ComScore reported Q3 earnings of $82.1 million, a 15% increase YOY, and reemphasized its focus on cross-platform measurements.
ComScore added 43 new Media Metrix Multi-Platform clients in the third quarter and has 448 total customers running MMX, a platform it rolled out in 2013 that shows de-duped audiences across smartphones, tablets and desktop.
“Digital transforms the possibilities for the TV business,” said CEO Serge Matta, acknowledging the growing complexity of the marketplace. “We continue to expand cross-media operations, including our total video product and we are delivering private data to broadcasters today through our syndicated media product.”
Matta reaffirmed comScore’s interest in measuring multiplatform views of video consumption. It has integrated its Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) measurement tool with video ads platforms like BrightRoll, TubeMogul and DoubleClick/YouTube. ComScore also intends to roll out in 2015 an “in-home solution that will provide us additional data for over-the-top devices and other forms of media content flowing through the home.”
While Matta declined to comment about Nielsen’s “stronger” positioning in video and television, he spoke about comScore’s data gathering strategies and its moves into mobile and video.
“We want to bring as many data sources as possible because there is no one perfect data source,” Matta responded. “Our integration of vCE started with Google and now with mobile being key to our success in 2015 and beyond, Yahoo will be a very strategic company for us as a mobile data partner.”
Internet radio provider Pandora also began using vCE this quarter, which gives comScore “a significant amount of mobile data” (84% of Pandora users are mobile), Matta said, claiming it improves comScore’s data quality. “This gives us a massive demographic dataset we can combine with Yahoo/Google data in an anonymized manner,” he added.
When asked how comScore prioritizes panel and Census-based data vs. partner-provided data, Matta called it an apples to oranges comparison, but said that, generally, partnerships such as Pandora (and a host of other third-party data sources) opens comScore up to “millions” of different demographic sources that are much larger in scale.
Finally, comScore this quarter developed a way to attribute digital ad exposure and viewable impressions with in-store sales through a Datalogix partnership. That combination of vCE and Datalogix’s DLX ROI, according to Matta, is now in a beta test phase with brands and agencies like Kraft, Kellogg and Starcom MediaVest. In separate strides to improve viewable impression rates, comScore’s August acquisition of MdotLabs will result in enhancements to vCE, along with a new non-human traffic detection module for publishers’ validated Media Essentials (vME).
