That is the key question which has suddenly engulfed the craft of TV measurement, as Nielsen’s admission it may not have measured pandemic TV audiences as well as beforehand has caused TV execs to worry audiences may be as much as 10% under-reported.

Amid the kerfuffle, rival Comscore senses an opportunity.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comscore’s chief revenue officer Carol Hinnant says a new deal inked with ViacomCBS shows TV networks are coming to value the approach of panel-informed measurement over panel-dependent measurement.

Measurement debate

As their ratings drop, TV networks fault Nielsen. Media researchers weigh in https://t.co/IKPhO22Z5N pic.twitter.com/h9P9RP5sAJ

— Forbes (@Forbes) April 21, 2021

“The controversy in the marketplace today is that, on a panel-based approach you’re dealing with a small sample, and you’re having to project that to the viewing behaviours,” Hinnant says.

“I think that given the sample, and the ability to recruit during the pandemic it’s caused a lot of controversy. I think that the pandemic has certainly emphasised to the marketplace the value of (TV) return-path data.

“What Comscore does, which is very different, is that we have secured return-path (viewing) data from set-top boxes for wired households, and we ingest that data. It’s our ‘massive and passive’ form of measurement that really is propelling the industry to look at Comscore as a currency.

“One in three television households in the US are contributing passive measurement. We are not asking for participation, and we’re not looking for button-pushing, we are collecting that data in a passive way, and that’s a very different approach than the panel-based approach.”

ViacomCBS extends

To prove her point, Hinnant points to news this week in which ViacomCBS an expanded renewal agreement to use Comscore’s national TV measurement currency for its news, entertainment and sports networks, enabling ViacomCBS to guarantee its traditional linear advertising campaigns.

“It’s the first time that a major media company has actually come out and said now they have currency diversity,” Hinannt says.

“There’s a choice in television measurement, and it’s not just Nielsen anymore, and Comscore is playing a huge role in that.

“The announcement here is really about Comscore reaching parity with Nielsen in terms of television measurement.”

Counting views

During the pandemic, the widespread assumption was that television viewing boomed as stay-at-home consumers swelled consumption.

That is why TV networks, flanked by their Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) representative body, recently criticized Nielsen for reporting a decline in viewing and usage during the 2020 period.

VAB complained that the number of households providing usable data to its people meter between February 2020 and February 2021 fell considerably, leading to an under-counting of true TV viewing.

Nielsen says it will continue to be scrutinized by the Media Ratings Council (MRC) but not by auditor Ernst & Young as requested by VAB.

The apparent under-measurement dropped a problem onto TV networks’ laps as they went into a critical upfront ad sales season. Concerned TV networks are now seen as exploring additional solutions.

Measurement methods

Comscore has seized on the debate.

In a blog post and lengthy analysis, it says “small samples today are extremely unstable”:

“The dynamics of panel refusal have almost certainly changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly when empanelment requires in-home interviews or installation.

“Thus, even if there may have been some attempt to understand the effect of nonparticipation bias before 2020, in the pandemic and post-pandemic worlds those conclusions, particularly for methods that include in-home visits, are now largely inapplicable.”

Nate made fun of me b/c I got excited about getting the Nielsen rating survey we got tru TV fans will kno pic.twitter.com/PXJFdV15GN

— Candi(ce) (@notmaeby) April 20, 2021

we’re informed by panels

Instead of being limited to two minutes an hour among multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), addressable advertising will become a bigger part of the 14 minutes an hour that national networks sell themselves.

“Addressable advertising on linear TV has been highly in demand. It outstrips supply,” Scott Worthem, global executive vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at media measurement and analytics company Comscore, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

Moving From GRPs to Impressions

Worthem sees addressable advertising as more valuable to buyers that want to reach targeted households, while the sell-side can command a higher price for their inventories. The shift to addressable advertising will coincide with changes to how audiences are measured. Instead of gross ratings points (GRPs), television will continue to move toward impression-based metrics that have been more common with online media. That includes newer over-the-top (OTT) video platforms that viewers watch on internet-connected devices.

“Moving from GRPs to impressions puts the industry on par with how most other media is evaluated,” Worthem said. “GRPs miss some of the mark in being able to results on the back end.”

Impression-based metrics help to provide a more holistic pictures of consumers as they watch programming among different screens, including TVs, smartphones, tablets, desktop computers and even movie theaters.

“As we move to cross-platform, you’re able to have media comparisons of how an ad might play in OTT or in mobile, versus how it might play out in traditional TV,” he said. “This is an opportunity for TV to take another new set of currency and go down to an impression level that can make outcomes-based measurement, which is really in demand by a lot of our clients.”

Top Priorities for Addressable

Comscore recently participated in an effort led by Dish Media to evaluate the current and future state of addressable TV strategies. They commissioned Forrester Consulting to do a study, “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV,” published this month.

The study found that a top priority is making addressable advertising easier for marketers and agencies to reach bigger scale, with 100% of them saying they had experienced at least one challenge in that goal. Cadent, Canoe, Invidi Technologies, LiveRamp, Verizon Media, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia joined Dish in sponsoring the report.

Source: Forrester

“The Forrester report really did a good job at a point in time where we needed feedback from the industry and the buyers that are out there considering addressable,” Worthem said. “I was pleasantly surprised that there is a lot of interest. There were a lot of categories that had people who were interested in addressable, and a lot that have already been trying it.”

Ninety-two percent of advertisers and agencies want a single measurement standard from media companies, and 93% want greater interoperability among their technology partners, according to the report. Meanwhile, 66% said they want to simplify buying and managing campaigns across suppliers, and 65% want to see increased scale for addressable ads.

“That was something that we’ve all heard in independent meetings and internet forums,” Worthem said. “Forrester was able to nail down some diagnostics around what we can do as an industry.”

You are watching “The Transformation of Television: Embracing the Era of Addressable TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Dish Media. For more videos, please visit this page.

