Steering Commitee

CIMM’s Steering Committee members make strategic decisions about the direction and funding for our initiatives.

Kelly Abcarian
Executive Vice President, Measurement & Impact, Advertising & Partnerships
NBCUniversal

Kelly spearheads the company’s rapidly accelerating cross-platform and full-funnel measurement capabilities, leading innovation from impressions to impact at a local, national and global level across NBCUniversal’s One Platform.  As consumer viewing habits continue to shift towards streaming and CTV, Abcarian leads a team tasked with pushing forward measurement solutions that reflect the all-screen future viewers have created, while providing advertisers with new opportunities to reach and target their key audiences. Additionally, she oversees the company’s attribution and ROI capabilities including Total Investment Impact (TII), which focuses on measuring and delivering what matters most to advertisers. Abcarian also plays an important role in the growth and development of NBCUniversal’s data strategy, including efforts such as NBCU ID and the Audience Insights Hub. A member of NBCUniversal’s Advertising & Partnerships leadership team, she is an essential voice in the marketplace, partnering with many of the leading trade organizations, measurement and technology companies on solutions and industry-wide initiatives.

Abcarian is an experienced executive with almost two decades of media and technology leadership in developing solutions for television, digital and CTV/OTT content and advertising platforms. Prior to joining NBCUniversal, she most recently served as GM of Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising Group, where she led the company’s addressable initiatives including the strategic acquisitions of several key players within the space. Prior to that, Abcarian led Nielsen’s global audience measurement product portfolio where she was responsible for the creation of Nielsen’s Total Audience Product suite, along with the development of Digital Ad Ratings for CTV.

Abcarian held leadership positions at various leading technology and professional services companies, including Oracle, Siebel Systems and Arthur Andersen, and is a highly awarded industry leader having been named a Cynopsis Top Woman in Digital, Woman to Watch and Wonder Woman in Streaming by Multichannel News, an OUTstanding Ally; and a Top 100 Diversity MBA Executive Leader. Throughout her career, Abcarian has devoted herself to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts as well as lifting up the LGBTQ+ community through allyship, from helping lead PRIDE activations to lobbying for new, more inclusive HR policies.

Sam Armando
Executive Vice President, Director of Video Marketplace Intelligence and Investment
Publicis Media

During Sam’s 29-year career, all within Publicis Media, he has worn various hats, concentrating in the areas of national video investment and audience/marketplace analysis.  Sam started his career concentrating on video audience research and marketplace assessment.  He now leads the group that is responsible for empowering the family of Publicis Agencies to exchange intelligence, test new models and leverage scale to drive marketplace and measurement efficiencies. Through gauging the spectrum of video viewing activity, Armando’s job demands expertise that touches competitive programming, audience assessment, viewer engagement factors and a complete analysis of video marketplace conditions.

In addition, Sam has served as a video investment director, starting at Starcom where he lead investment for Allstate.  Through the years, he has filled that role for clients across Starcom and Spark Foundry that include Delta Faucets, Starbucks, Dole, Starz, Panera and Visionworks.  Throughout his career, Sam became an integral part of many industry breakthroughs.  In 2006, he helped to negotiate the first Upfront advertising deals based on Nielsen’s minute-by-minute data in partnership with the Weather Channel. In the same month, Armando helped to lead negotiations in an Upfront deal with Court TV based on engagement – the first deal of its kind.

Sam negotiated the industry’s first deal using Rentrak set-top-box data in 2012, and played an integral role in the industry’s local television measurement and currency discussion.  In 2016, Armando led the agency charge in understanding and implementing out-of-home viewership in a partnership with ESPN, and pushed for progress in measurement of the connected television space.  In 2018, he negotiated the agencies terms that led to the OTT/co-viewing deals that were in place for the 2018/19 broadcast season.  In 2007, he was named a Media All-Star by Mediaweek, a Media Maven by Ad Age, and he was recognized in Advertising Age’s top 10 most quoted executives in its annual Media Talk survey three years in a row.

Colleen Fahey Rush
Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer
Paramount

Colleen Fahey Rush is Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer at Paramount. Rush oversees the research, insights and analytics functions across Paramount’s leading portfolio of streaming, broadcast, entertainment, news and sports brands. She is also responsible for the corporate research function including data collection and analysis spanning the company’s business portfolio to support strategic priorities.

