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Inside a giant tent at New York’s Lincoln Center in May, Phil Robertson strolls onstage. He’s wearing camouflage pants, wraparound sunglasses, and a solid-black long-sleeve shirt that accentuates his signature beard, which is off-white, unruly, and of ZZ Top proportions. Before him are a multitude of linen-draped tables, where media buyers from advertising companies sip wine, nibble on plantain chips, and listen to yet another pitch on how they should spend their clients’ budgets. This is advertising “upfront” season in New York, and Robertson, a cast member on A+E Networks’ runaway blockbuster reality program Duck Dynasty, is one of the stars of tonight’s show.

The final episode of the show’s third season, which aired on the A&E channel on April 24, was watched by 9.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen (NLSN), beating everything on both cable and broadcast television that night in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic, including the NBA playoffs and Fox’s American Idol.

Upfront season is a festive, testy time of year when every TV network (and, these days, a handful of businesses with large, online video operations such as YouTube (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO)) throws a lavish self-congratulatory party, rolls out its programming lineup for the coming season, and tries to sell ad space in advance. This past season, the proliferation of choices for consumers took a major toll on the traditional broadcast networks, which collectively lost a sizable portion of their viewing audience. “The math says that broadcast erosion is throwing over a billion dollars up for grabs in this year’s upfront,” Berning tells the ad buyers. “If you’re tired of paying a failure tax, we have lots of successful programs for you to invest in.”

To help decide which celebrity is the best choice for a film role or product endorsement, entertainment and marketing executives can tap into a host of numbers to gauge public figures' star power. So many, in fact, that the numbers leave a dizzying portrait of who's hot and who's not. At least four companies regularly track opinion on public figures in entertainment and sports. The venerable Q Score, in its fifth decade, surveys consumers once or twice a year by mail. Three newer competitors rely on the Web, enlisting panel participants to weigh in more regularly. The numbers are marketed to advertisers and casting directors to help them identify celebrities for product pitches or starring roles. But the various ratings sometimes show sharply different results.

Last July, 65% of respondents to an E-Poll Market Research poll who were aware of Mr. Woods said they liked him, or liked him a lot. That proportion dropped to 26% in their latest rating, earlier this month. Some 31% found the golfer insincere, while only 2% found him trustworthy (compared with 1% and 28%, respectively, for Tom Hanks in the most recent poll, last April).

Davie Brown Entertainment, a unit of Omnicom Group, began polling in 2006, after talking to marketers and ad agencies about the attributes most important to them in celebrity endorsers. The company settled on seven attributes, including appeal, influence and trust. Respondents who recognize the celebrity are asked to rate him or her on each of those attributes on a six-point scale. Then their scores are averaged, and that attribute average is combined with awareness, which is weighted more heavily, to produce the Davie Brown Index. Assigning so much weight to name recognition can yield perplexing results. Mr. Woods's index dropped only modestly, to 80.9 just before his apology from 89.2 a year earlier, in part because slightly more people were aware of him. This helped overcome a plummet in trust, to 43.7 from 68.8. "The overall DBI number is very, very important, but we look at everything," says Jeff Chown, president of Davie Brown Entertainment's talent division. The newest entrant on the scene, Millward Brown, rates celebrities and brands on the same scale, to identify the best marketing fit. Like the Davie Brown Index, Millward Brown's Cebra scores also emphasize familiarity, which is averaged with likability and "buzz," or media attention. Mr. Woods's Cebra score dropped only slightly, to 67 this month from 70 last September. A crash in likability, to 46 from 69, was mitigated by a surge in buzz, to 85 from 74; and a small bump in familiarity, to 70.

What are the advantages of crowdsourced research? Cost-effectiveness –- Comparatively speaking, crowdsourced research can be done at a fraction of the cost of traditional research. Quick Turn Around –- The time it takes to gather, execute, and analyze is shorter thanks to a purely digital foundation. Flexibility –- As trends emerge in findings, researchers can easily adjust their strategy to catch any shifts or “surprises.” Collaboration –- Crowdsourced research allows brands to collaborate easily with customers to ideate or improve upon products, to test concepts, ads, and experiences, and to continue the conversation over a longer term. Velocity –- Crowdsourced research can travel at the speed of digital, allowing for real-time consumer behavior analysis and insight for new technologies, memes, trends, and conversations. Marketing and Marketing Research –- Even though it’s frowned upon and often times refuted in traditional research, the nature of crowdsourced research implies there will be some form of marketing intertwined as consumers share their stories, insights, and ideas for brands they support.

Crowdtap, which is still in beta, is a tool that fills the gap between traditional research and digital, and helps with insight gathering, customer empowerment and influence. At my company, we use Crowdtap to augment our research activities, especially when time is of the essence (i.e. new business pitches, client presentations, low-budget projects). Brands and agencies can leverage Crowdtap to target questions (polls, discussion topics, and open-ended queries) to a certain demographic profile subscribed to the tool.