Innovator Profiles-Ron Kolessar

Ron Kolessar is chief engineer of a tiny gadget that could shake our media-saturated world to its foundations. The Portable People Meter he helped design at Arbitron Inc. could radically change the way advertisers spend their billions, creating new winners and losers in TV, radio, print and other ad-driven media.

More than 13 years ago, Arbitron (Columbia, Md.) handed Kolessar the challenge of inventing a better mouse trap for capturing both TV and radio ratings. At the time, ratings were defined by users with paper logbooks for radio and pushbutton set-top boxes for TV. "We were committed to finding a solution, even though we didn't know what it would be," Kolessar said.

"Idea teams" of engineers, marketers and business people at Arbitron brainstormed. In parallel, Arbitron's team of fewer than 30 engineers reached out for technical help to Martin Marietta, which was just starting a commercial consulting business, and the 2,000-plus engineers at Johns Hopkins University's advanced-physics lab just a couple of miles down the street.

Kolessar wound up presenting a novel concept to his management—a wearable device that listens for embedded signals in a broadcast to automatically report what consumers are actually hearing. The Portable People Meter, or PPM, could handle both TV and radio—and maybe someday even Webcasts and grocery store Muzak. Arbitron's execs snapped up the idea.

Kolessar credits Martin Marietta with providing expertise in detecting radar signals for submarine warfare, and the Johns Hopkins lab for help in understanding location technology and sensors. Both groups share some of the patents on the PPM with his Arbitron team. Arbitron also tapped research from the 1980s on psycho-acoustic masking for audio watermarking.

The company is now conducting a small trial in Houston, and consumer giant Proctor & Gamble is helping to ramp up a bigger trial while national networks test Arbitron's signaling system. Meanwhile, Kolessar's team is exploring next-generation PPMs that are cheaper and that incorporate GPS and RFID capabilities.

If the trials are successful, Kolessar might have one of the most disruptive PDAs ever to hit the sometimes stodgy media world. "The industry we are in is fixed in a don't-rock-the-boat mentality. The idea of changing to a new methodology, even if it is demonstrably better, is very hard to do," he said.