comScore Launches comScore AdEffx

Suite Uses Unified Platform to Measure the Actual Delivery of Online Media Plans and the Impact of Ad Campaigns on Attitudes, Behavior and both Online and Offline Sales

RESTON, VA, December 10, 2009 – comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the launch of comScore AdEffx™, an integrated campaign effectiveness measurement suite that enables clients to accurately “measure what matters” depending on their particular campaign objectives.

The comScore AdEffx suite resolves many longstanding measurement challenges that have precluded advertisers and publishers from accurately accounting for ad delivery against its intended targets and the resulting brand and sales lifts on audiences exposed to the campaign.

The Problem

Since the advent of digital display advertising, campaign effectiveness has traditionally been measured by clicks. More recently, numerous comScore studies have demonstrated why the click is a flawed measure of advertising effectiveness for most campaigns; most notably because it neglects the brand building value of the campaign and does not measure whether the intended target was impacted. As the digital media industry has come to understand that the click is not a relevant metric of advertising performance, there has been a movement towards more relevant methods of measuring the effectiveness of online advertising by examining their impact on other variables, including brand awareness, online site visitation, trademark search and lift in both online and offline sales.

Despite these innovations, the industry currently remains mired in a situation where different measurement solutions from individual research suppliers reside in separate silos based on fundamentally differing methodologies. Because these methodologies typically employ cookie-based measurement rather than person-centric panel measurement, they can be subject to errors caused by cookie deletion and misattribution of consumer behavior because a cookie fails to identify which individual is using the computer at any given point in time. Importantly, these cookie-based approaches also prohibit the ability to perform accurate post-buy analyses to ensure that the correct audience targets were actually reached by the ad campaign. The result is often an inaccurate measurement of campaign effectiveness where clients cannot isolate whether it was the media, creative or other factors that influenced their results.

The Solution

comScore understands that not every campaign has the same objective and that many require a customized measurement approach. With the introduction of the comScore AdEffx suite, advertisers and publishers can accurately measure campaign effectiveness according to their particular objectives based on a unified person-centric audience measurement platform. This approach enables clients to obtain a 360-degree view of the delivery of their online media plans and their campaigns’ impact on consumer attitudes and behavior and be confident that they are measuring what matters correctly.

“Other digital ad effectiveness solutions tend to see each client’s campaign as a nail because their only available tool is a hammer,” said Anne Hunter, comScore vice president of ad effectiveness. “The comScore AdEffx suite offers our clients the complete toolkit for measuring ad effectiveness for any campaign objective with unparalleled accuracy. We understand that clients want media accountability and optimized performance, and only comScore AdEffx provides the ability to measure what matters using an integrated measurement platform based on the high quality media planning methods clients have come to trust from comScore.”

The comScore AdEffx™ suite currently includes five core services:

* Campaign Essentials – Provides critical measures of the actual delivery of every campaign including reach, frequency, GRPs / TRPs and demographics of those exposed to the advertising in a post-buy analysis. This module provides advertisers and their agencies with the type of campaign reporting information they are used to obtaining through TV post-buy analyses, helping make online advertising consistent with traditional media.
* Action Lift – Demonstrates the lift in online behaviors over time following the viewing of a marketer’s ad at any Web site and in any ad format, including search, display and video formats. Behavioral changes that are measured include site visitation and trademark search query activity.
* Brand Survey Lift – Demonstrates the lift in consumer attitudes and intentions subsequent to advertising exposure in any online ad format. Can also include an evaluation of the lift from mobile advertising.
* Online Sales Lift – Measures the lift in sales over time at an e-commerce site following exposure to an online ad in any format. This module includes a measurement of latent purchase behavior that is not accurately captured by click-based metrics, giving marketers a unique view into their online market share.
* Offline Sales Lift – Measures the lift in offline sales resulting from online ad exposure in any ad format, also including latent buying following ad exposure. The solution matches the comScore panel with third party offline databases to create single-source data marts that combine online activities (including ad exposure) with offline buying behavior.

“comScore’s continued innovation in the field of advertising effectiveness has helped us provide added value to our clients. Their suite of products allows us to measure advertising impact across delivery, attitudinal changes and offline sales impact” said Theresa LaMontagne, Carat SVP of Data Analytics and Insights.

“Campaign Essentials finally provides the visibility into the actual demographic make-up of campaign audiences reached with particular media buys. It allows us to optimize media delivery on the fly and to demonstrate the value of online advertising in reaching specific consumer segments – in comparison to offline media buys,” said Yaakov Kimelfeld, SVP, Director of Analytics, MediaVest Worldwide.

“We’ve chosen comScore’s AdEffx suite because campaign performance should be determined by more than clicks and actions alone. Our innovative applications of these products really reinforce the value of our targeting capabilities by showing clients how their audience segments are responding to campaigns,” said Minal Kamlani, Director of Planning & Insights at Undertone Networks.

Source: comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR)