Like many of us PR practitioners, Karen Nelson-Field began her career in media. After earning her PhD in Audience and Measurement at the University of Adelaide, she went on to complete post-doctoral research at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, where she explored social media engagement - looking into Facebook “likes” and Youtube virality and how these metrics could be of value to brands.
Karen describes that decade of research as an incredibly transformational time. “Facebook wasn’t even Facebook,” she says, reflecting on a period when the industry was still figuring out how to measure digital media at scale.
After leaving the University, Karen founded Amplified Intelligence, a company that specialises in understanding the difference between something being served and someone actually watching. Her team built biometric measurements at scale and began researching “viewability”, a metric that, as Karen points out, meant little to the industry when she first started out.
More than eight years on, Amplified Intelligence has transformed how brands, agencies, and advertisers think about attention. In creating an entirely new economy around the value exchange between the publisher and the brand, the business has exposed an uncomfortable truth: that the measurement systems we have relied on for so long, might not be serving us anymore.
