LAS VEGAS—With new and expanded measurement deals with Nexstar and other local television broadcasters in hand, “We feel like the levee is breaking in local,” says Comscore CEO Bryan Wiener.
This week, Comscore announced an expansion of its deal with Nexstar, the second-largest TV broadcaster, provide measurement and ad sales currency for all Nexstar markets, including the stations recently acquired from Media General, as Broadcasting & Cable reports. In addition, Comscore will provide local measurement for E.W. Scripps stations and Gray Television, the latter calling for Comscore to be used exclusively in 80 of its 91 markets.
Wiener, who took over as CEO in the spring of 2018, local broadcasters are looking to compete more effectively with the likes of Facebook and Google.
“They want advanced targeting, and we are the solution that’s going to allow the local TV stations and the advertisers to do more granular targeting and try and reach customers for advertisers in more efficient ways,” says Wiener in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.
Nexstar will be one of the first broadcasters to deploy Comscore’s advanced cross-platform data attribution and audience measurement across its broadcast and digital platforms, including linear TV, mobile, and desktop devices, including OTT content consumption. Comscore plans to begin integrating linear and digital datasets in local TV markets in 2019.
According to Wiener, one major point of differentiation for Comscore is its census footprint from set-top boxes in 30 million homes that produce data that are overlayed with other data for granular targeting.
Instead of advertisers buying on age and gender they can “reach somebody whose car lease expires in three months. When you buy on Facebook or Google, you’re doing the latter,” Wiener adds.
“That’s important for local but that’s also important in the national market when you start to think about cross platform, when you think about addressable, when you think about some of the advanced TV things that are happening with OpenAP and others.”
He sees what’s happening at the local level to be a harbinger of what’s in store for national TV.
“I’d say the biggest competitor that we have was inertia. We see what’s happening in local now in being that major step that is going to push us from being a planning currency to a buying currency in many areas both on the local and the national market,” says Wiener.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
