MarketCast’s Zoë Friend takes on new role to expand MarketCast’s Content Insights practice as Hall and Partners leader, Jenna Lauer, joins MarketCast to lead Research and Insights
Los Angeles, Calif. – February 16, 2022 – MarketCast today announced Jenna Lauer is joining its leadership team as its new Head of Brand and Custom Research, while current MarketCast research leader, Zoë Friend, will head up a newly formed MarketCast Content Insights practice.
Jenna joins MarketCast from Hall & Partners, an Omnicom research business, where she served as Managing Partner for nearly a decade. While there, she led Hall and Partners’ West Coast (U.S) teams, which counted top consumer brands, video games publishers, and automakers as research clients. With a career spanning qualitative, quantitative, social, and mobile research, as well as agency advertising, Jenna has deep experience managing large research programs and teams. In her new role, Jenna will be responsible for growing MarketCast’s research practice, innovating its methodologies, and expanding its team of world-class researchers.
“Jenna is a research powerhouse, having led research and insights for some of the world’s biggest consumer brands,” said John Batter, CEO of MarketCast. “Jenna’s addition to our team will help MarketCast continue to innovate its research and insights practice, bringing proven consumer research methodologies together with advanced data science and analytics to help our clients better understand who their fans are and how they engage with their products, brands, and content.”
MarketCast’s recent acquisition of real-time research platform, Invoke, expands the company’s content research and testing capabilities into longer-form media, including pre-released streaming and TV series (pilots and episodes), movies, and podcasts. MarketCast’s Zoë Friend has decades of experience in entertainment research, which includes leading research for groundbreaking original series and movies for Netflix and Paramount, making her the ideal person to lead this new MarketCast team.
“Having spent years on the studio side of content creation, I can think of no better person to partner with on media testing and research than Zoë Friend,” said Batter. “Zoë understands the pressure facing today’s content creators and programmers, and can deliver them smarter, more strategic audience insights to guide their biggest content development and distribution decisions.”