Comscore in the third quarter continued to make a name for itself in the audience measurement space, enhancing its partnerships with major media companies while reporting favorable cross-platform growth.
The company this week renewed its data licensing agreement with Charter Communications, with the cable operator extending its endorsement of Comscore from five to seven years.
Aside from Charter, Comscore also expanded its relationship with Scripps Networks, enabling the use of its local currency across 16 new Scripps markets. Speaking on Tuesday’s earnings call, Comscore CEO Jon Carpenter touted the importance of working with wide reaching companies like Scripps.
“With 85% of all local advertising spend coming from station groups inside the top 30, our partnerships like the one we just announced with Scripps…are critical to our growth,” Carpenter said.
Fox is another distributor that has added Comscore currency to its local advertising toolkit, providing Fox stations more metrics for identifying audiences. And today, Comscore announced it will integrate its viewership data into Simulmedia’s TV+ platform, helping advertisers more effectively run campaigns in the fragmented distribution environment.
Carpenter also talked up Comscore’s latest partnership with Dentsu, which will place buys in local markets using advanced audiences rather than standard age and gender demos.
“Through their partnership with Comscore, Dentsu will be able to leverage more intent based signals, giving their clients a much clearer picture of their audiences, allowing them to optimize creative executions and drive better outcomes,” he said.
Carpenter added that while buying advertising on advanced audiences has been happening on the national level for the past few years, Comscore’s work with Dentsu allows Comscore to offer these insights to more local markets.
Comscore’s total revenue this quarter was $92.8 million, up 0.3% from $92.5 million in Q3 2021. The revenue bump was mainly attributed to Comscore’s cross-platform solutions business, which grew 14% year-over-year to $40.4 million.
Just as Comscore noted in its second quarter earnings report, the company saw a decline in its digital ad product revenue, which dropped 8.2% year-over-year to $52.4 million.
On the cross-platform measurement front, Comscore this quarter released a new user interface for its Comscore Campaign Ratings (CCR) product, enabling deduplicated audience views.
Carpenter boasted CCR is now “the only cross-platform campaign measurement product in market that can provide deduplicated reach across desktop, mobile, linear and connected TV in one single report.”
Deduplicated reach is crucial, he added, because advertisers running campaigns across multiple platforms “want to be able to see that one view of that campaign and its reach, not in three views that aren’t deduplicated.”
Comscore is also undertaking a broad restructuring plan that includes employee layoffs, the company disclosed in September. Restructuring costs contributed $5.8 million to total quarterly operating expenses of $149 million.
Comscore expects its core operating expenses to decrease in the fourth quarter, as it realizes the cost-saving benefits related to the restructuring plan.