Backchannelmedia

Boston Business Journal, November 13, 2006

New Web Service Allows Advertisers to Zero In

By Lisa van der Pool

In this age of media fragmentation, Backchannelmedia Inc. is offering up a formidable weapon to combat the conundrum of how best to reach consumers.

Last week the company launched its Web-based free service, DRTV Research. Michael Kokernak, founder and co-CEO of the Boston-based company, spent a decade developing the software that is the backbone of DRTV Research. The service, which can be accessed through Backchannelmedia’s Web site and is meant for media planners and advertising agencies- although anyone can search ’ tracks television programming and content and gives planners access to TV data on a granular level. In the future, those planners will be able to purchase media directly through the Website while working with Backchannelmedia.

“It’s the first time advertisers can see what content is more popular on what day and what actor is more popular — so they can derive whether or not those are good targets for their customers,” said Kokernak.

The best example of DRTV — or direct response television — are infomercials and short form commercials in which a product is demonstrated and customers communicate directly with the company to buy the product.

Launched in 2000, Backchannelmedia is a media planning and buying agency that also creates DRTV commercials for its clients. The 27-person business currently has about $6 million in billings.

Up until recently the company was bootstrapped but in January received a $2.3 million seed investment that will enable it to ramp up technology and product development. The company predicts it will hire between 50 to 75 people by the end of next year.

Once the company accumulates enough billings it plans to begin licensing its technology to companies that wish to run its patented DRTV Research system in-house. The company recently filed a patent titled “Systems and Methods for Accountable Media Planning.”

DRTV Research contains 1 million pages of TV data, and media planners can conduct searches by demographic categories to create highly targeted media plans. That number will increase to 10 million by the end of next year. The company says it tracks cable channels that Nielsen Media Research does not even measure. Content can be searched according to a slew of different categories including demographics (ethnicity, age groups and consumer patterns), genre (bowling, bullfighting, and badminton) and ZIP codes of viewers.

“Nielsen’s system of measuring advertising effectiveness doesn’t get any better each year, and as fragmentation continues, it gets worse,” said Dan Hassan, co-CEO and an investor in Backchannelmedia.

Nielsen did not return a call seeking comment.