Once upon a time, TV ads were sold against rough demographics. Now that internet-enabled TV services are bringing targetability and data, TV is changing.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comscore’s chief product officer David Algranati says that is prompting a re-assessment of how “TV” must be measured and sold. He describes three trends describing the conversation.

1. Impression-based measurement

Finally, measuring TV measurement doesn’t have to just be about a rough, representative panel estimate.

Panels still have their place, but the new trend is toward measuring actual viewing.

“Impression-based measurement is common in the digital marketplace, it’s more emerging in television,” Algranati says. “But to measure those impressions, that involves large-scale data, in both digital and television deliveries.

“On top of that large-scale data, (there is) the ability to link and deduplicate those impressions, which then gives advertisers the intelligence about reach that they seek in really formulating their media plans.”

2. Making ads addressable

Whilst new TV services are burgeoning, you don’t necessarily need new services to create new ad slots.

Thanks to software coming in, even, to linear TV, ad buyers are finding they can target ads even in conventional TV streams.

“This includes sources that have always been available, like local station inventory, MVPD inventory and national network inventory wanting to be more jointly evaluated,” Comscore’s Algranati says. “But then there are other more emergent sources, like OTT and digital video.

“This is really existing inventory … but having different insertion capabilities across that.”

3. Providing detail

“Describing those media transactions in detail that the buy and sell side want” is key, Algranati says.

“A big component of the impression-based measurement is having ubiquity of the ad measurement across the different types of ad delivery.

“And then, on top of that, impression-based measurement, decorating those with additional information, like advanced audiences or other more bespoke or custom target definitions that are important to the buy side.”

This video is part of Advancing Toward a Common TV Measurement Currency, a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Comscore. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. 

So how can ad buyers adapt and change tactics?

Apple is due to change its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), which advertisers use to identify iOS devices so they can deliver customized advertising, to a default opt-in.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rachel Gantz, Comscore’s GM, Activation, says the impact will be significant – but alternative approaches will be found.

Extra difficulty

“What these privacy regulations are doing is making it, frankly, more challenging to be able to deliver some of this at scale, to provide the reach that advertisers are used to,” Gantz warns.

One Forrester analyst expects 70% of iPhone users may decide not to opt in.

Apple has moved the change back from the just-released iOS 14 update to early next year.

But Beet.TV has been hearing from a collection of industry players, concerned about the development.

Apple’s IDFA Change Will Destroy Chunks Of Economy: LUMA’s Kawaja

Census continuity

Comscore’s Gantz says there are ways to build back capability, but they take investment.

For Comscore to continue providing clients the insight they need, she says there was a “need for methodologies that have multiple layers of redundancies in order to still be able to provide the census level service”.

“That’s not something that you can do on the fly,” Gantz says. It’s not something that you can wing.

“It’s something that you need years of preparing for. We’ve been preparing for this for some time.”

Privacy-first

Gantz agrees with the sentiment behind the changes. The IDFA change, like ongoing third-party cookie deprecation, follows earlier legislation which now requires explicit opt-in consent from consumers for data collection and processing.

“Most people view their mobile device really as an extension of themselves and they literally never go anywhere without it,” she says.

“They think that the personal information that gets associated with that, that’s important to them, and having more consenting control over that. That’s important to them.

“I think there’s still this common misconception that privacy compliance and having accurate effective targeting are at odds with one another. I think that premise is fundamentally flawed.

“So being able to put all of these processes in place that enable that while still delivering the value for the advertisers, that’s what it’s all going to be about for the next months and years.

Apple’s IDFA Change Will Hurt Consumers & Apps: IAB’s Mitchell

Future of identity

Amongst the alternatives mooted to third-party cookies and IDFA are first-party data, fully-authenticated users, fingerprinting, universal IDs and contextual ad targeting, the practice of matching an ad to some container content, rather than to a user.

“Contextual targeting, I think, still has this stigma in people’s head of being outdated or old,” Gantz says.

Far from it – she says the ability to combine contextual data with TV behavior data and panels in a privacy-compliant, cookie-free manner can be a win.

After Identity, Context Can Power Ads: News Corp’s Layser

This video is part of Advertising in a Time of Privacy-Centricity, a Beet.TV series presented by AppsFlyer. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Tershone Phillips reflects on her job path from Mindshare to Nielsen to Comscore where she is managing programmatic products.

Grateful for the support along the way for efforts at all these companies, and for the corporate embrace of  the Black Lives Matter mantle , she says that businesses need to address the systemic issues around racism.

A daughter of two retired Black NYPD officers, she shares her hope for police reform.

Straddling the Millennial and GenX  ages herself,  she hope that the passion of young people will power a new era of civil rights changes.

This video is part of an ongoing Beet.TV series of interviews with men and and women of color, addressing their personal experiences and hopes for essential change addressing racial inequality. Please find additional videos here. 

In this video interview with Beet.TV, CEO Bill Livek says the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing more brands to seek even greater accountability.

To that end, he hopes a recently-inked partnership with ad-tech supplier LiveRamp can help.

In May, the pair announced a partnership to “combine our companies’ collective television and video intelligence”.

The wait to make #addressability more mainstream is over. @jayin3D spoke w/ @Forbes @awolk on how our @Comscore partnership provides advertisers with even more options for measurement, segment creation, & understanding business outcomes. Read more: https://t.co/JcrTEhJZjL

— LiveRamp (@LiveRamp) May 15, 2020

That combination includes pairing Comscore’s census-based TV footprint and audience demographics with LiveRamp’s identity solutions.

Comscore’s audience activation segments – for groups like live sports watchers, cord cutters and political audiences – will be promoted through LiveRamp Data Marketplace.

Merged datasets

For Livek it is one more step to creating “reliable TV information”

“LiveRamp has a wonderful reach,” says Livek, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“They have created a safe haven where customers feel safe putting their database and merging it with other data sets.

“We’re looking forward to having LiveRamp use our information through their Data Plus Math platform.”

Multi-screen insight

It all matters, Livek says, because, in the multi-device, multi-screen era, truly understanding how different channels are used is critical.

