While the opportunities around premium video are “extraordinary,” educating the buy-side about cross-platform execution has long been a common industry theme. For Comscore, which has seen many changes over the past year, it’s more of a re-education process, according to President Sarah Hofstetter.
In this interview with Beet.TV roughly a month into her new role at the measurement company, Hofstetter talks about Comcore’s doubling down on offerings like its Comscore Campaign Ratings and what’s needed to move cross-platform unification ahead.
“The question that has been brewing has really been a big question on the buy side. There have been silos. There’s TV buying, there’s digital buying and then there’s that premium that sits in that purgatory in between,” says Hofstetter, who until September of 2018 was Chairwoman of marketing agency 360i.
“Consequently, media partners have tried to aligned themselves to the buyers. So we’ve had a little bit of a breakdown in the ecosystem and that has inhibited a lot of the movement towards looking at video more cross-platform.”
Measurement providers want to see things go cross-platform, “but the buy-side’s not always organized for that,” she adds.
“I think the more we can get better video, better targeting, better cross platform, better de-duplication, the more we’ll be able to proliferate and help advance that.”
In speaking with marketers, media partners and agencies, Hofstetter has found that “everybody has their own perception of what Comscore is and what they do. And if I just say we’re here to bring trust and transparency to media and marketing to use data to drive growth, that is true but it doesn’t explain the how.
“So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us, call it in the next six months, to better educate the marketplace on who we are, the benefits that we provide and then bring that to market and deliver on the promises.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
