Watch live at 1 p.m. EDT: Edward Norton talks media measurement
The actor and co-founder of EDO to discuss the state of media measurement and how an award-winning actor came to be a player in the business.
Konoly
In this edition of Ad Age Remotely, Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe-winning actor Edward Norton—who also happens to be co-founder of measurement firm EDO—joins Ad Age’s Jack Neff to discuss the future of media measurement.
It might seem like an unlikely side hustle for Norton, best known as an actor and producer, and his roles in movies such as “Fight Club,” “Primal Fear,” “Birdman,” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” But he’s also a serial tech entrepreneur.
Norton was a co-founder of CrowdRise, a crowdfunding portal developed to raise money for charity that ultimately was acquired by GoFundMe in 2017. In 2015 he co-founded EDO, which began as an acronym for Entertainment Data Oracle and a focus on how search behavior could predict audience response to movies. It evolved into a company with a very different take on TV measurement.
Rather than focus on quantifying audiences, a process that has defied great minds and easy solutions, EDO instead focuses on measuring what TV ads cause people to do, specifically what impact they have on online search.
EDO recently got an $80 million strategic growth investment from Shamrock Capital to further build the business, in part by expanding its network of data partners. EDO clients include NBCUniversal, Univision, Fox Corp., Paramount, IBM, Subway, Royal Caribbean, New Balance, Nissan, Toyota, Hyundai and Amazon Studios.
Norton joins Remotely to discuss how he got involved in the measurement and analytics business and where he sees the industry going.