For example, Livek says, whilst working at home, he uses one TV screen for business news, the other for entertainment. Understanding how and why different screens are used, thus, becomes important to understanding and connecting consumers’ position in buying cucles.

“We’re seeing on some information sites and entertainment sites, exponential increases in viewing and entertainment minutes, and the number of impressions,” Livek adds.

“If there is one trend coming out of this, I think it will be that advertisers are going to become more thrifty. And if they’re more thrifty, they’re going to rely on more accountability, and they’re going to want to know that their ad reached the homes that have the potential to buy their product.

One of the leading contenders – contextual targeting, the practice of seeking out ad inventory adjacent to particular kinds of content, rather than targeting individual users, no matter what content they are consuming.

But, whilst the emergence of contextual targeting is being framed as the flip-side of audience targeting, Rachel Gantz says there is no dichotomy.

“I think it’s the wrong question,” says Comscore’s general manager for activation, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “It’s not ‘either-or?’. It’s not ‘audience or contextual?’. The question should be ‘how do I get the best out of both?’

Context for COVID-19

Gantz has a prescient example. She says many advertisers that had allocated budget to sporting events now cancelled by the global COVID-19 pandemic are seeking an alternative way to reach the same kind of audience.

“So we’re seeing a huge surge in demand for some of our sports fan audiences…  viewers of sporting events from past seasons … for things like golf and baseball,” Gantz says.

“But then you layer on that contextually relevant piece. One example was … a CPG company who had tagged a lot of money for part of their media plan for sporting events.

“(They) still wanted to reach those audiences, but they wanted to do so in food- and recipe-oriented content. That’s that contextual layer that you can put on top of that.”

As COVID-19 continues to spread, local television viewing habits are shifting. Join us on April 14 as we talk about the impact on local markets and share insights on what trends are emerging across the U.S. https://t.co/Er3dVXWaWo #coffeewithcomscore #TV #coronavirus

— Comscore (@Comscore) April 8, 2020

Beyond cookies

Gantz says Comscore is partnering with ad platforms like Xandr to bring cookie-free, contextually-based demographics to market.

“For example, in Europe where GDPR impacted countries, (we can) take some of those tenets of age and gender targeting and make that available in a contextual standpoint,” she adds.

“Where the industry is going is to expand that to behavioural audiences, and really merge those two.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

The thirst for information about the pandemic is widely seen as driving a flight of audience to trusted news sources.

So you may think that advertisers would be happy with the traffic boost.

But some ad buyers are unhappy with the nuance of the virus stories they are being placed against.

In response, Comscore has just launched an “epidemic brand safety filter”, a brand safety segment inside its activation suite, which lets ad buyers fine-tune the kind of virus content they do or don’t appear against.

According to Comscore’s announcement: “For example, if a brand was comfortable advertising alongside coronavirus educational content but not content (about) COVID-19-related tragedies, Comscore’s new capability enables this level of nuanced control. These segments also offer publishers the flexibility they need to help their advertisers navigate the evolving news cycle.”

Think of it as “social distancing” for ad buyers who don’t want to stand too close to virus content.

Content boom

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rachel Gantz, General Manager, Activation Solutions at Comscore, explains the rationale.

“What we’ve seen, even in just the last week, is that 22% to 30% of all ad impressions are appearing in coronavirus content, which is just a huge number,” Gantz explains.

“And as a point of comparison, crime and violence, which is a pretty popular brand safety filter… during that same time period, we saw 2% to 5%.

“‘Pervasive’ is really the best word (for) coronavirus content and how that is creating some challenges for marketers and publishers.

“A couple of weeks ago, some of our clients came to us, asking us to help them figure out ways, from the advertiser side, to protect their brands from some of this unwanted negative content and, from the publisher side, to be able to offer that to their advertisers.

“So we’ve been pretty hard at work trying to solve that as quickly as we can.”

Balancing act

The launch could reignite the debate over what constitutes advertiser value in a news environment, and whether organizations are commercially incentivized to report bleak news.

Last year, Beet.TV produced a series, Why News in Today’s Marketplace, in which executives explored how to navigate what has become a charged, negative and sometimes partisan current-affairs landscape.

Vice Media revenue chief’s said brand safety blacklists, which allow ad buyers to filter certain sites out of their demand-side buying platforms, were effectively “censoring” news sites. GroupM senior advisor Rob Norman said: “The idea that a whole category of content, and eventually almost all of what I would referred to as ‘hard news’, could be determined as bad news … is patently absurd. News organizations can only produce great news if they have great funding.”

Coronavirus-related news stories are now being widely blacklisted, according to brand safety vendors cited by Digiday. YouTube last month said it would demonetize virus-related videos. A third of GroupM clients are blocking coronavirus terms. Native ad platform Adyoulike says ads simply targeting homepages have fallen off a cliff.

But Gantz says Comscore’s launch, available inside DSPs via Comscore contextual targeting, is more nuanced than that.

“Instead of traditional brand safety filters, which are binary – they either block all content related to a topic or none – what we’ve created is brand suitability filters which have low and high thresholds,” she explains.

“So, a brand might be comfortable with content around educational content surrounding the coronavirus, or content around some of the impacts of popular culture, but they very much want to stay away from content, say, about some of the horrible tragedies, or lockdowns, or content of that nature.”

Brands in a crisis

Run-downs of various ads seen during the pandemic highlight how brands can be either mocked or celebrated for the relevance and timing of their ads, some of which can take on a different context through the lens of coronavirus.

For example, KFC announced it was suspending a UK. campaign where people are seen licking their fingers. Others have been rowing back on ads showing people hugging or shaking hands.

Many brands are using the episode to demonstrate their heart, purpose and relevance. McDonald’s has a commercial which celebrates otherwise-unseen service and public sector workers.

McDonalds has re-done a 2016 ad, now 'Night Workers', which shows invisible service workers re-stocking shelves and nursing patients along to 'Rhythm Of The Night', a song by… Corona https://t.co/XR445tUJC0

— Robert Andrews (@RobertAndrews) March 15, 2020

Cafe chain Pret a Manger is offering free coffees to UK National Health Service workers.

