It has been a good week for comScore in its battle with Nielsen for supremacy in the enlarged multiple platform media measurement field. After landing a major multi-year contract with Viacom, previously just a Nielsen shop, comScore has struck a global partnership with Adobe for each to incorporate the other’s measurement data.
The two announcements are connected in that they follow a concerted effort over several years by ComScore to realign itself as a dedicated cross platform media measurements company, bringing TV and online together, while ditching parts of the business that do not fit with this strategy.
So on the one hand comScore completed its ambitious takeover of Rentrak for $732 million in February 2016, creating a cross-platform measurement portfolio reporting on multiscreen audience behavior in more than 75 countries, with the grand objective of establishing a new consistent multiplatform currency for ad and content trading. This came shortly after completion of an almost equally significant alliance with Kantar, the research division of advertising giant WPP. Under this deal WPP agreed to buy up to 15.45% of comScore shares at a price of $46.13 per share, giving it a 15%-20% share of the company, while comScore in turn acquires Kantar’s audience measurement business covering some European countries.
But then at the end of 2015 comScore divested itself of its Digital Analytix big data business intelligence service, bought by Adobe itself. With an enterprise focus Digital Analytix no longer fitted with comScore’s streamlined cross platform consumer measurement strategy.
Adobe on the other hand is still covering both the enterprise and consumer bases. As part of the partnership with comScore it is integrating the latter’s audience data, including demographics, for use by customers of its Adobe Marketing Cloud, which include enterprises in various categories including media players. ComScore for its part is incorporating into its Cross Media, Audience and Advertising Product Suites new Adobe Certified Metrics along with standardized digital census data built on the Adobe Platform and driven by Adobe Analytics.
This is relevant for the Viacom deal because it reaffirmed comScore’s credentials as a serious cross platform industry player, having proved, so far, more agile than Nielsen at incorporating accurate data from diverse target devices. It is notable that comScore recently announced its “Total Home Panel” to incorporate household media consumption data across all screens, which looks very much like stealing Nielsen’s clothes.
We should note that Nielsen dwarves comScore in size and is still forging ahead itself, as we can see from the respective 2015 results. ComScore coming from a much smaller base, has had to tread carefully to avoid over reaching itself in a bid to make up ground quickly, most notably with the Rentrak acquisition.
For the calendar year 2015 comScore achieved record annual revenue of $368.8 million, an increase of 12% compared to 2014. But it actually lost $5 million. However, on the less strict non-GAAP basis, which includes interest and discounts some costs like depreciation, comScore made $69.6 million net income, so it is fundamentally fit financially and able to digest its acquisitions.
Nielsen on the other hand reported revenue down by 1.8% to $6.2 billion for the year, but this was attributable to the strength of the dollar so that the total was 5% up on a more realistic constant currency basis, compared to 2014. Net income for the year was up 50.9% at $575 million, 87.9% up on the constant currency basis compared to 2014. However, that figure too is misleading, since the gain was almost entirely attributable to an increased stake in Nielsen Catalina Solutions during Q4 2015. Overall Nielsen is well placed for further acquisitions, if deemed necessary, with the challenge being to rebalance and reposition its portfolio as a true cross platform service rather than still dominated by traditional panels. So like comScore it is now talking about a “total audience” measure that brings in online data, with some of its major media customers in the US now making adjustments to their systems accordingly.
Viacom of course is one such customer which is retaining Nielsen for TV ratings, but is instead buying into comScore’s vision for Total Audience data as a currency for advertising deals. This will work through Viacom’s Vantage data platform, which will now enable advertisers to target specific consumers across Viacom’s platforms and services, including linear TV, VoD and OTT. In this case Nielsen is hanging on but has been elbowed out of the multiplatform side, so it represents a coup for comScore, being its first major customer after the Rentrak acquisition.
For Viacom it highlights the fast growing importance of online at a time when it is struggling to maintain its linear TV ratings. It hopes the comScore partnership will strengthen its hand in negotiations with advertisers, by allowing it to sell ads based on active data. A key here is comScore’s online reach, which now outstrips any other player, with its cross platform tools now gathering information from 120 million VoD users in 210 markets across the US as well as 40 million TVs, totaling 1.5 trillion monthly digital interactions.
Of course these are just numbers, but the important point is that Viacom’s Vantage platform can now translate this data to allow advertisers to reach audiences on just about every platform where they might be consuming content. They can then measure the impact of that viewing on a cross platform basis with the ability to apply weighting to different platforms.
With the average age of its audience declining, reflecting its programming being dominated by its two popular networks MTV and Nickelodeon, Viacom is promoting its content available on mobile devices through its TV everywhere initiative with a pack of apps called Viacom Plex Play. The comScore alliance is designed to help Viacom monetize this trend. Viacom’s chief research officer Colleen Fahey Rush saluted comScore’s alliance with Adobe as a significant further step in the evolution of advanced currencies. “It gets the industry one step closer to unified cross-platform measurement, further validating the value of our audiences across screens and giving our advertisers the ability to deliver data-enhanced campaigns across devices,” she added.