One Take with Doug Darfield

👉 The Scoop – 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.

👉 Decisive Moment #1 – 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.

👉 Decisive Moment #2 – Another call. Doug had been at the forefront of bringing Nielsen to Univision. His bosses, however, did not want to share the Nielsen numbers with P&G. Doug got a call from P&G about an unrelated matter. The P&G person asked directly about the Nielsen project. At that moment, Doug made the decision: he would go against his bosses’ fears and be transparent with P&G. The rest is history.

👉 Unexpected change or event – 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.

👉 What did he do? – 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 numbers, their story. This has distinguished Doug from his earliest days in research.

👉 About older workers – 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. So don't worry about us adapting to change because that's all we've done for every second of our lives.