This one is on us pic.twitter.com/gDLiZEuQi7

— Pret (@Pret) March 18, 2020

Gantz was interviewed remotely at home via the BeetCam powered by Zoom.

Instead, it got preoccupied with technologies which promise hyper-detailed targeting of individual users, regardless of the content they are consuming.

That was until privacy regulation put the brakes on advanced audience targeting techniques.

What’s coming next is what came before. In other words, to find their audiences, ad buyers are turning back toward the old method of “contextual” placement. But, in 2020, context comes with a difference.

“In the privacy era that we’re now in … what’s old is new again,” says Comscore activation GM Rachel Gantz. “Contextual targeting was quite popular from a digital perspective for a long time. It really took a back seat to audience-based approaches.

“We’re now seeing, because of all the privacy focus, the pendulum swing back towards connected TV and towards contextual offers.”

We're excited to introduce @Comscore to our Contextual Video Marketplace. This partnership represents our continued focus on privacy-driven innovation to meet brands' needs for CTV advertising and the next step in expanding contextual targeting to CTV. https://t.co/r4Vv0eBK6I pic.twitter.com/04tMD6Pawy

— IRIS TV (@iris_tv) March 2, 2020

Gantz’s Comscore this week announced that its segments for describing the brand safety and contextual categorisation of content will be available to IRIS.TV.

The latter, an LA company, offers a contextual video marketplace which uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata, helping ad buyers decide which inventory to buy against.

Gantz says that advertisers are growing weary about connected TV because they expect to be able to use the get the brand safety effectiveness to which they have now become accustomed in other digitals channels also in OTT environments.

And she says the looming death of cookie-based targeting will further spur the drive back to contextual.

“I think it’s going to mean that people are focused on much more privacy centric solutions, like contextual,” she says. “I think it means that people are just going to pay a little more attention … to exactly what are the mechanisms they’re using to be able to reach the audiences and content that they’re after.”

The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.

This video is part of  Beet.TV’s coverage  of  RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco.  This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.

For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.

But the emerging focus on “attribution” and “outcomes” doesn’t come as easy as it sounds.

“Data is not sexy,” Hinnant says, in this Beet Retreat townhall interview. “It’s really a tough business. And the more you have, the more that you know that, Hey, there’s more work to be done to clean it up and to make it usable and intelligible in order to make business decisions off of it.

“So there’s a lot of datasets out there, a lot of closed loops, a lot of people coming out and saying, ‘Hey, we have measurement’. But it’s really trying to figure out, ‘How do you decipher that and how do you aggregate it, bring it together so it can be actionable data at a large scale?’

“It’s one thing to do outcome-based measurement. It’s another thing to say, ‘Okay, now I’m going to take that outcome and I’m going to plan and try to optimise off of them’.”

At the same event, 605’s Noah Levine also said much of attribution is a “house of cards” due to insufficient focus on data provenance.

Hinnant was in January promoted to chief revenue officer after working in national ad sales for Comscore.

Comscore merged with TV measurement firm Rentrak in 2016, creating a company with capabilities across both TV and online channels.

Xandr & Comscore in August announced that the former will be the measurement and currency provider for Xandr’s Addressable offering, inclusive of DIRECTV, Altice USA, and Frontier.

The interview was conducted by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

But new advances mean the TV networks which historically run over the operators can also now offer equivalent functionality.

“Up until today, addressable has been an MVPD or connected TV provider alone. That is their resource,” says Comscore’s Carol Hinnant in this video interview with Beet.TV. “And so networks really couldn’t participate at that, at a television level.

“There is a great interest in to be able to participate in national addressable. Now with Project OAR, with Nielsen’s beta that’s going on with their acquisition of Sorenson and with Xandr’s national addressable consortium, they’re allowing those minutes to come into their pool (of inventory).”

• Project OAR is aa consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising.
• Nielsen’s beta test sees a number of networks dynamically swap-out ads ads in live linear TV feeds for their advertisers.
• Xandr & Comscore in August announced that the former will be the measurement and currency provider for Xandr’s Addressable offering, inclusive of DIRECTV, Altice USA, and Frontier.

Hinnant added: “We have the one-to-one relationship with the MVPDs that are providing us the return path data and so we have second-by-second click stream data from that return path and we are able to have the ad placement delivered to us.”

“So, whether it’s a five second, you know, a 30 second or 60 second ad, we’re putting a precise measurement to that directly from the input from the MVPDs.”

Hinnant was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

Comscore’s goal is to help buy-side advertisers get better results from ad measurement. Attribution is critical, says Wilson, and it’s even more critical that advertisers are operating off not just a subset of data, segmented by channel (linear TV, OTT), but a complete picture.

Comscore’s data sources are made up of 30 million households and 70 million televisions, as well as a digital consensus-based panel.

To Wilson, understanding who was exposed to advertisements from both linear and digital standpoints is a critical component of advanced TV measurement.

“That gives them the ability to effectively target their best consumers and understand who is exposed to those ads,” says Wilson. “Once we understand who is exposed to those ads, we have the ability to measure specifically what the return on media spend is. So it becomes a closed-loop system.”

As more customers cut the cord and more TV networks launch streaming platforms, having a holistic idea of who the end customer is and addressing them properly across channels is going to be table stakes for advanced TV advertisers.

“What’s key to understand today is to be able to manage the touchpoints of consumers across all the platforms that advertisers can understand what combination of platforms will have the biggest impact,” says Wilson. “Ad measurement from the point of addressable, OTT, linear campaigns and how all those work together to provide results for customers is number one.”

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here. 

But TV networks give cable and satellite platforms the ability to sell just two minutes per hour of advertising in their live feeds of network programming.

So how is addressable going to get greater scale?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comscore strategic partnerships SVP Scott Wortherm says he is trying to push two ways of doing so.

The digital measurement group previously merged with TV viewer measurer Rentrak to offer a combined and cross-channel measurement solution.

