Comscore Raises Curtain On NBCU’s Outcome-Based Movie Campaign Guarantee

Like many companies, Comscore plays an important role in seeking to derive unduplicated reach curves for television audiences, along with other data advancements. It recently played a key role in a project with NBCUniversal in which NBCU guaranteed business outcomes for the first time, in a campaign for the movie The Upside.

Comscore’s seat at the table was its “data-centric, panel-informed” data assets across digital media, TV and OTT, according to Carol Hinnant, who is EVP, National Television Sales. “We bring that together in a single-source panel and then we really use that to drive our outcomes,” says in this interview at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.

NBCU had the benefit of data from Fandango, the movie ticket business of which it is majority owner. STXFilms was guaranteed that NBCU and its Audience Studio team would produce ticket sales and searches for information about the movie, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

With Comscore’s matching its digital and TV data with Fandango’s data, “those outcomes were based on Fandango ticket sales and online searches for the film. So we really were able to tie that entire marketing ecosystem and have it be outcome based on how we actually drove that,” says Hinnant.

Asked by interviewer Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., how agencies and marketers manage to bring together all the data needed for outcomes-based campaigns, Hinnant says “it really takes a collective effort of everybody.” She cites Comscore’s relationships with such third-party data providers as Polk, Experian and IRI.

“We also invite first-party data to come in. In the case of Universal, they brought in their Fandango data set, we did a match on that.”

So what is required to reach a tipping point of sorts for similar campaigns? “I think that you have to get the ecosystem to be able to accept those outcomes. So it’s not only just looking at those audiences but you have to have that be able to flow through the whole planning and posting cycle and we’re starting to see more and more of that happen.”

Although planning based on outcomes is “at kind of a small scale today,” Hinnant observes that Viacom is “winning with their advanced audiences structure so I think we’ll see more and more of that as these media networks and publishers have more success with that.”

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.