BIA Expands Forecasting And Consulting Services With New Hires

BIA Advisory Services has added three key personnel to augment its forecasting and consulting divisions.

“BIA’s role as a trusted advisor has been increasing significantly, and I am excited to expand our team to support our efforts for clients,” said Tom Buono, BIA’s CEO and founder. “The media marketplace is extremely dynamic and its incumbent on us to continually challenge ourselves to deliver the best data and insights that help our clients with their goals and priorities. Our new team members have exactly the skillsets necessary to immediately deepen our impact and value to clients.”

Nicole Ovadia

Nicole Ovadia has joined as vice president of forecasting and analysis to focus on enhancing BIA’s U.S. local media advertising forecast models and to support strategic and financial consulting projects with insights and analysis on broadcasting, digital trends, and economic impacts.

Ovadia comes to BIA from the New York State Broadcasters Association (NYSBA) where she had a successful track record advocating for New York City radio. Prior to that, she spent more than 14 years with Emmis Communications at both the corporate level in the strategy group focusing on sales and acquisitions and at the local level in New York where she was vice president customer success.

Over her career, Ovadia has focused on building forecast models, implementing process improvements, and building partnerships with clients. These will all be areas she will focus on at BIA. In addition to her role in forecasting, Ovadia will be leading enhanced initiatives to develop recommendations and conclusions based on forecasted outcomes and will work with the forecasting team to develop and share custom analyses with clients.

Ovadia has a B.S. degree in economics from Wharton and an MBA from MIT Sloan. She will be based in New York City.

Leyla Chatti has joined as a senior media analyst. She comes to BIA from Warner Brothers Digital where she worked in the business intelligence area analyzing and reporting audience insights to global leadership. Prior to that, she was a client insights analyst for the financial services area at Comscore.

At BIA, Chatti will do qualitative and quantitative research and use BIA’s advertising forecast to develop custom strategic business insights for clients. She will also be focused on business vertical analysis by media channel.

Chatti earned her B.A. from the University of Virginia. Whe will be based in Washington.

Mark Dugan, BIA’s new director of data insights and client relations, joins from Sinclair Broadcast Group, where he was a research director for WPGH Pittsburgh. In this role, Dugan worked regularly with Nielsen, Scarborough, Media Audit and Kantar Research to develop customized client-centric presentations and assist sales management to better position the station. He also trained sales staff in projection and estimate techniques.

Dugan has also been an account executive at Raycom Media and Research Director at Granite Broadcasting.

At BIA, Dugan will use his industry experience to help clients use BIA data and research effectively and efficiently. He has his MBA with a concentration in marketing and a BA in psychology from the University of Rochester. Dugan will be based in Pittsburgh.

BIA’s managing director, Rick Ducey, commented on the company’s expansion, saying: “Nicole’s broadcasting experience and unique set of skills and experience will be invaluable as we expand and refine our advertising forecast to reflect today’s digital trends. Combine that with Leyla and Mark’s abilities to develop deep analysis around our data and we will be able to better key into our clients’ business goals and help them succeed.”

Ovadia, Chatti and Dugan have started in their positions at BIA.