My name is Eleanor Baird, and I love to think and write about media, advertising, and consumer behavior. So, I decided to start a blog about it.
I’m a recent transplant from Boston to the west coast. In October 2009, I joined online video distribution, promotion, and analytics company TubeMogul in Emeryville, CA, where my handle is Director, Partnerships & Analytics. (By the way, the observations on this blog are my own, and do not reflect the views of my current or past employers).
Back in Boston, I worked as a Senior Associate with a web analytics and online marketing consulting firm called Compete. My job was to interpret data to understand what people are doing online and why, then advise Fortune 100 companies on attracting and retaining customers through the online channel. I also wrote extensively for the AdAge ranked company blog.
Before I joined Compete, I completed my MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management in June 2008. I was the only person in the MBA graduating class that year to choose to write a thesis. My research was on how targeted online advertising works and how it might look in the future. Glen Urban was my supervisor.
Also at MIT, I was also the only student outside of the Comparative Media Studies program to be a Researcher with the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3), headed by Henry Jenkins. At C3, my work focused on media metrics, advertising, social networks, and valuing fan activities. I also did research on how feature films were promoted by fans and studios through YouTube.
Between years one and two of graduate school, I interned with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington DC, where I worked on a few projects to help them identify new sources of revenue, where local stations could best pool resources, and increase viewer engagement.
I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. Before I moved to the U.S. for graduate school, I worked in the public and private sectors, mostly in client-facing roles focused on organizational development and communications. My undergraduate degree is from the University of Toronto, where I got a B.A. and specialized in Political Science with a minor in History.
What is “massless communication”?
I use the phrase “massless Communication” to refer to two things:
- the ephemeral quality of digital media and communication; and
- the diminishing need to address media to a mass audience.
I’ve been using the phrase for a couple of years now. It really started with my essay for Henry Jenkins’ media theory class at MIT in spring 2007, which was titled Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Massless Media. It evolved into “Massless Communication” in 2008, when I started the first blog with that name. It was focused on my thesis, which was entitled Targeted Online Advertising: Persuasion in an era of massless communication
