Beginnings

Sesame Street and The Electric Company gave me my professional start in 1971  with a series of projects for Children's Television Workshop. 

CTW had just created 5 pilot programs for a new reading series to be called "The Electric Company".  It tested children's reactions by seeing what and when they looked at the screen.  I conducted a new kind of grounded analysis to uncover the  content attributes that drove attention towards, and away from, the TV screen.

My results successfully predicted children's attention to new program content,  The creative teams found the findings particuarly helpful, and CTW instituted the findings as creative guidelines for new production. Then they contracted for a similar study of Sesame Street,

It was then I decided to launch my own company, with a mission to use new kinds of research to help companies make better things for children.

Middle years

At first the company concentrated on educational and entertainment public programming.  We later broadened our scope to include commercial programming (TV and radio), print, advertising, product development, interactive software and strategic marketing issues.  Our clients have included ABC, CBS, NBC, Children's Television Workshop, The Young Filmaker's Foundation, The Educational Film Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The American Heart Association, The American Cancer Society, Sea World, The General Mills Radio Adventure Theater, Family Radio Programming, Siegel Productions, PBS Ready-to-Learn, Quaker Oats, Hunt-Wesson, General Foods, Procter & Gamble, Lipton, McDonald's, Mead-Johnson, Hasbro, Matchbox, Lego, Disney Interactive, Walt Disney Records, Ringling Brothers Circuses, and numerous advertising agencies.

In 1983, and again in 1992, General Foods' Post Cereals awarded us their children's commercial TV copy testing business. The system we developed, KidWatch(c), integrated behavioral observations with verbal measures and was extensively validated against marketplace data.

The ever-growing variety of my research projects led me continually to write new apps to collect, store, and analyze data and to generate pre-formatted reports -- quickly, cost-effectively and with minimal staff training.

The thought occurred that some of these apps could be rewritten as products in their own right. That planted the seed of pivoting from being custom-research supplier into becoming a creator of products myself.

Today

And that is where I am now: writing, inventing, starting new businesses and reaching out to the people and companies who can make these things happen.