PDMI Fall Seminar Series

Jeffrey de Veer is managing partner at IMRA Music Publishing in the Netherlands.

Bryan E. Miller is the founder of Sensory Overload Music and has extensive experience in creating dynamic, original music for the direct response industry. Miller is constantly in high demand by the industry’s leading marketing companies, including Script to Screen, TriStar, Envision Direct, Bob Caudill, Patrick Raymond, Guthy-Renker, and many more. His music has been featured in many of the highest grossing infomercials of all time, and his shows consistently rank on the IMS charts. Miller secured the rights to Cher's classic hit, “If I Could Turn Back Time,” for a major Luminess campaign and then created a new master recording, which saved his client more than $100,000.

Pat Rickey, composer and musician, founded Downpat Music in 1986 after scoring one of the first known infomercials, titled “SyberVision's Neuropsycholgy of Weight Loss.” This first DRTV client birthed the DTC industry we know today, as many future industry leaders in production and media buying started at SyberVision. Upon discovering that infomercials had no classification with the Public Rights Organization, BMI, which was responsible for collecting the public broadcast royalties for music on TV, Rickey negotiated a very favorable music royalty rate for both composers and music publishers that continues today. Rickey's work includes hundreds of infomercials and DTC spots with more than $3 billion in sales across 72 countries. Downpat Music's soundtracks commonly surpass 10 percent of all DTC TV media airings. The company scored many of the early infomercial legends — from Carleton Sheets, Billy Mays, George Foreman, Don LaPre, and The Juiceman, to product hits like Hooked on Phonics and Nordic Track, and new brands including Worx, Car Shield, Humana, 3M and many more. What began as a paper-based media schedule submission system for royalty tracking and collecting has turned into an efficient, electronic tracking model for all current infomercial airings. Through this system, Rickey's company has collected millions of dollars in music royalties on behalf of composers and clients.

Joseph Gray currently serves as senior vice president of DR Solutions at iSpot.tv. He founded DRMetrix in 2012 to provide much-needed insights and competitive data to the direct-to-consumer television industry. DRMetrix was sold to iSpot.tv in October 2021. Gray also founded television's largest cost-per-action advertising network, REVShare, in 1989. Prior to that, one of his companies, Global Media Productions, was acquired by TelAmerica Media, now Cadent Networks, where he briefly served as president in 1987-1988. In 2007, Gray raised an equity round from The Carlyle Group and HIG Capital, forming Media Property Holdings and Lead Generation Technologies, which operated a pay-per-call lead exchange in various verticals including legal tort, debt, and tax.