Rush leads research and insights across content, streaming, marketing, brand strategy, trend forecasting, digital and social to inform decision making, drive strategy and super serve audiences in today’s evolving media landscape. Under her guidance and leadership, she built the company’s corporate consumer insights practice dedicated to new technologies and emerging consumer behaviors to inform key stakeholders. She continues to play an instrumental role in the industry advocating for the improvement of linear, digital and multiplatform media measurement and analytics in order to manage and aggregate data across all of Paramount’s media and digital properties.

Rush most recently served as Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer of ViacomCBS. Her previous roles also include Executive Vice President of Strategic Insights & Research and Senior Vice President, Research & Insights for VH1, CMT and Logo.

Rush is on the Board of Trustees at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), on the Advisory Board of Civic Science, and sits on the Advisory Board for Cornell University’s Department of Communication. She holds a U.S. Patent in Systems and Methods for Delivering Online Advertisements.

She earned a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University and has an M.B.A. from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Lisa Heimann
EVP, Corporate Research & Strategy
NBCUniversal

Lisa leads the group targeting effective investment in new measurement approaches and analytic tools, with the aim of developing unified cross-platform measurement to improve monetization and program insights across NBCUniversal’s TV businesses.  In addition, her group provides enterprise-wide research resource coordination as well as instituting unified practices across the portfolio. She previously served as SVP, Multiplatform Research for NBC Entertainment where she worked with the research teams to ensure consistent metric standards across the ever-expanding number of platforms and collaborating across departments to help identify key multiplatform trends. She was also responsible for exploring both new measurement options and the expansion of existing measurement sources.

Before NBC, Lisa had a long 17 year tenure at Disney/ ABC where she worked in several research capacities, including responsibility for the measurement strategy, forecasting and reporting of ABC/ABC Studios content across all platforms as well as measurement of emerging platforms.  She also oversaw ABC ad sales research and previously ABC local research. Prior to coming to ABC, she held research positions within CBS’s syndication arm and Blair Television. She graduated summa cum laude from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications and resides in California.

Marshall Jacobowitz
Vice President, Data Standards, Performance and Methodology, Spectrum Reach
Charter Communications

Marshall Jacobowitz is the Vice President of Data Standards, Performance and Methodology at Charter’s Spectrum Reach, where he oversees data usage, methodology and integration with Spectrum’s ad products.   Marshall joined Time Warner Cable in 2007 as VP of Research, and assumed his current role after Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable in 2016.  Prior to joining Time Warner Cable, Marshall spent almost 10 years as a Research Vice President at MTV Networks and has also worked at Zenith Media, Saatchi & Saatchi and Management Science Associates (MSA).

Kelly Johnson
Vice President, Ad Sales Research, DMED
The Walt Disney Company

Kelly Johnson is Vice President of ad sales research at DMED, a unit of The Walt Disney Co. Johnson and her team at DMED are responsible for delivering best-in-class audience insights, marketplace thought leadership, and innovative research solutions to grow revenue. She played a key role in ESPN’s groundbreaking cross-media research initiatives, including Project Blueprint, and worked with Nielsen to develop out-of-home television measurement. Johnson is Grand Winner of the 2011 ARF Great Mind Award in the Rising Star category, and her work has been published in the Journal of Advertising Research.

Scott McDonald, Ph.D.
CEO & President
Advertising Research Foundation

Scott became the CEO and President of the Advertising Research Foundation in March 2017. Prior to joining the ARF, he held senior research positions at leading global media companies, including 18 years at Time Warner, and 14 years at Conde Nast, covering both the consumer and the advertising sides of the media business. Throughout his career, he has kept a foot in both the academic and business worlds, teaching for 5 years at NYU and for 18 years at Columbia Business School. He serves as an adviser to the Social Science Matrix Program at UC Berkeley, and is on the Board of the Population Reference Bureau. An avid art lover, he also is on the board of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He holds an A.B. degree from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Yee Pang
Research Group Director
GroupM

Yee Pang is the Research Group Director at GroupM. In this role, he’s focused on data & technology solutions to improve unified measurement. He bring 20+ years of experience in digital and cross-media investment. Prior to GroupM, he held stints at IPG and Publicis agencies. Yee lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

Bharad Ramesh
Executive Director, Research and Investment Analytics
GroupM

Bharad leads research & investment analytics for GroupM US. A WPP Atticus Award winner, he brings to his role a love for data & analytics with global experience building & leading agency investment teams. Prior to GroupM, he built & led the integrated brand & demand digital team at PHD Media U.S.. Bharad came to PHD from Singapore where he was head of trading & strategic partnerships at VivaKi South East Asia. Before VivaKi, Bharad was with GroupM in China & Singapore running audience research & investment planning. He got his start in the agency business at Ogilvy in Bangalore as one of the early members of what become Mindshare MCI-ATG. His background also includes stints as a market analyst for Jack Myers in New York & at Frost & Sullivan, a technology consulting firm.