In August, AT&T’s ad-tech group Xandr picked comScore to measure viewing of addressable ads across its live linear platforms, extending the existing deal through which comScore did so for DirecTV to also encompass Altice USA and Frontier.

1. Combining forces

“About a month ago, Xandr and comScore announced an expansion of their relationship to measure addressable advertising,” comScore’s Worthem says.

“We help them measure addressable advertising in their consortium. That’s one way we can grow the two minutes an hour, by combining forces.”

2. Every spot rated

“In every ad that is addressable, not every viewer is actually targeted and sent the message. Because of the business model and how we measure data with 30 million households, we’re able to create a rating holistically, both for the addressable portion of one ad spot, and the portion of that ad spot that was not addressable.

“We can actually help measure what was addressed, and then if it’s a national ad, everything that was not.”

This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara.  This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr.   Please visit this page to find more videos from the series. 

“I definitely think we’re coming of age, if you will. We’re hitting that critical mass where yes there used to be scarce inventory. But especially with consumer trends we’re seeing more and more of that inventory becoming available,” Psacharopoulos says.

Comscore is one of many companies that participated in the recent MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. In this Beet.TV interview at the event, Psacharopoulos details Comscore’s latest contributions to planning, transacting and measuring results of advanced-TV campaigns.

Comscore is integrating advanced audiences into programmatic TV so that buyers can continue to venture beyond standard age and gender demos.

“We’re now introducing new metrics such as show-level exposure and dayparts and exposure to linear TV advertising,” says Psacharopoulos.

“We’re even getting into personas, believe it or not, whereby we’re now making available to the buying community the ability to buy based on people who were exposed or engaged with the World Series or the Stanley Cup or the Super Bowl.”

Also for programmatic TV, Comscore has metrics showing heavy, medium and light OTT and SVOD subscribers, as well as online gamers. “We’re trying to respond to what we’re hearing from the buying and selling community.”

Psacharopoulos says the industry wants trusted, third-party metrics that incorporated advanced-audiences insights. “We’re fundamental believers in the way in which we should be doing that is not from a single-source basis, given all the known issues from single-source type solutions.”

He calls MediaMath “an absolutely phenomenal partner. The way that they see us as a trusted partner, we also see them as a highly trusted, highly valuable partner.”

Comscore’s latest announcements heralded new “packages across our planning suite to enable folks to understand dynamics of disparate audiences, be it for their online and or offline behaviors in terms of understanding trends and patterns and so on.

In addition, “we’re enabling the targeting of those individual segments and making those available within MediaMath.” From the measurement side, within the Comscore Campaign Ratings suite, “we’re making available that post ad exposure measurement transparency again across these advanced audiences.”

This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.

The panel titled Making Identity a Reality in a Multi-Screen World brought together Matthew Krepsik, Nielsen’s Global Head of Analytics, Carol Hinnant, EVP of National Television Sales at Comscore and Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer at NCC Media.

Moderator Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principle of Prohaska Consulting, kicked things off by asking about the much desired “leap forward” from household to individual person addressability.

“I think we’re still in the early days of that as an industry,” said Krepsik, who believes the quest for a curated, omni-channel experience rests on “insuring that we have that common view of an individual person, regardless the screen or the device that they’re watching content on.”

No one seems to think that’s on the immediate horizon. Hinnant touted the actionable nature of household data, saying, “We’ve had great progress with it. I think it does come to scale at that point.” When used at scale, “it actually proves to have better results.”

Asked to quantify where the industry stands on achieving true one-to-one targeting and suggest a wish list of improvements, Ivins said that while for TV advertising spending “flat is the new up,” digital has been going up for 25 years.

“We should have seen it coming. What were we thinking? I think the industry is now woken up to that,” Ivins said. “All the media owners, they have the reach,” but that alone isn’t not enough.

“NBC can reach almost any household in the country if they wanted to because of their portfolio of products, but they don’t have the first-party relationships or some of technology. And the distributors have the technology and first-party relationships but they don’t have the reach,” Ivins added.

“TV as a platform, we have to get there,” said Hinnant. “We’ve got to stop the silos that are merging and I get that data privacy is an issue on that. But if we can come together as a platform, then we could actually compete.”

Five years ago, technology was a common barrier to advancement, according to Krepsit. Now cooperation is a bigger hurdle.

“The hardware manufacturers are beginning to play a bigger and bigger role in this ecosystem as well,” he said. “So it’s moving beyond the set-top box and actually moving to the actual devices. I think it’s only going to get more complicated.”

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

It seems likely there won’t be one central identity graph for each person judging from comments by Matthew Krepsik, Nielsen’s Global Head of Analytics, Carol Hinnant, EVP of National Television Sales at Comscore and Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer at NCC Media at the forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World. The panel was moderated by Matt Prohaska, CEO & Principle of Prohaska Consulting.

“If you don’t have consumer trust, it does not matter what technology solutions we put in place, the device graphs, the different partnerships, or any sort of math or data science we put behind it,” said Krepsik.

He cited regulations like GDPR in the European Union and the nascent California privacy act known as CPPA as being guiding forces. “I think just throwing technology and math at a problem without actually winning the trust of consumers sets our industry back,” Krepsik added.

Hinnant agreed with Krepsik and underscored the need to move beyond rating points to audiences in media transactions. “We have to help that conversion for all the ecosystem to go through and it’s the identity graph that helps that or the panels that help do that,” said Hinnant.

Prohaska mentioned the sharing of user phone numbers by Facebook without consent as one extreme, while observing that many people have been satisfied with a value proposition that involves the use of their data. “We’re in a bifurcated world,” he said.

“You have some people that will go one way and maybe a vast majority to the other,” said Hinnant. “But if we can help communicate what the value is to the consumer and educate them on what it means to be able to protect their privacy, I think that would be helpful.”

Ivins related the frustration of having to provide his credit card number while buying an airplane ticket online from a company with which he had done business before. “What do you mean you don’t store my credit card? I’ve been doing this for so long. It’s one of these things that you want to know who has what.”

