Deb Roy: Twitter’s Rad Scientist
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A key part of Twitter’s ad strategy rests on the assertion that the service is a complement to TV viewing. Deb Roy is bringing scientific rigor to that claim.
A tenured MIT professor who came to Twitter in February via its acquisition of the social-TV-analytics startup he co-founded, Bluefin Labs, Mr. Roy is the company’s chief media scientist. He’s charged with propping up ad sales by applying data to support Twitter’s positioning as a driver of TV tune-in and articulating how its TV-related ad products work, which he did with beautiful data visualizations and his engaging professorial delivery at Cannes.
Mr. Roy, 44, believes the TV industry is undergoing a seismic change — triggered by its audience increasingly dividing their attention between their set and their tablet — akin to what Hollywood experienced during the transition to talkies, which dramatically altered how people related to movies. “There are certain kinds of programming that I think, looking at the data, are social by nature. They just catalyze conversation,” he said. “What’s happening in the TV industry is a search to optimize for that characteristic and create more of it.”
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