5 questions with Edward Norton, EDO co-founder

While many people might know Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe-winning actor Edward Norton for his roles in cult classic movies like "Fight Club" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel," they might not know that Norton has quietly transformed himself into a seasoned tech entrepreneur since his earlier silver screen days. Norton joined Ad Age’s Jack Neff on Wednesday’s edition of Ad Age Remotely to share some insight into his tech investing ventures and his role in disrupting the industry-dominating Nielsen TV rating system.A brands’ guide to the Nielsen turmoil Norton, co-founder of measurement firm EDO, recounted his path toward the measurement and analytics industry and shared his vision for the field’s future. In addition, he shared his thoughts on the state of media measurement, diving into his firm’s unique approach to measuring television advertisements’ impacts on human behaviors. Before founding EDO, Norton invested in Kensho technologies, an AI startup, and co-founded CrowdRise, a crowdfunding platform designed to raise money for charity that was eventually acquired by GoFundMe in 2017. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. How did you get involved in business? I was really lucky to be one of the very first investors in a friend of mine's company called Kensho Technologies. [Daniel Nadler] founded this company called Kensho, which I was an early backer of and ultimately became one of the larger stakeholders in and they were doing incredibly pioneering work with both all of the major global banks and hedge funds as their clients and ultimately investors. I told him, there were some specific applications of what Kensho was doing that I thought were very applicable to media analysis. But a very famous US tech investor named Jim Breyer was a friend of both of ours and also an investor in Kensho, sat on the boards of companies like Fox and Marvel and, and Jim and I convinced Daniel that there was that there that we should do a standalone. And there wasn't room at Kensho and we convinced Daniel that it was worth setting up a new company to focus on really advanced machine learning and AI applications of his technology to media analytics. And so that's why we started EDO. How did you go from movie measurements to broader TV and video measurement? Box office prediction was sort of a neat and easy thing that we did early on just to sort of win some allies. What we were always playing at talking with Breyer, talking with the co-founders of VISTA, who are the best enterprise data, enterprise software investors in modern history, we knew a new currency was needed. You can't sell your inventory in smart, structured optimized ways, because no one can really say using Nielsen data, what's the true value of it, you know, in a granular way. We've always been ultimately playing for the target of being a part of the upgrading of the currency for the whole ecosystem. What it feels like is that there's an increasing consensus and comfort with the idea that the system is going to work with this basket of a few really smart differentiated things as opposed to one behemoth oligopoly that they're shackled to, and I think that's really exciting. Does audience data matter in TV measurement? We know for a fact, it is an academic fact that social sentiment has zero correlation value with actual economic outcomes for corporations. Our argument is that it is a demonstrated fact that the intelligence community and the finance community knows that that search and not just any search, but high-value search query is one of the most predictive datasets in the world, indicating actual purchase intent and lining up with financial outcomes. That's our differentiating thing because what we do, we know for a fact that no one else can do, which is monitor highly granular search data at a 32nd level of resolution. That's a very difficult data science machine learning problem. But the answer is we don't think measurement is a function of audience scale anymore. It is a function of efficacy, how effective, what is the methodology that shows you in an investment-grade ROI way, and the effectiveness of the action that you took. What will Shamrock Capital’s recent $80 million venture funding round allow EDO to do? As was the case with Kensho, we really believed in being a tech-first firm. It's actually time for us to just lean into growing our sales team and a little bit of the higher optics cost things that that you need to go and sort of honestly take market share and grow. It’s also going to allow us, we do like to ingest and incorporate lots of other data, lots of different forms of data and it gives us a war chest to go and get the data that we want and need that isn't alongside our own original data. How do you juggle your business in measurement and a Hollywood career? I've always liked the space, the space that you know, my own kind of ebbs and flows of creative inspiration. And then the key for me, honestly, is that I have great partners. When you link up with really great people, you leverage each other's strengths and you don't all have to be perfect all the time. You don't have to all be on all the time. So when I go do "Knives Out" like last year and a new Wes Anderson film in the fall, I have people that I can trust to sort of hand the baton to, you know? Watch Norton's full Remotely interview below.

5 questions with Edward Norton, EDO co-founder

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