Barry Tannenholz

Mr. Tannenholz began his career as an advertising copywriter after being plucked from the University of California at Berkley by David Ogilvy. At the time, he had been pursuing a Ph.D. in Logic and Methodology of Science.

Mr. Tannenholz established himself as one of the premier copywriters and became the president of his own advertising agency. However, along the way, he took advantage of his access to a wealth of data to begin to disentangle and quantify the causes and effects of marketing. His work became known to clients who then commissioned him to explain issues that had long troubled them. The result was an array of models that predict consumer purchase behavior with uncanny accuracy.

His accomplishments include:

• A test market simulator with superior forecasting accuracy to the standard used by most major package goods companies. This simulator is extremely sensitive to each element of the marketing mix and will reverse engineer optimized promotional plans.
• Consumer media planning models that accurately forecast incremental business as a function of the media plan and the measured persuasiveness of the advertising. These models produce media plans that are very likely much more efficient than those coming from any ad agency.
• A share of shelf simulator that forecasts retail takeaway as a function of share of shelf, given the brand’s current market share and the category purchase cycle. This simulator was developed from a large nationwide experiment across eight different product categories.
  A methodology for building real world price elasticity curves.