Audience measurement company Comscore, announced its business unit tailored to programmatic targeting, Proximic, is integrating a trio of AI-powered tools that allow advertisers to target ID-free audiences contextually across platforms without using cookies.
In 2015, Comscore acquired Proximic, a contextual capability-focused company, and continued to invest in its technology for real-time audience and content targeting. Earlier this year, it launched Proximic by Comscore in a further effort to amplify the value of programmatic campaigns with data and targeting.
A key focus for Proximic has been “combating signal loss,” according to Managing Director of Proximic by Comscore Rachel Gantz, citing IAB’s State of Data 2022 report that found 50-60% of programmatic ad inventory no longer has an ID associated with it.
“It's providing so many challenges for advertisers from a reach perspective,” she told Stream TV Insider. “We've been really excited and focused on developing completely ID-less technologies that enable audience reach in order to help with signal loss across programmatic.”
The new suite announced include ID-less Demographic Segments, an ID-less, cookie-less and privacy-focused demographic segment solution; Show-Level Linear and Streaming Audiences, which counts over 1,700 segments available and use predictive audience technology to offer show-level audiences at scale and across all digital platforms; and the Proximic Activation Platform, designed to allow marketers and media companies increased control and customization over ad campaign targeting by tapping into Comscore’s data assets.
Signal loss “is not a tomorrow problem,” Gantz said. “It's a today problem that's really inhibiting [advertisers] ability to have effective ROI on their campaigns. So that's really the challenge that we set to solve for with the release of these new tools and solutions.”
The release touts that “each solution has been designed to push data to its scalable limit,” and that clients are already experiencing ROI increases. One advertiser saw a “96% lift in incrementality when using ID-less Predictive Audience segments compared to the same ID-based segment.”
Gina Perino — VP of another Proximic customer, Blavity, a U.S. digital media company serving Black millennials — described the ID-free solutions as “especially crucial in the face of increasing signal loss and privacy constraints.”
The VP also described how it can help prepare for the cookieless future promised by Google in coming years.
“This proactive approach helps us reduce dependence on third-party segments that may become obsolete when third-party cookies in Chrome are eliminated in 2024," Perino continued.
The entire set of tools has been made possible by Comscore’s AI-driven contextual engine and double opt-in digital panels, according to Gantz.
“AI is the backbone of every single solution that we're making. That technology and machine learning (ML) is core to all of these solutions,” she explained. The AI contextual engine that can then be applied to Comscore’s currency-grade data assets is what “enables that crosswalk between audience behaviors and contextual signals, which creates the ID-less delivery of these audience segments, which really has been helping with reach.”