-By Steve McClellan

The Nielsen Co. has hired McKinsey & Co. partner Steve Hasker to fill the newly created position of president, Media Product Leadership and Advertiser Solutions.

Hasker will join the company next month and have a dual reporting function to company CEO David Calhoun and Itzhak Fisher, who was just promoted to evp at Nielsen, with responsibility for global product leadership, emerging businesses and strategic planning. (Adweek, as well as Mediaweek, is a unit of Nielsen Co.)

In this new position, Hasker will direct strategy and development of Nielsen's media products and services, including measurement of television, online and mobile media, as well as the company's ongoing work around cross-media measurement. Jim O'Hara, who formerly led Media Product Leadership, is moving to Nielsen's Global Business Solutions division as the client service executive for emerging businesses, Nielsen said. 

Hasker will also oversee Advertiser Solutions, a new business unit designed to help advertisers deliver the right messages to the right consumers, and improve marketing effectiveness and return on investment. In this respect, Hasker will work closely with Alan Gould and Ken Orkin, co-CEOs of Nielsen IAG, who have also been tasked with running the day-to-day Advertiser Solutions operation.
 
"We are extremely pleased to add a leader of Steve Hasker's caliber to guide our product efforts across media and advertiser services," said Calhoun in a statement. "This appointment, as well as the creation of Advertiser Solutions, is a significant next step in Nielsen's continued delivery of insights into the 'connected consumer.'"

In 1998, Hasker joined McKinsey's Global Media, Entertainment and Information practice advising on issues of strategy, growth and innovation for leading companies in television, mobile telecoms, syndicated information, filmed entertainment, sports and online advertising. Hasker is a regular guest lecturer at Columbia University, and his research into the influence of social networks on consumer behavior has been published in the Harvard Business Review. His writings on digital and online business models and marketing have been featured in the McKinsey Quarterly.

Commenting on his appointment, Hasker said, "I look forward to working with media companies and advertisers using the breadth of Nielsen's assets to better plan and measure media across the Internet, TV and mobile, and to enhance the direct relationships between marketers and consumers that will optimize advertising investments.

"The opportunity to do at least two different things are central to the Advertisers Solutions mandate," he said. "The first is to look across the Nielsen three-screen initiative and the second is to tie together information showing different forms of media consumption with subsequent forms of media behavior."

Nielsen Business Media