Comcast names Comscore as Nielsen alternative

Comcast Cable’s ad sales division Effectv will offer Comscore’s local TV measurement as currency, joining the growing ranks of TV players offering Nielsen alternatives to write deals.

Although it involves local measurement, the deal announced today is effectively national, covering 66 markets and nearly 35 million subscribers. In an interview, James Rooke, general manager of Effectv, said both local and national holding company agencies have expressed interest in using Comscore’s impression-based measurement to do addressable deals across linear and streaming.

RSVP for Ad Age In-Depth: TV Pivot on May 24 and 25 at AdAge.com/TVPivot

“We want to do everything we can to spur innovation, which we think is going to be good for buyers and sellers,” Rooke said.

While Nielsen has been Effectv’s “de facto currency,” he said, “a number of our clients have come to us saying, ‘We want alternatives.’” That’s not to say that agencies don’t want to work with Nielsen, Rooke said, but they do want to support multiple currencies.

Bringing in Comscore’s impression-based currency as an alternative to Nielsen age-gender gross rating points aligns with a direction Effectv has taken since the pandemic shook up viewership patterns, Rooke said.

“Now, over 40% of our business we sell at the local level is against audience, vs. less than 5% probably two years ago,” he said. It’s a strategic shift Effectv planned previously, but accelerated as local advertisers sought to follow their audiences during the pandemic as live sports programming went away.

“We know we can deliver better return on investment by using viewership data to follow an audience than using content as a proxy,” Rooke said. “We are moving the business from selling on content against linear TV measured on spots to selling everything on audience, multiscreen, measured by impressions. The impression is the common denominator that enables us to have a single campaign goal we can then execute across linear TV and streaming inventory.”

In following audiences, Effectv has an edge over many digital players, given their loss of third-party identifiers, since its data is based on Comcast’s direct relationships with subscribers, he said.

“My belief is that you can’t have 22 currencies, but you can have two primary ones,” said Comscore CEO Bill Livek. “This is affirmation that the market is moving toward Comscore in a number of ways.”

Effectv joins Paramount, Fox Corp., WarnerMedia and Discovery in offering Comscore as an alternative currency. Effectv’s Comcast Corp. sibling NBCUniversal earlier this month gave Comscore certification that will allow Telemundo and NBC-owned local affiliates to use its measurement as currency. Charter Communications’ cable system Spectrum Reach last year named Comscore as its preferred local TV currency provider. And Livek said more than 1,000 local TV stations nationally use Comscore as a currency.

Livek said he’s seen agencies moving toward Comscore as a currency locally, for example, when working with auto dealerships, in part because of his company’s ability to integrate auto registration data with cable subscriber data. Automotive player WeatherTech uses Comscore as its deal currency nationally and in local markets, he added.

A brands’ guide to the Nielsen turmoil

Rooke said Effectv also is in talks with VideoAmp about offering its measurement as a currency. “Whether it's VideoAmp, Comscore, Nielsen or others that we’re in conversations with, that falls under the same pillars of solving for innovation, which is good for the industry,” he said. He added that he hopes added competition has “a halo effect” on dominant player Nielsen’s performance.

Efectv’s move follows Comcast Advertising’s decision in 2020 to provide anonymized subscriber viewing data to Comscore and a similar move earlier this year with VideoAmp. Comcast has provided anonymized subscriber data to Nielsen since 2018.