Mellon, which not only was I a student and teaching there, but I’ve been the longest-serving trustee and vice chairman.
Starting with the University of Michigan, my understanding is that NOAA published its weather data through Michigan.edu. So, back then, you went to the University of Michigan to get weather data.
Carnegie Mellon is my embarrassing answer. It was sort of the leading porn site on the internet back then. A graduate student, who I won’t name because he’s well-known right now, developed a methodology of mousing over something on your screen and moving it. He demonstrated that methodology by letting you mouse over a picture of himself and removing all of his clothes.
I’m not sure what MIT was, and University of Illinois, I think, related back to the history of Netscape, if I’m not mistaken.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh right, yeah, that would track. Interesting. It wasn’t like the CMU.edu homepage.
Tod Johnson: Some website that wanted people to see the technology. I don’t think CMU stayed in the top 20 for very long, but it was ahead of Penthouse Magazine, which was number 18 back then.
How the Internet Transformed Market Research Operations
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. I was going to say there’s a couple that was not safe for work websites that I saw on there. It’s funny. We all know it’s like a big part of the internet, but it kind of usually doesn’t make these top lists these days too often anymore. But it’s out there, that’s amazing.
You saw this three-in-300 moment where it was like, “Wow, that’s strange.” And you see that they’re presumably using some web browser or spending a large number of hours using software. I imagine you had an early view into seeing this growth where it wasn’t three-in-300; it then went to six and then 12 and then 30, and you saw some of the exponential.
Tod Johnson: I think if I remember right, by the time we published the first report in January, it was up to about 35%. It really just skyrocketed during that period.
Andrew Mitrak: What did NPD’s clients do with this information? How did they respond to seeing this and getting an early view into “Hey, the internet’s going to be big”? Do you feel like they heeded the call and got on quickly, or do you feel like there was still some skepticism? Or how did people react? Because I’m always interested in when there is something new and somebody has compelling data that says something is coming but it’s not quite here yet. Do companies make the switch and start to act on it soon enough to really capitalize on the opportunity?
Tod Johnson: The key initial application was to sell advertisers on using your website. So you needed a currency or data to do that. Back then, the PC Meter data—Media Metrix data—became that currency which the websites used to show the size of their audience and the demographic profile of their audience as well. It was trying to make your internet site competitive with a television program or a radio station or radio program and things like that. That was the primary application.
The secondary application was understanding how consumers were surfing the internet and what you had to do as a website to both get someone to come to your site and stay in your site. People would look at competitors, how they were doing it, and adopt strategies that way.
Andrew Mitrak: I will ask broadly: How did the internet and this explosive growth change market research and change NPD?
Tod Johnson: At the time, NPD had two businesses: one was the diary panel business and the other was what was called a mail panel back then, or was really a survey research business. Starting around 2000, you had to become online interactive to be a successful business.
The first change it made is I made the decision that if we were going to make that transition, we weren’t going to make it well if we tried to transition both businesses simultaneously. So I sold one of the two businesses and just concentrated on the diary panel business at the time. Clearly, timing changed. You didn’t have a month to deliver information; you had to deliver it much more real-time. The presentation of the information changed; it was now presented on a screen much more often. It was more interactive and analytical, and you had to have the capabilities to do that. Pulling together disparate pieces of information, rather than just providing independent separate pieces, became much more critical and required a lot of investment and a lot of change.
A Legacy in Arts Patronage and Andy Warhol
Andrew Mitrak: I want to shift gears and ask you about the arts, because you’re also a major patron of the arts. You’re on the board of Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera, where you also serve as the president and CEO of the board there. You alluded to your background, which I noticed were a couple of Andy Warhols, which I imagine are original. It’s really impressive that you have such great taste on your wall. When did you develop your interest in the arts?
Tod Johnson: I grew up with it. My family collected art. My aunt was a major art dealer—in fact, she was one of Andy Warhol’s primary dealers. So I was always exposed to contemporary art.
Andrew Mitrak: Warhol was from Pittsburgh, right?
Tod Johnson: Yes, he went to Carnegie Tech.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh wow, okay, I just put that connection together.
Tod Johnson: One of the benefits of having offices like NPD is I have lots of walls for art. There were like 40 Warhols in the NPD offices at the time I sold the company.
Andrew Mitrak: So when you sold NPD and the Warhols were on the wall, does that show up as a line item on the balance sheet or?
Tod Johnson: Oh no, I got all of them. It wasn’t part of the sale; it was an exclusion.
The Intersection of Entrepreneurship and Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: As you’re working with visual arts institutions like the Met and Lincoln Center, do you feel like you bring your marketing expertise to the table there on how they’re marketing themselves?
Tod Johnson: Marketing to some extent; probably entrepreneurial business acumen to a greater extent.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you distinguish between entrepreneurial business acumen and marketing a lot? Because when I think of actually a lot of the best entrepreneurs, they’re also talented marketers. What part of their success is marketing instinct or intuition and prowess versus entrepreneurial business fundamentals? It seems like they overlap a lot. Do you distinguish between those two?
Tod Johnson: I kind of think they go together. Marketing doesn’t necessarily mean entrepreneurial. I think entrepreneurial is more likely to mean marketing directionally.
Andrew Mitrak: To be a great marketer, you don’t necessarily have to be an entrepreneur as well, but to be a great entrepreneur, you have to be a great marketer.
Tod Johnson: I think you said it better than I did.
The Future of Data: AI and Real-Time Insights
Andrew Mitrak: I know this is kind of a history podcast, but I want to talk to you about the future because you’re the co-founder and managing director of Duo Partners, and that firm invests in and consults with early-stage information and data companies. Do you have a vision for the future of market research when it comes to investing in companies? Can speak behind your investment thesis and what do you look for when you invest in information and data companies, but presumably also companies that will impact the future marketing as well?
Tod Johnson: Well, my partner Karen Schornbard and I are looking for really disruptive technologies to measure things in new ways—to measure things more accurately that isn’t dependent upon what a consumer recalls or says. To do it much more in real-time, continuous types of measurement.
I can give you a couple of examples. One of our investments has developed really physical AI technology where you can attach a tag to a product. You can see when the product is moved, you can see how much of it is used at each usage. You know when that happens so you can contact the consumer at the exact moment that they’re doing something rather than being dependent on “can they recall what they did two days ago?” You just get different information that way.
Another has built a fabulous database of food trends by scraping over the internet various restaurant menus and delivery service recommendations, seeing what’s changing, what’s growing real-time, and just things like that. These are going to lead to new ways of getting better information, particularly since the old methodologies are starting to be constrained by consumers not really having the time to think about it.
Andrew Mitrak: When you find a company that has the right underlying technology and product, where does marketing fit in on your calculation as to whether to invest or not at an early stage? Does marketing and their ability to tell a story and find a market and take this to market, does that play a part or do you kind of assume “Hey, these founders will hire the right marketers and they’ll figure it out if we invest in them”? How does that enter your calculus?
Tod Johnson: People who are developing products like that are developing them to take to a particular market. They usually know where the clients are by the time we get involved. There’ll at least be enough of a business that they’ve proven that clients can respond, so it’s built into the organization at that time.
Andrew Mitrak: Tod Johnson, thanks so much for your time. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m grateful for all of your wisdom and your stories. It’s just such a great pleasure to hear about how market research has evolved over all the years. I had a lot of fun.
Tod Johnson: Andrew, I’ve enjoyed doing this with you as well. Thanks for inviting me.
For more on the Advertising Research Foundation, see my interview with ARF President & CEO Scott McDonald
