He devoted more than 35 years of his career to media research, becoming a pioneering thought leader in New Media, measurement standards and the Portable People Meter (PPM). In June 2025, this experience led the Advertising Research Foundation to select him as a featured speaker at its Attention 2025 event in New York.
Now, many are mourning the loss of Bill Harvey, the man who helped create radio industry ratings giant Arbitron.
Harvey most recently served as the founder, Chairman and Chief Research Officer of RMTLabs. He died on Sunday (9/20) at the age of 84, following a short illness.
For some, conversations about optimizers, privacy standards, the “ARF Model” and innovations including set top box data can’t be had without mentioning Harvey and his role in their advancements. With respect to STB data, he received an Emmy award for his efforts.
As head of strategy for the American Research Bureau, the precursor to Arbitron, Harvey developed the concept of the Area of Dominant Influence (ADI), helping establish the geographic framework for television markets. He would also gain national recognition for his role as a media research professional at Grey Advertising, Kenyon & Eckhardt and Interpublic.
In the early 1970s, he founded New Electronic Media Science (NEMS), a marketing and media consultancy that worked with leading agencies and advertisers, major cable operators, networks and Hollywood studios. At NEMS, he was responsible for serving an early online questionnaire on behalf of World Book in 1982. NEMS and Harvey were also active in the development of digital out-of-home media. In the late 1980s, NEMS led a multi-studio study of the feasibility of deploying large television or computer screens in malls and other public places.
In conjunction with IBM and Leonard Matthews, former CEO of Y&R and Leo Burnett, he founded Next Century Media (NCM), an interactive media advisor to advertisers, agencies, entertainment and media companies worldwide. NCM helped lead the development of addressable television advertising and interactive media measurement standards, working with organizations including the ANA, 4As, ARF, IAB and CableLabs. Harvey originated and drafted the CASIE Principles, which helped establish industry privacy standards. NCM also invented and patented a system for targeting television commercials to individual homes and people.
While Senior Vice President and General Manager of OpenTV Research, a unit he conceived for OpenTV, he led the landmark Aurora trial of SpotOn addressable commercials for Comcast, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson and the U.S. Army.
Following his time at OpenTV, he founded TRA to make single-source research economically scalable and sustainable. TRA pioneered the use of naturally occurring data at scale by connecting set-top box and digital clickstream data with purchase data at the household level. The approach helped establish a model for linking advertising exposure to business results. TiVo acquired TRA in 2012.
Most recently, he co-founded RMTLabs, a neuro-motivational intelligence company that makes human motivation measurable and actionable for marketers. The company is built on decades of his research and reflects his lifelong conviction: advertising is more effective when it better understands the human beings it seeks to reach.
An accomplished author, speaker and media futurist, Bill received numerous industry honors, including the ARF Great Mind Award in 2008. In 2014, he became the first recipient of the ARF’s Erwin Ephron Demystification Award. He was inducted into the Market Research Council Hall of Fame in 2018.
In 2022, Bill was awarded a Science and Technology Emmy for his pioneering development of technologies to collect granular television viewing data for measurement, marketing and advertising, recognizing work he led at Next Century Media.
Details of a memorial service will be announced shortly.
