Executive Summary Archives

Disclaimer:

The opinions blogged herein represently only those of Rick E. Bruner and do not reflect those of his employer, persons or companies mentioned herein, or anyone else.

rick-small.jpg




























Name Phreaks: Staats and Poltrack

When I lived in San Francisco in the late 1990s, like so many Bay Area residents I became a great fan of the legendary columnist Herb Caen in the last year of his life. One regular feature of his columns I loved was "name phreaks": people whose names seemed to oddly describe them in some way, usually by what they did for a living.

In that proud tradition, here are two name phreaks I love in the media and market research space: David Poltrack, EVP of Research and Planning at CBS Television and Staats Abrams, SVP of Roper.

I heard of Poltrack a few years ago and thought that was pretty amazing for a guy in charge of research, but Staats??

Meanwhile, Roper, formerly Roper Starch, was bought a while ago by NOP, which was itself just purchased by a German company, Gfk, so, as I understand it (no kidding) the company is now going to be known as Gfk/NOP. If they could only merge with an LM, they'd lock up nearly a quarter of the alaphabet (Gfk/LM/NOP). Get a Q in there and go back to the full Roper Starch brand and they could have the whole run of GFKLMNOPQRS. Name phreaks, indeed.

UPDATE:
Oops. I forgot "J".

Comments

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?