With regard to Facebook and other digital advertising giants, Ivins said “there’s a message being sent there” by a backlash characterized by a decline in user engagement. “Whether they listen to it or not is TBD.”

From NCC’s perspective, “One of the issues that we’re looking at is I don’t want to be single threaded through one ID graph. I think that’s dangerous,” said Ivins about relying on one company. “I think we need to have some flexibility in that situation.”

Krepsik talked about people regardless of age or gender having to watch commercials for erectile disfunction products.

“What’s the biggest differentiation between me and my daughter? I’m a male, she’s a female. My son, he’s ten now. He doesn’t really even need to see an erectile dysfunctional ad at the age of ten. So you need his age.”

There needs to be a foundation that provides “a view of real people to underpin that measurement to build trust,” Krepsik said. “You can’t just live with one identity graph. We have different sources of information around people, around persons. And so it does have to be persons-based, but more importantly it has to be distributed. There’s not going to be a magical decoder ring where all the data’s going to sit in one spot.”

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Comscore’s seat at the table was its “data-centric, panel-informed” data assets across digital media, TV and OTT, according to Carol Hinnant, who is EVP, National Television Sales. “We bring that together in a single-source panel and then we really use that to drive our outcomes,” says in this interview at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.

NBCU had the benefit of data from Fandango, the movie ticket business of which it is majority owner. STXFilms was guaranteed that NBCU and its Audience Studio team would produce ticket sales and searches for information about the movie, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

With Comscore’s matching its digital and TV data with Fandango’s data, “those outcomes were based on Fandango ticket sales and online searches for the film. So we really were able to tie that entire marketing ecosystem and have it be outcome based on how we actually drove that,” says Hinnant.

Asked by interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., how agencies and marketers manage to bring together all the data needed for outcomes-based campaigns, Hinnant says “it really takes a collective effort of everybody.” She cites Comscore’s relationships with such third-party data providers as Polk, Experian and IRI.

“We also invite first-party data to come in. In the case of Universal, they brought in their Fandango data set, we did a match on that.”

So what is required to reach a tipping point of sorts for similar campaigns? “I think that you have to get the ecosystem to be able to accept those outcomes. So it’s not only just looking at those audiences but you have to have that be able to flow through the whole planning and posting cycle and we’re starting to see more and more of that happen.”

Although planning based on outcomes is “at kind of a small scale today,” Hinnant observes that Viacom is “winning with their advanced audiences structure so I think we’ll see more and more of that as these media networks and publishers have more success with that.”

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

For nearly 10 years the industry has been aware of the challenge of “needing to do something different and better,” Rockwood explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit in Manhattan. “I think in the last two we’ve probably made a lot of progress. I think before then there wasn’t enough of a business need but now there certainly is and I think there has been a lot better progress.”

The SVP of Ad Sales Portfolio Research says of Comscore and Nielsen, “I think that they both have started to do more that’s actually helping us” while echoing the concerns of many CIMM participants about the need to make it easier to conduct business in cross-platform premium video.

“It’s just too hard. As this measurement improves it will become easier to transact.”

She describes the fragmentation of viewing options as “so extreme that it may not be the best thing for the consumer. So I do believe that they’re going to start looking for simpler solutions that provide more value” And while the marketplace is fragmented is now, it’s “going to coalesce around some solutions that actually have more consumer value.”

Asked whether there are too many measurement options for the sell-side, Rockwood doesn’t think so. “I think you have to have competition in this marketplace and you have two major companies that are trying to solve for this,” both of which are “getting traction.”

Beyond that competition is the disparity in data sets, whether they derive from an MVPD or in Turner’s case DirecTV and NBCU with Comcast that “can all be used in different ways and I think we’re finding our way through that now. I don’t think that the complexity is getting in the way of us doing business.”

On the subject of identity graphs, Rockwood stresses their importance in how video advertising and viewing related to individual households and individuals.

“Having high-quality information around what devices belong to which households and then which people are using those devices is I think really important,” Rockwood says. “I think that the Xander data will certainly give us a leg up in that race.”

The latter was evident at the recent CIMM Cross-Platform Video Measurement and Data Summit in Manhattan. Referring to a panel discussion on cross-platform standards, ARF Chief Research Officer Paul Donato says in this interview with Beet.TV, “It was a nice polite session. It showed some of the sort of two sides of the story. We’re pretty close to all the members and it’s really quite controversial.”

One aspect of cross-platform measurement in particular divides digital players from those in linear television. “There are some mostly in the digital space that feel like there should be no real time duration, waiting, and are very much against it,” Donato explains. Those in the traditional linear TV space “who typically have longer ads tend to support the standards as they exist right now.”

The ARF will be working with its members on research that “goes right to should it be a linear waiting for time or is it non linear? I personally believe that the impact of advertising is non linear, which means eight seconds is not quite as good as four seconds, but the first four seconds have more value than the next four seconds.”

On the attribution side, there are anywhere from 15 to 30 attribution providers “all using different models,” says Donato. “I will say that what concerns a number in the industry is actually understanding the models and how they actually work and how to actually validate those models.”

He cites a common scenario wherein an attribution company will present to the CMO of a marketer, who then typically asks in-house researchers whether they understand how the company’s offering works. “A lot of what CIMM does and much of what we’ll do moving forward in 2019 is to actually study those models and try to understand the biases associated with them.”

Some CIMM attendees feel that progress is being made on cross-platform measurement, for which companies like Nielsen and Comscore received “soft compliments.” Because a lot of viewing is coming off of linear television and moving to other places, “it’s not surprising that the programmers are concerned that there’s still what they’ve been calling blind spots, places which are not part of the measurement system,” Donato says. “It’s really important to the media that all of those tiny pockets of non measurement be measured. That’s the stress that you see. Every percentage of inventory counts just given the value of that inventory.”

