About

About the Blog: This blog will be a place for me to keep things updated, share stuff I find interesting, and encourage you to comment or contribute so that we can make it a site for listening thoughts, comments and advances that we all participate and share in.

About Me: I’m Stephen D. (Steve) Rappaport, ARF Knowledge Solutions Director, responsible for creating the knowledge resources, tools and services which help members build brands. Listen First! draws upon my decades of experience in listening for market research and for creating listening-based business strategy, services and companies. Listening grabbed me in academia, where I had the good fortune to train under a number of distinguished professors who pioneered media content analysis, and then brought that to business to include in my toolkit for consumer and B2B research, strategy and planning. I advise companies as diverse as Campbell, Toyota, Warner Bros., and Kaiser Permanente, and keynote, speak, panel or lead workshops at conferences such as the World Federation of Advertisers, Mobile Marketing Association, and ARF. Listen First! is my second book published by John Wiley & Sons under the auspices of the ARF. I’m the lead author of the best-selling The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from the Advertising Research Foundation (Wiley 2007)