Prior to joining Lifetime Brooks was Senior Vice President, Research for USA Networks, where he supervised their programming and advertising research in domestic and international markets, and developed and launched new businesses. While there he helped structure the programming plan for the launch of the Sci-Fi Channel in 1992 and USA's Latin American and European networks in the late 1990s. He joined USA Networks in 1991. He was widely quoted in the press on audience matters both while at USA and at Lifetime.
Before USA Networks, Brooks was Senior Vice President/Media Research Director for N.W. Ayer from 1989 until 1990, and with NBC in the 1970s and 1980s holding various positions, including Director, Program and Advertising Research and Director, Television Network Research. He began his career in New York with WCBS-TV in 1969-1970, and also worked briefly for Capital Cities Broadcasting and Westinghouse Television.
Brooks has been very active in industry affairs, serving as Chairman of the Board of both the Media Rating Council and the Advertising Research Foundation; longtime Chairman of the ARF's Video Electronic Media Council; a board member of the Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM); three-term chair of CTAM's Research Committee; and a board member of the recently formed (2005) Council for Research Excellence, among others. He is currently a member of the George Foster Peabody Awards committee. He is a recipient of the Cable Television Advertising Bureau's Jack Hill Award for Excellence and Integrity in Media Research, as well as CTAM's TAMI Award.
Regarded as one of television's leading historians, Brooks has had a parallel career as a writer on television and record industry history. The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present (1979), co-authored with Earle Marsh, is a standard industry reference that won an American Book Award in 1980 and is now in its ninth edition. His groundbreaking Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry (2004) won three major academic awards, and a related double-CD by the same name won a Grammy Award in 2007. He has also authored or co-authored several other books and numerous articles. He has been a leader in the field of recording research, serving as president of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in the 1980s and in various other capacities for that organization, including (currently) chair of the Copyright Committee. He has authored the ARSC Journal's "Current Bibliography" column, which surveys literature in the field, since 1979. He received ARSC's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.
Brooks was an adjunct professor of communications at Long Island University (1979-1988), and also served as a captain in the United States Army. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Dartmouth College and a master's degree in television-radio from Syracuse University. (A detailed biography can be found in Who's Who in America.)
Earle Marsh considers himself one of the Midwest's first television babies. In 1947, when he was barely speaking, his parents bought their first television set, a Sentinel with a 10-inch screen. He can still remember his folks setting up folding chairs on Tuesday nights for friends who came to watch Uncle Miltie. In his formative years he acquired such treasures as a Captain Video Space Helmet, a set of genuine Hopalong Cassidy cap pistols, a Davy Crockett coonskin cap (complete with snap-off tail that could be fixed when his friends pulled it off), and his own Mickey Mouse ears.
While earning a degree in marketing at Northwestern University in the 1960s, he worked on the local campus radio station, WNUR-FM, and it was only natural that he would migrate to broadcasting. Following a stint with the A.C. Nielsen Company, during which he learned more about ratings than most people would care to know, he made two round trips between NBC and CBS, advancing through the ranks in network radio, network television, and local television research. His most recent corporate media position was as Vice President of Research for Showtime/The Movie Channel.
Although Mr. Marsh is currently working in the computer services industry, he also serves as a media consultant, servicing, among others, some of the companies for which he previously worked. He also gives college lectures and makes numerous media appearances.