A year from now, he’d like the ARF to have achieved a better understanding of attribution models, partly to determine whether “a lot of the attribution models really disadvantage upper funnel media, because we don’t have that sort of granular data for individuals in television. So I hope we understand if, in fact, upper-funnel media are biased by these models.”

But, if that is the case, how do you explain Netflix?

Many executives in the industry have long since moved on from using “TV” to describe the box in the living room connected to an antenna, with many choosing the describe all moving-picture content, including “TV”, as “video”, whatever device it is delivered on.

But what is the current state of “television”, does it matter and what’s in a name?

A Beet Retreat panel convened by Beet.TV discussed the issue in Puerto Rico…

TV is the same – and different

Television is becoming something very different, with hugely different capabilities. But, for both viewers and advertisers alike, there has been no wholesale recalibration of the enduring nature of “TV”…

Julie DeTraglia, Head of Research, Hulu:

“I mean, Hulu is television. If we don’t define it as television, I don’t know what else we’d call it. Increasingly, especially as you get to younger generations, they define streaming as television. Older generations slightly less so.

“We do have advertisers that consider us in two different ways. You have sort of more traditional reach-and-frequency linear buyers who look at Hulu as a reach extension, as a way to brand their products, as a branding platform. And then increasingly, we have all of these direct-to-consumer advertisers … who treat television a little bit differently, who want the data that they’re accustomed to getting in digital.”

But TV is fragmenting

Viewers may still have a unified sense of what TV is – but that doesn’t mean that, for broadcasters and advertisers, the medium isn’t nevertheless splintering in to umpteen different challenges…

Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:

“It’s clear from our data that the consumer defines OTT as television. It’s the fastest growing platform, it kind of enfuels dataset, and it’s also the largest.

Now the challenge, I think there are a couple that we see with publishers. One is it’s very fragmented. We look at kind of OTT – there are a couple different buckets of devices that we include in that. So there’s kind of plug-in devices like Roku or an Apple TV or an Amazon Fire. There are gaming consoles. There are (also) smart TVs.”

Advertisers want ‘TV’, but like digital

From the advertiser perspective, the panel heard how advertisers want all of this complexity simplified so they can execute video- or TV-like ad buys across all the screens. But there is a tension – they want TV-like simplicity, but they want far more of the benefits of digital channels…

Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights

“What they’re looking to do is buy a single audience across different platforms – plan, and buy, and get the outcomes that they need. In each of those cases, there is friction. Using first party data, third party data, all that is possible, but there’s friction like the matching process that the previous panel talked about.

“The number of days it takes (is significant). By contrast, campaigns can be live on digital platforms in literally an hour, (or) a day. So if it takes two weeks, that there is friction.”

Addressable TV hard to scale

The panel heard from one tech vendor that was early in to helping brands benefit from digital targeting of TV viewers. He said that addressable TV is powerful, but hard to expand…

Mike Baker, CEO, dataxu:

“We started experimenting with addressable TV for Ford. (They asked), ‘Could you literally show us the incremental cost of selling an F150 using highly targeted addressable TV?’ We said, ‘Sure, we do data science innovation’.

“We did the campaign, and it was like $767. The VP of sales was like, ‘Yippee, this is great’. And then I want to scale this, and it just ground to a halt. And we were sort of snake-bitten by that, because what you could show is the promise of using all this data and analytics really could ring the bell for a major marketer and get them very enthused. But it just couldn’t scale.

“So we sort of retrenched a little bit and said, what is – back to the friction point – how could you have a more digital like workflow? And what would it require?”

But beware excess scale

But a panel member also echoed a view heard elsewhere during Beet Retreat, that the extent of available content against which to sell ads has a profound impact on how ads are sold there…

Neil Smith, GM, FreeWheel Markets:

“We’re potentially falling into the same trap we did with digital video on other platforms – we’re kind of sacrificing the quality of the content and that ultimate TV experience to go get scale in places that’s kind of a different-quality-of-content, different-context, probably different-value-proposition to marketers.”

Measurement needs metadata

Advertisers want to be able to straightforwardly understand who is viewing content and ads, no matter what the device. But, in a world of proliferating platforms, each with their own commitments and approaches, that can be difficult…

Carol Hinnant, EVP, National TV, Comscore:

“It’s a very difficult environment to try to pull all of that together. What we’re working on cross-platform is really taking that linear television approach and bringing in all the various (other) platforms and lining it up with the linear television.

“Metadata behind all of this is what is absolutely critical. And that has to be solved. Because there is no group today that is good at their metadata.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

This week, Comscore announced an expansion of its deal with Nexstar, the second-largest TV broadcaster, provide measurement and ad sales currency for all Nexstar markets, including the stations recently acquired from Media General, as Broadcasting & Cable reports. In addition, Comscore will provide local measurement for E.W. Scripps stations and Gray Television, the latter calling for Comscore to be used exclusively in 80 of its 91 markets.

Wiener, who took over as CEO in the spring of 2018, local broadcasters are looking to compete more effectively with the likes of Facebook and Google.

“They want advanced targeting, and we are the solution that’s going to allow the local TV stations and the advertisers to do more granular targeting and try and reach customers for advertisers in more efficient ways,” says Wiener in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

Nexstar will be one of the first broadcasters to deploy Comscore’s advanced cross-platform data attribution and audience measurement across its broadcast and digital platforms, including linear TV, mobile, and desktop devices, including OTT content consumption. Comscore plans to begin integrating linear and digital datasets in local TV markets in 2019.

According to Wiener, one major point of differentiation for Comscore is its census footprint from set-top boxes in 30 million homes that produce data that are overlayed with other data for granular targeting.

Instead of advertisers buying on age and gender they can “reach somebody whose car lease expires in three months. When you buy on Facebook or Google, you’re doing the latter,” Wiener adds.

“That’s important for local but that’s also important in the national market when you start to think about cross platform, when you think about addressable, when you think about some of the advanced TV things that are happening with OpenAP and others.”

He sees what’s happening at the local level to be a harbinger of what’s in store for national TV.

