Comscore

Introduction

Comscore (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a trusted partner for planning, transacting, and evaluating media across platforms. With a data footprint that combines digital, linear TV, over-the-top, and theatrical viewership intelligence with advanced audience insights, Comscore allows media buyers and sellers to quantify their multi-screen behavior and make business decisions with confidence. A proven leader in measuring digital and TV audiences and advertising at scale, Comscore is the industry’s emerging third-party source for reliable and comprehensive cross-platform measurement and targeting.

Market Differentiators

Comscore's differentiators are its proprietary Pattern Profiling methodology and measurement consistency powered by Comscore's core products. These fundamentals allow Comscore to offer a wide range of pre-bid contextual activation attributes, from content targeting and brand protection to viewability and invalid traffic. Comscore's assets provide a rich set of cross-platform data that includes a powerful combination of trusted digital data and precise, scalable TV data. Its industry-leading panels provide a robust, deterministic source of truth, whereas its digital census assets and return path television data provide the requisite scale needed to make data truly actionable. Comscore has the second-largest commercial contextual crawler in the ecosystem. Comscore's patent-pending Predictive Audiences are the industry’s first cookie-free targeting capability that enables advertisers to reach audiences based on granular consumer behavior through privacy-friendly contextual signals.

Characteristics

Supported Platforms

  • Web
  • Mobile Web
  • Mobile App
  • Connected TV

Geographical Availability

  • Demographics: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Taiwan, United States
  • Media Metrix Ranks, Video Metrix Ranks, Media Metrix Category/Sub-Category Ranks: Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Mexico, United States
  • Comscore contextual geographical availability is based on language.

Vertical Specialization

Comscore segments can be used across a variety of verticals. Some of the top verticals using Comscore segments today include:

  • Alcohol
  • Cannabis
  • Tobacco
  • Automotive
  • B2B
  • CPG
  • Gaming
  • Insurance
  • Media and Entertainment
  • Pharma
  • QSR
  • Retail
  • Tech
  • Travel

Data Taxonomy

As a Basis customer, you have access to Comscore's syndicated taxonomy within the platform as well as the ability to create custom segments specific to your requirements.

Syndicated Taxonomy

  • Comscore Predictive Audiences provide industry-first cookie-free targeting based on demographics, TV viewership, personas, OTT/gaming, automotive data (Polk), financial data (TransUnion), location (PlaceIQ), CPG (IRI), and B2B (Eyeota), gaming (Spiketrap), political data (L2), healthcare (Symphony),and commerce consumer data (Commerce Signals) across 40+ languages.
  • Legal Drinking Age: Powered by visitor indices from trusted Comscore Media Metrix® and helps buyers reach more age-appropriate consumers by targeting inventory that over-indexes for audiences aged 21+.
  • Brand Suitability (High/Medium/Low Risk): A tiered approach to overall level of brand safety.
  • Content Rating: Movie-style rating of the appropriate audience for a given page.
  • Negative: Exclusion categories for the presence of specific types of inappropriate content.
  • Demographics: Target pages that over index for a particular demographic. In other words, the likelihood that visitors to the page are the target demographic is greater than average.
  • Invalid Traffic: Likelihood of the presence of non-human traffic.
  • Language: The language of the page content. Currently includes: Afrikaans, Albanian, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Urdu
  • Media Metrix Category/Sub-Category Rank: Categorization of domain in Comscore's Media Metrix taxonomy
  • Media Metrix Property Rank: Ranking of most popular domains by unique visitors. (Comscore top 500 sites)
  • Media Bias Ratings: Powered by Ad Fontes to target highly reliable/neutral news sources or exclude unreliable/extremely biased information sources.

  • Video Media Metrix Rank: Ranking of the most popular domains with video content by unique visitors
  • Page-Level Contextual: Page-level contextual categorization from Proximic
  • OTT: Streaming segments covering ad supported, non-ad supported, premium rental, sports subscriptions, and others.
  • Personas: Persona segments such as sports fans, early adopters, pet owners, cord cutters, and others.
  • TV: TV viewership segments spanning network, genre, and ad exposure.
  • Safety Level: The four aggregated brand protection tiers (Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze) make it easier to categorize and organize brand protection levels. Platinum is the highest level of brand protection, scaling down to Bronze as the basic level of brand protection.
  • vCE Viewability: Target pages based on historical average viewability. This targeting is based on the historical viewability seen on the combination of page URL and size on campaigns using Comscore Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) measurement.

Custom Taxonomy

Segment Creation

Comscore offers a custom keyword solution. Customers can use Comscore's self service Agents UI to create custom segments.

Segment Addition

The addition of segments is automated. As soon as a segment is created within Comscore's Agents UI, the segment will appear in Basis within minutes.

Pricing

Syndicated: $0.06 to $0.35

Custom: $0.15

Methodology

Comscore has the second largest commercial crawler in the market, which accesses trillions of pages a month. Comscore crawls a new URL whenever it is called by a partner using Comscore's programmatic API and data pertaining to that URL is not currently in their cache. The standard process is to cache URL categorization for a maximum of 48 hours, but URLs that change frequently may be scanned every 10–15 minutes.

Comscore's contextual engine is made accessible through the Comscore's programmatic API. Combining a proprietary and non-linguistic contextual profiling technology called Pattern Proximity with Dynamic Category Matching, utilizing a proprietary mesh of hundreds of thousands of topical nodes, this technology provides precision data for digital inventory and enables targetability across highly granular topical interests.

  • Pattern Profiling: A proprietary process that extracts the contextual essence from unstructured content (such as a page's content) using an intelligent crawler to create a relevant pattern profile.

  • Dynamic Category Matching: Connects the pattern profiles with structured targeting data. The pattern profile can be compared to a fingerprint, which is matched against an ultra-granular mesh of topical nodes. The level of detail of this mesh exceeds traditional semantic/linguistic approaches at an order of magnitude. For example, a page on "Computer Waste" will identify relevance to "Green Tech" or "Sustainable Computing", as well as terms not even present on the page itself, such as "Eco-Labeling of IT Products".

Provider Collateral

Overview

Cookie-Free Demographic Profiles

Predictive Audiences US

Predictive Audiences EMEA

Next Gen Brand Safety Solutions

IRI ProScores CPG

Activation

Activation & Custom Segment Creation

Agents Application

Content Activation