Daily Show: Comscore Offers Episode-Level Content Measurement

The streaming era has brought a surprising level of uncertainty to advertisers that want to know exactly in which shows their commercials are airing.

With more media buying being done programmatically, information about show titles and episodes often isn’t readily available, creating issues of transparency.

Comscore, which has historically focused on measuring the viewership of commercials on digital platforms, more recently began measuring the audience for content. Now, users of its Comscore Content Measurement will be able to get data on audiences for content down to the series and episode level. And they’ll be able to get that data on a daily basis, whether the program appears on linear TV or streaming.

“The expansion of Comscore’s content measurement capabilities to the program-level unlocks better planning, smarter selling, and greater confidence in a converged world where content is the new currency,” said Steve Bagdasarian, chief commercial officer at Comscore. “For the first time, our clients can see daily, deduplicated audience performance for specific programs and episodes across the major platforms, supporting more informed decisions around programming, acquisitions, and monetization strategies.”

Already signed up for Comscore Content Measurement and its new capabilities are media agency Canvas, NBCUniversal and ESPN. Also using the service is Spotter, a YouTube creator platform.

Comscore said that agencies have been looking for this level of program information in order to quickly understand viewing behavior.

“Given the dynamic nature of the advertising landscape, it’s critical for our brands that we optimize their investments with smarter decisions, by measuring each piece of content and understanding people’s behavior across multiple devices,” said Jack Embree, director, planning and research platforms at Canvas. “We are excited about the capabilities of Comscore’s CCM and how it can help us navigate the complexities of the cross-platform reality.”

Comscore says it is using an OpenAI open weight model on Amazon Bedrock and a range of AWS services to process millions of tokens every day, bringing together viewing metadata from multiple systems and platforms, to provide deduplicated measurement at the title level across linear, CTV and digital.

“We are proud to support Comscore's new agentic capabilities in CCM with our cloud and AI services, helping their clients optimize campaign reach and advertising return on investment,” said Rich Geraffo, VP & managing director, AWS North America. “AWS and Comscore are committed to innovating together on behalf of our mutual customers in the advertising industry.”

The new Comscore capability could also be a boon to creator content, which is trying to make inroads with advertisers.

“Creator content has become one of the most powerful forces in modern media, shaping culture, driving fandom, and reaching audiences at remarkable scale,” said Nic Paul, president & co-founder of Spotter. “Through our partnership with Comscore, we’re bringing long-overdue transparency to the marketplace. Creator-led programming deserves to be measured, valued, and invested in with the same rigor as broadcast and streaming. At Spotter, we’re proud to partner with Comscore to help provide creators with the third-party data they need to grow sustainable businesses and help brands see the true impact of the content people love most.”

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Phynd, the free cloud gaming platform for smart TVs started by Tru Optik founder Andre Swanston, said it is working with Magnite so that marketers can buy advertising on the platform programmatically.

“With Magnite as our ad tech launch partner, we’re bringing both direct and programmatic advertising into cloud gaming for the first time at scale,” Swanston said. “This creates meaningful value for players through free games, while enabling advertisers to precisely target audiences in an environment that’s brand-safe and truly engaging.”

Ad campaigns can be target by demographics, user interest and play behavior, the companies said.

“Our deep omnichannel experience across both streaming TV and gaming makes us uniquely positioned to help Phynd efficiently monetize their premium content.” said Sean Buckley, President, revenue, at Magnite.

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Basis and Mediaocean said they have formed a partnership to further automate campaign planning, activation, ordering, trafficking, execution, quality measurement and finance.

“Together, Basis and Mediaocean are helping advertisers manage the full complexity of media, empowering the largest and most sophisticated ad buyers to bring direct buying, programmatic, search, social, and video together in a more connected, accountable way,” said Basis CEO Shawn Riegsecker.

Basis systems are being integrated into Mediaocean’s Prisma, Innovid and Protected platforms. The companies said this will provide clear visibility into planning decisions are followed and the results they produce.

“Modern advertising is about reimagining how programmatic, direct buying, social, linear, and other media channels come together in powerful ways. Basis and Mediaocean are bringing that vision to life,” said Ramsey McGrory, president, Prisma by Mediaocean. “Programmatic is no longer a form of media, but rather a mindset about how to integrate workflow and data in automated ways, and we are thrilled to make this partnership available to our agencies and marketers.”

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At CES DoubleVerify said it launched DV Authentic Streaming TV, which enables advertisers to unify premium content discovery, reporting, analytics and optimization.

“DV Authentic Streaming TV gives advertisers the ability to better align their brand suitability criteria with their CTV activation in programmatic platforms,” said Mark Zagorski, CEO at DoubleVerify.

“For the first time, by incorporating richer program-level signals, such as genre, maturity ratings, premiere dates, content trends and viewer-approval scores, along with deeper app-level intelligence, including attention insights and power-state awareness, we are transforming how advertisers evaluate and verify CTV quality. This breakthrough heightens transparency, strengthens performance and brings true accountability to streaming TV,” Zagorski said. “Make no mistake, DV is throwing down the gauntlet and independently challenging the industry to deliver on the quality and performance promise of CTV.”

DV Authentic Streaming TV’s initial release includes planning, optimization and select reporting capabilities. Additional functionality is set to follow as part of DV’s ongoing rollout.

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Also at CES, Brand Metrics is pitching interactive ad formats for connected TV that don’t need SDK, making them easier to deploy, measure and monetize.

Brand Metrics says its SDK-less formats include pause-ad capabilities and are already in use by some top publishers.

“Removing the SDK requirement is a game-changer. It eliminates friction for publishers and accelerates adoption of interactive formats. We’re proving that measurement innovation can be both technically elegant and commercially impactful,” said Robby Kraai, head of CTV at Brand Metrics.

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Dan Aversano has been named CEO of datafuelX, which plans to expand from a data-driven linear platform into a broader video intelligence and analytics business.

Aversano was most recently executive VP at TelevisaUnivision. He is also a co-founder of datafuelX and board member of ad tech startup Audyns.

He succeeds Jay Amato, who has led datafuelX since its inception.