Jim Santa Barbara Joins Mediassociates as Head of Analytics

Jim Santa Barbara, who has been instrumental in designing and sustaining media analytics programs over two decades, has joined independent media company Mediassociates as head of analytics. His charge at the fast-rising agency: Answer marketers’ unmet call for actionable media attribution across the full marketing funnel.

“Analytics is the missing agility for many small agencies, and it’s the key to delivering big results for leading and challenger brands alike,” said Jeff Larson, CEO of Mediassociates. “We’re creating tomorrow’s standards to connect brand and performance advertising and put it all on a provable basis for marketers. Jim has driven analytics development for several of the world’s most complex marketers, providing frameworks to see their opportunities more clearly and seize them more reliably. He’s the ideal person to lead our efforts here.”

Across a diverse client base including PepsiCo, P&G, and J&J, Santa Barbara has led the development of new data strategies to sharpen the marketing mix, speed up analysis, and enable modelling for prospective and under-resourced markets. While with Nielsen, Santa Barbara drove adoption of mix modelling for P&G to improve overall marketing return, introducing the service for the first time in developing markets. He also created a service to forecast sales volume from pre-market copy test scores.

“Media is the most exciting arena within marketing analytics because there’s tremendous change and potential for impact, and we need to navigate significant hurdles to analysis,” said Santa Barbara. “As an agency, we’re in the best position to  elevate and integrate analytics for our clients, because we can ensure they’re designed to be truly useful and actionable.  I’m focused on building the best team of people who can uncover what the numbers mean and set profitable directions for clients."

Mediassociates was founded on measurement, and has grown steadily by taking a more sophisticated, predictive approach to media planning. For example, the agency helped make Winstar the largest U.S. casino by focusing advertising on guests with the highest lifetime value, and boosted Grand Seiko sales more than 110% by concentrating geo-targeting on the brand’s highest-growth markets. In the past four months, the agency has attracted new clients including Mount Sinai Health System, Verisign and University of Phoenix due in large part to its analytics prowess.