ComScore has secured Addictive Mobility as its first mobile demographic data partner in Canada. With Addictive’s data and the Canadian Mobile Metrix panel ComScore launched last summer, the measurement firm says it can move forward on bringing mobile and cross-platform campaign measurement to Canada.
ComScore’s mobile and unduplicated cross-platform audience measurement will be available through its Validated Campaign Essentials (VCE) product by the end of Q1 2016 at the latest, ComScore Canada president Brent Bernie told Marketing. The planned launch will add mobile reach and frequency metrics to ComScore’s mobile viewability solution, which has been available through vCE since earlier this year.
“There is a lot of attention around mobile — there are certainly more dollars going into mobile — and with that there’s a need to evaluate mobile at the same level as desktop,” Bernie said. Giving advertisers the tools to understand the value of their mobile campaigns will help close the gap between how much time consumers spend on mobile and how much advertisers spend on it, he added.
ComScore and Addictive announced the partnership at Addictive’s annual Mobile-First Strategy Forum on Thursday. Addictive will supply probabilistic data on the age and gender of mobile app users, which will be paired with ComScore’s passive panel measurement to estimate mobile GRPs.
Bernie said that finding a partner with high-quality mobile data was one of the key pieces that needed to fall into place before ComScore could bring mobile GRPs to Canada. “If you’re going to start measuring campaigns, you’re going to need rich, deep demographic data, so you’re going to need partners,” he said. “They’re a company with some vision that stepped up and said, ‘That’ll be us.'”
Although Addictive is a programmatic buying platform rather than a measurement or data provider, Paul Cross, its vice-president of insights and partner relations, said the company wants to highlight the quality of its audience segments and targeting methods.
To become a ComScore data partner, Addictive’s algorithms for determining the demographic of mobile users had to be tested for accuracy against ComScore’s panel. Supplying the data for vCE in Canada is evidence of Addictive’s credibility, and the credibility of mobile advertising in general, Cross said.
He said that more effective campaign measurement in mobile will help build up awareness of the effectiveness of in-app mobile advertising across the industry. “It builds a more educated advertiser base. When they come to the table, they know what to expect, they know what we can do. That’s the biggest win for us coming out of this.”
FROM MEDIA AUDIENCE TO CAMPAIGN EFFECTIVENESS
ComScore already provides audience metrics, GRPs and rankings for mobile media content via Mobile Metrix, a panel of approximately 20,000 Canadians that launched last July. Bernie said the data that Mobile Metrix has collected show just how important mobile has become in advertisers’ and publishers’ channel mix: according to July 2015 data, 57% of Canadians’ digital media time comes from mobile devices.
Multiplatform vCE will use the same panel as Mobile Metrix, but extend panelist reporting to advertising campaigns. While Mobile Metrix has been useful to give advertisers a general idea of which audiences are consuming what content on mobile, campaign measurement is the real golden egg, since it tells advertisers directly how often their ads are being seen and whether they’re reaching the right consumers.
Bernie said that once vCE’s multiplatform GRPs are added, ComScore’s media performance surveys will be layered in as well, so that advertisers can judge how a specific cross-platform campaign performed against objectives like brand lift, brand attributes and intent to purchase.
ComScore currently has the systems in place to do media effectiveness surveys in mobile, but it can’t tie them to campaigns on a day-to-day basis. “The power of that, of course, will be to adjust in real-time,” said Bernie. “So if you have elements of the campaign that aren’t working for you, whether they be creative or publisher elements, you could make that change in real-time, instead of waiting to the end of the campaign.”
ComScore’s chief competitor Nielsen launched the Canadian version of its own cross-platform campaign measurement solution, Digital Ad Ratings, in April. Though the products are similar, Bernie says one of the features that stands out with vCE is its single-tag implementation, which means advertisers only have to use one piece of code to measure audience delivery, viewability and invalid/fraudulent traffic.
