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.

“Local TV still has the majority of its revenue based upon the traditional buy/sell process with our local clients,” says Al Lustgarten, VP, Technology and Information Services at Hearst Television. “What we’ve seen in the market is that there is a very slow evolution of the traditional broadcast sales process.”

Advances like Internet-protocol-based ATSC 3.0 hold the promise of revolutionizing the way local broadcasters can deliver editorial and advertising content. But it’s a voluntary standard requiring investments by broadcasters for something that won’t reach consumers until late 2020 at the earliest.

“We don’t see any significant immediate change, but as new technologies emerge like ATSC we hope to have new targeted and addressable capabilities within our advertising that we could market to our customers,” Lustgarten says in this interview with Beet.TV at the WideOrbit Connect conference. “But we are very focused now on trying to maintain our current business but then try to bring more efficiency to the buy sell process.”

A main selling factor for local broadcast is local news, which remains highly relevant despite competition from online outlets. Hearst’s footprint comprises just under 20% of the country or about one in five households.

“The local television market has a unique presence now in the media that the public consumes,” says Lustgarten. “The unique presence is the fact that we can provide live news to an audience in the geographic areas that we support. There is no other medium that can provide that now.”

The TIP initiative involves creating application programming interfaces to streamline some of the transactions that take place between buyers and sellers at the local broadcast level. In addition to Hearst, its members are Nexstar, Sinclair, TEGNA and Tribune.

As Lustgarten notes, agency media buyers typically have their own tech providers and the sell-side has its own. The goal of TIP is to “seamless connect the two and provide them with the opportunity to easily transact business electronically and efficiently.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.