For the first time, measurement heavyweight ComScore is making its historical performance data available to programmatic platforms on a real-time, pre-bid basis.
Until now, ComScore’s primary relationship with programmatic buying has been to report on a campaign’s effectiveness after-the-fact, through reports like Media Metrix and Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE). Although buyers could use those reports to inform high-level decision making – and direct buyers have long used them to build their media plans – they weren’t able to directly feed it into a demand-side platform to inform future purchases.
But with ComScore’s new Trust Profiles, a select group of DSPs can directly access data about every publisher’s ability to hit its target audience, as well as average viewability and non-human traffic levels, based on ComScore’s past measurements.
That means programmatic bidding algorithms can take into consideration past performance at the time of auction, and make better-informed, real-time decisions about how to reach the audience the buyer wants.
ComScore Canada president Brent Bernie said the service is intended to make the buying process more transparent for both the buyer and seller. “They can buy knowing that it’s been independently verified that it is quality inventory,” he said.
On the publisher side, the Trust Profiles will help differentiate premium inventory. “Premium publishers, the publishers who are out there providing great content, we want to make sure that they’re getting value and their inventory stands out in the marketplace,” Bernie said.
Trust Profiles are comprised of three components: viewability, non-human traffic, and audience, which includes the site’s category and propensity to hit its target audience. ComScore recently acquired ad verification startup Mdotlabs, which Bernie said has helped the company to boost its fraud detection capabilities.
As with all of ComScore’s measurement products, publisher clients of ComScore will be able to see their own Trust Profiles to determine how they stack up against the competition and where they can improve performance.
Brand safety detection and context analysis aren’t currently part of Trust Profiles, but Bernie said ComScore plans to keep developing the product through its new Industry Trust Initiative. “We see this as a first phase,” he said. “We’ll look for things that may not even have been developed yet, to make this more robust, and aspire to 100% transparency.”
While improving viewability and reducing non-human traffic are important to a lot of buyers, and ComScore is a well-known and trusted brand in that department, fraud detection and viewability are already a hotly contested market. Established companies like Integral Ad Science, Proximic and White Ops all offer real-time pre-bid data on a huge range of trust metrics like viewability, fraud and brand safety.
What could be a much bigger differentiator for ComScore is its audience verification data, which, as one of the most widely-used measurement providers, it is uniquely positioned to offer. ComScore’s historical audience data is nearly ubiquitous in media planning on direct-bought campaigns, and could become a staple of audience buying in programmatic as well.
“Clients are all looking for that level of verification by such a large company, but ComScore is also going to be layering in demographic data, household income, gender, etc. That’s going to be very, very useful,” said Renee Hill, founder and CEO of Eyereturn, one of the DSPs included as a Trust Profiles launch partner.
“If I know for a fact that if I’m targeting somebody who is in the exact demographic profile that I want, from a trusted vendor, with high viewability, our system will be able to pay more for that impression, and more money will go back into the industry,” she said. “Being able to pre-buy based on ComScore data is really going to take programmatic to the next level, to the point where we’re competing directly with television.”
At the moment Trust Profiles are available through Eyereturn, The Trade Desk, Turn, MediaMath and The Rubicon Project (notably, not Google DoubleClick). The product is currently available in the U.S., and is expected to launch in Canada before the end of Q1.