“I’d say the biggest competitor that we have was inertia. We see what’s happening in local now in being that major step that is going to push us from being a planning currency to a buying currency in many areas both on the local and the national market,” says Wiener.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Instead of “iterating on media plans year over year,” companies should take a fresh look and contemplate how they would build a new brand today and before deciding how to go to market,.

“And I think that is one of the best learnings that a marketer can get today from those direct to consumer brands,” says Hofstetter, who joined Comscore as President in October of 2018 from the 360i agency.

Citing the “migration to the big screen,” she notes the “migration to the big screen” and the need to consider the various ways that consumers are receiving content.

Direct-to-consumer marketers would take the approach of an “if I were inventing that brand today point of view. How can I get the same kind of targeting and measurability from TV that I was getting from digital. And I think they’re doing a fantastic job.”

While first-party data is more important than ever for engaging with customers, Hofstetter says it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition.

“It’s really fun to work with companies that have richer data sets, but they’re not necessarily nearly as necessary depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Yes, they have tremendous rich data sets, and that’s great for targeting.

“But I would say the vast amount of data that’s available today actually can be used to help target no matter what you have. I think there are a lot of big companies today that are short on first-party data, and it doesn’t necessarily put them at a disadvantage if they think about it the right way.”

While she attends CES in part to help elevate the Comscore brand, the annual event lets people think more out of the box.

“When you’re here, you get to take out the craziness of the day to day. You have an opportunity to really take a fresh look at your business and think ‘I probably need a more modern approach to how I’m looking at my data from a planning, executing and measurement perspective,’ and the receptivity has been wonderful.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019.   The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal.  For more coverage, please visit this page. 

In this interview with Beet.TV roughly a month into her new role at the measurement company, Hofstetter talks about Comcore’s doubling down on offerings like its Comscore Campaign Ratings and what’s needed to move cross-platform unification ahead.

“The question that has been brewing has really been a big question on the buy side. There have been silos. There’s TV buying, there’s digital buying and then there’s that premium that sits in that purgatory in between,” says Hofstetter, who until September of 2018 was Chairwoman of marketing agency 360i.

“Consequently, media partners have tried to aligned themselves to the buyers. So we’ve had a little bit of a breakdown in the ecosystem and that has inhibited a lot of the movement towards looking at video more cross-platform.”

Measurement providers want to see things go cross-platform, “but the buy-side’s not always organized for that,” she adds.

“I think the more we can get better video, better targeting, better cross platform, better de-duplication, the more we’ll be able to proliferate and help advance that.”

In speaking with marketers, media partners and agencies, Hofstetter has found that “everybody has their own perception of what Comscore is and what they do. And if I just say we’re here to bring trust and transparency to media and marketing to use data to drive growth, that is true but it doesn’t explain the how.

“So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us, call it in the next six months, to better educate the marketplace on who we are, the benefits that we provide and then bring that to market and deliver on the promises.”

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.

CFlight was launched in the spring of 2017 to enable holistic video planning across platforms by measuring all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions. It initially was available for solely for NBC’s primetime and sports programming, Vazirani, who is EVP, Insights & Measurement for NBCU, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Going into next year we will expand it across the portfolio, and we’re working through how do we make it less friction with the systems and what are the investments we need to make from an operations perspective to make this easier across the portfolio,” says Vazirani.

In addition to facilitating cross-platform planning, CFlight also was intended to “raise the bar on digital and provide guarantees on completed views” while providing a new way for NBCU to maximize ad inventory and yield portfolio-wide. “It was really a mechanism to deliver on our vision to measure across all screens, all platforms and have a unified impression measurement approach.”

She stresses the open source, transparent nature of CFlight’s methodology. After considering “many different partners,” including Comscore, Adobe and VideoAmp, NBCU chose Nielsen’s C3 and C7 TV ratings and its Digital Advertising Ratings for digital media.

“We know we’ll evolve it in the future, but the key was that this is open source and we are very transparent with our methodology.

According to Vazirani, marketers thought CFlight was “conceptually fantastic” at the outset and that agencies were also excited. She cites Simulmedia’s adoption of CFlight two months ago as it added OTT inventory to its campaigns as additional validation. But systems remain a challenge.

“We’re still on some of our older billing systems. How do we transform from an operations perspective to now report on it holistically and how does an agency ecosystem transform from that?”

In the meantime, NBCU is building “a continuum of measurement” from unifying impressions with CFlight being able to assign credit to television and providing marketers with a closed-loop evaluation of their campaign and, eventually, a series of campaigns.

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.

When brands bring data to Comscore, it matches that information through privacy complaint manners to the viewing behaviors generated by its cross-platform data sets. “I think that is the misnomer of when people say ‘I want to bring this first-party data. You have to then have all of the rights in order to match that,” Hinnant explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018.

“I do think that is something that needs to be verified and Comscore plays a big role in that we can make sure that it’s matched in the same way,” Hinnant adds. “We can verify to any agency or brand that wants to come in that this is how we match the data and this is the sizing of that particular segment and this is what was delivered.”

Asked for her thoughts about OpenAP, the audience targeting consortium created by Fox, Turner and Viacom, she sees it as one of the answers to the industry challenge of removing friction in the marketplace. Comscore’s advanced audiences was one of the first data sources integrated into the new system.

“I think that the partners have done a good job to pool their inventory and allow any marketer to come in and say, ‘Yes this the segment I want to trade on and this is the pool of inventory.’ So it does make that process easier.”

According to Hinnant, advertisers ranging from American Express to Universal Pictures are trading in the OpenAP system, “so I think those are great at-bats and great starts. I think there needs to be more inventory available. Comscore’s just happy to be playing in that universe.”

To thread the needle of varying players all seeking to harness more data for consumer targeting, Comscore is “beholden to all of our verticals. The MVPD’s have put us in business through their delivery of data that we manage for them, set-top box and return path data,” Hinnant notes. “We look at all of our partners across the digital ecosystems and then our own panel information” to deliver a cohesive measurement system that’s useful. We’re trying to help provide the solutions to our customer base.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.