When Allison Cohen conducts research, she likes to get personal with the respondents. The philosophy at Ally & Gargano, the New York ad agency where she works, is that the more the creative staff knows about its target audiences, the better the creative process will be. As senior vice president and director of account planning, part of Cohen's job is to uncover the feelings of those target audiences and pass them on to her co-workers.

"I really have been positioned as someone who can help the creative team find out information to make their job of developing advertising easier. I like to put the emphasis where possible on helping them find out up front what it is they need to know before they start making the ads."

Along with the traditional qualitative and quantitative methods, Cohen uses on-site interviewing when it's appropriate to the project, whether she's researching for a new business pitch or for a client's ad campaign.

"One of the agency's goals is to develop consumer focused strategies that result in consumer focused advertising. To do that, I like to talk to consumers where they are, or where they're thinking about using the particular product or service that we're interested in. I find that you get fresh insights that way and people are either close to the decision-making process or the usage occasion so it's easier to get the kind of information we're after rather than having it be historical and based on memory."

The quest for that information has sent her - with video camera often in tow - on a variety of ethnographic missions to: the living rooms of chocoholics to chronicle their sweet obsession; the kitchens and cupboards of consumers to analyze shopping habits; and to the beach on a hot July day to talk with young girls about feminine hygiene products.

"We were pitching an account and we new that teenagers would be very important to us as a target audience. It was July, and it seemed like the best place to reach teenaged girls was at the mall or at the beach, so that's where we went to find them and talk about their lives and their goals, what their concerns and preferences are.

"People think that doing research among teens is difficult, but I just haven't found that to be the case. If you get them in a comfortable situation, they're willing to tell you anything. They're aware of the world, and they're very willing to share their opinions and be taken seriously by adults. I've really enjoyed the research that I've done with them."

Her personal touch with consumers also appears to have given her a friendly relationship with her agency's creative staff-something not often found at ad agencies, where the research and creative camps typically maintain a state of mutual distrust caused by their skirmishes in the research vs. creativity wars.

"We have a close-knit clan here and one thing that has been good for me is that I think the creative team feels I'm sensitive to their issues. Part of my job does include taking rough work out to the consumer for input either before the commercials are made into animatics or before they're produced in a final manner. Often times creative people are reluctant to have researchers take their work to consumers because it's easy for them to feel threatened or to feel like they're going to have to change everything because somebody in New Jersey said they didn't get it.

"But we try to sit down and talk about the best way to approach consumers with their work. And I think they're far more receptive to listening to my interpretation because they have come to see me as the representative of the consumer rather than someone they don't really know very well. They would much rather have me taking their work to consumers than a stranger, so to speak."

When she tests storyboards with consumers, she prefers to do so in a one-on-one interview. "I find that when you present storyboards in a focus group it is more difficult to get a diversity of opinion or to get the shy consumers to speak up when there is someone who is quite vocal about how they feel about something. So I feel that it's worth it to take the time to do it on an individual level."

The creatives often observe these sessions to learn first hand how consumers feel about their work, Cohen says. "They want to come and hear what these people have to say. There is a constant communication between the back room and myself. I don't wear an earphone because I find them distracting but (the observers) are free to interject at any point with questions or anything they want probed and I will usually convene to the back room after every interview."

While testing is often done in conjunction with clients, Cohen says that the agency itself likes to pre-test ideas and executions with consumers before going back to the client with work. "We want to get a feeling for how the work has been received by consumers and see if we can head off at the pass any potential problems, especially problems in communication. Those are things that can often trip you up and they're so easy to fix or adjust before you go to the client with the work."

As an account planner - a relatively new addition to the list of ad agency job descriptions - Cohen says she has the freedom to "float around" between the creative department and account management.

"One thing that I have found about account planning is that it is less a defined discipline and more something that everybody practices in their own way. I've adapted to a particular way of working with the people here at the agency. We're a medium-sized agency with about 250 people and we're used to working in relatively small groups. People tend to work across disciplines, whereas in a large agency people tend to be somewhat more focused on someone's job description. Here I've found that the boundaries are a bit more flexible."