Bharad has a MS in TV, Radio & Film from Syracuse University, U.S., a graduate degree in marketing communications from MICA, India and an undergraduate degree in commerce from Madras University, India.

Kate Sirkin
EVP, Global Data Partnerships
Publicis Epsilon

Kate heads data partnerships for Epsilon PeopleCloud, which is a set of proprietary, cloud-based platforms that use data to identify sources of client growth. In her role, she is responsible for the identification and creation of unique and actionable datasets to be used within the PeopleCloud platform to deliver business growth for clients globally.

Previously, Kate was Executive Vice President and Practice Lead, Analytics and Insight Americas and Audience Insight Global at Publicis Media, where she managed a massive worldwide budget as she managed emerging trends, data and support for Publicis Medias, initiated proprietary studies and acted as the company’s voice on many critical media issues.

Throughout her career, Kate has spearheaded research initiatives that have helped to expand the field of communications research, from early investments in brainwave monitoring to evaluate impact on attention levels and eye tracking in pursuit of optimal OOH context, to single source analysis and fusion.

She is a founding member of MASB, executive and board member of the ARF and CIMM. Kate is also on the Print and Digital Research Forum Program Committee.

Radha Subramanyam
Chief Research and Analytics Officer, CBS Corporation
President, CBS Vision

Radha joined the CBS Television Network in November 2017 as Executive Vice President, Chief Research and Analytics Officer and was promoted to her current role after 18 months. She oversees all research and analytics operations for CBS, including audience measurement, analytics, market research, program testing and advertising research. She has extensive experience in research and data analytics in all areas of the industry, including broadcast, cable and digital, as well as radio and social media.

Most recently, Radha served as President of Research, Insights and Data Analytics for iHeartMedia, where she developed and managed wide-ranging data and research efforts involving digital analytics, ratings and measurement, ad sales research, mobile measurement, programming analysis, music research, campaign measurement and marketing research.

Prior to joining iHeartMedia, she held senior executive research roles at Yahoo!, MTV Networks and Nielsen, where she was one of that company’s early leaders of a new analytics and consulting practice. Before beginning her career in the media industry, she taught media and entertainment at Vassar College and New York University.

Radha serves on the board of directors of the International Radio & Television Society and the Advertising Research Foundation. In addition, she serves as the chair of diversity on the board of directors of Women Advancing, an organization recognizing diversity as a priority for the future health of society and supporting development of resources to advance diversity in media, marketing and entertainment.  She was named as one of Corinium’s Top 100 Innovators in Data and Analytics in 2018, a list highlighting business leaders, technologists and influencers who have accelerated the proliferation and understanding of data and analytics over the last 12 months. Subramanyam was also one of the power women in Variety’s 2019 Women’s Impact Report.  She is a graduate of Northwestern University, with a Ph.D. in radio, television and film.

Andrea Zapata
EVP, Head of Ad Sales Research, Measurement and Insights 
Warner Bros. Discovery

Andrea Zapata serves as EVP, Head of Ad Sales Research, Measurement and Insights at Warner Bros. Discovery. In this role, Zapata oversees research for Warner Bros. Discovery’s portfolio of linear and digital brands, marketplace intelligence, category and client insights as well as outcome focused research for advertisers.

Zapata brings a wealth of experience in media where she has brought an innovative approach to her work, demonstrating the value and impact that research, data and insights can have on a business. Previous to her role at Warner Bros. Discovery, Zapata served as Head of Research, Data and Insights for WarnerMedia. Prior to WarnerMedia, she was Vice President of West Coast Sales at Vevo, responsible for building on the momentum of their US sales teams’ in-market strategy and maximizing the value of premium music videos. In addition, Zapata has held research leadership positions at Effectv, and Hulu. At Hulu, she built the research practice from the ground up, making critical changes in the company’s go-to-market sales narrative.