Building the Path Forward for the Future of Measurement: An Open Letter to the Industry

Today's audiences are watching what they want, when they want, on the devices of their choice. The pandemic didn’t cause this shift – the pendulum began to swing long before the early months of 2020. However, the pandemic did accelerate this inevitable change, while, at the same time, bringing to light the many cracks that have long existed in traditional media measurement. We’ve listened to our customers – as well as other leading industry voices – who all recognize the need to reject the status quo and rethink the entire approach to audience measurement. Now, for the first time, buyers and sellers throughout the industry are in agreement: the outdated panel-dependent measurement from the past (and whose under-reporting cost the industry billions) no longer serves the diverse needs of today’s modern media environment.

In a recent industry op-ed, Nielsen, who acknowledges Comscore as the alternative, took aim at our modern technological approaches to audience measurement. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised at their admitted skepticism regarding the use of large-scale data, given the challenges they’ve had moving away from small panels with single digit response rates within their own service.

At Comscore, we see things differently. Our commitment has always been to an evolving industry, both in the content itself and the technology used to measure it. Throughout Comscore’s more than 20-year history, we’ve kept our focus on – and our investments in – the future, building the data infrastructure, tools, partnerships, and services for what comes next. With a DNA in digital measurement and advanced television, Comscore began providing deduplicated cross-platform media measurement more than 10 years ago. Comscore is confident in the representativeness of our reporting households, our partner Experian’s credibility as the leading credit bureau, and our transparent reporting of more than 250 national networks (which is done without the need for complex devices).

The result? The industry’s most stable, reliable, accurate, and privacy-forward cross-platform audience measurement service, and a dedicated client base that spans the media and entertainment industry. Today more than 3,000 global customers partner with Comscore, including more than 1,000 local stations, 150 national networks, 50 station groups, every major movie studio, and the world’s 10 largest advertising and media agencies. We have enormous scale – Comscore passively measures one in every three U.S. TV households – and a data-driven, census-scale approach that’s frankly impossible to achieve with small samples.

Why is this important? For agencies and brands to conduct commerce with stations and national networks, a single language is required. A language that speaks to a world in need of more than just tools, but rather a stable, reliable, accurate cross-platform investment currency built with the future of audience measurement in mind. That language is Comscore.

So, while others in the industry are only now beginning to consider a future of measurement that puts audiences first, Comscore has the infrastructure, methodology, and secure data assets in place to realize this future today. We have spent the last decade providing interoperability with key third-party providers that connect buy-side and sell-side solutions.

For years, the industry stuck with the same antiquated service out of fear of the risk of change. However, we are now at a point where the risk of staying with a provider incapable of measuring modern audiences is simply too great. The time for change is here, and the choice is clear. Only Comscore can deliver stable, reliable, accurate reporting built for the future of media, today.

The future is now. The future is Comscore.