comScore Audience Advantage(TM) for CPG Helps Improve Digital Advertising Effectiveness and Efficiency for Consumer Packaged Goods Advertisers

RESTON, Va., Feb. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- comScore (Nasdaq: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced that Microsoft Advertising will use the comScore Audience Advantage™ platform to help consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertisers in the U.S., including Campbell Soup Company and Alberto Culver, reach their desired audiences across Microsoft's online properties, such as MSN and Windows Live. As the inaugural comScore Audience Advantage partner for the CPG industry, Microsoft will use the platform for anonymous audience modeling and reporting to improve the effectiveness of ad delivery for its customers.

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comScore Audience Advantage is a digital audience optimization platform that enables publishers to provide advertisers and media planners with the ability to accurately reach their most valuable audiences. Using data from its opt-in research panel of Internet users that can be aggregated into a variety of important consumer segments, comScore builds sophisticated predictive algorithms that a publisher can use to determine which of its site visitors should receive a particular ad. No personally identifiable information (PII) data is used in the implementation of comScore's predictive algorithms by Web site operators.

The Audience Advantage platform combines shoppers' actual in-store purchases made with loyalty cards with their online attributes – such as purchase behavior, geographic data, site visitation and search activity – to anonymously determine which visitors to a Web site are most likely to purchase a particular brand or product in a retail store.

Microsoft Advertising developed a CPG Online Effect product last year as part of its Microsoft Media Network offering to anonymously provide advertisers with sophisticated behavioral models that combine data that measure offline and online purchase behaviors to help advertisers reach their target audience online and drive offline sales results. This product will plug into the Audience Advantage platform to further explain how online advertising campaigns can impact offline sales.

After an ad campaign has been anonymously implemented on Microsoft's Web sites, CPG advertisers can leverage comScore's 350,000-person database of Internet users who participate in supermarket loyalty card programs to measure actual in-store sales resulting from the campaign. This helps CPG advertising customers to make more informed and sophisticated decisions about their online media campaigns and improve their effective audience reach across Microsoft's online properties.

For example, if a cereal company wants to reach women age 30-54 who used to purchase a particular cereal brand but haven't recently made a purchase, Microsoft can find an audience based on the comScore Audience Advantage model that fits the cereal company's key consumer criteria. Microsoft can then create look-alike customer segments and serve ads to people with similar characteristics across Microsoft's online properties. As a result of the collaboration, comScore is also able to use its consumer panel data to determine the offline sales trends among panelists who were exposed to the cereal company's online advertising as compared to a control group that wasn't exposed. This analytical approach determines the incremental sales the cereal company received from the online campaign.

"Given their offline and online panel size and their research capabilities, comScore was a key industry ally for Microsoft's CPG Online Effect solution," said James Colborn, Microsoft Advertising director. "Our combined solution will help not only deliver more relevant audiences to advertisers, but will also enable us to measure the lift in offline sales in an insightful way to help advertisers tweak or improve existing campaigns and their future media plans."

"We are excited to work with Microsoft on the inaugural audience optimization product built on the comScore Audience Advantage platform for the CPG industry," said Erin Hunter, comScore executive vice president. "With Microsoft's CPG Online Effect product, consumer goods advertisers can approach their digital ad campaigns with a significantly higher level of sophistication and insight than has previously been possible. By using actual point-of-sale purchase data as a key input in the modeling algorithm, advertisers can be confident that their campaigns will be delivered against their most valuable consumer segments."

The CPG Online Effect product features enhanced reporting capabilities from comScore AdEffx™ that go beyond traditional ROI metrics to demonstrate how ad campaigns influence trademark search queries and drive sales lift by creative message and ad size. All reporting is customized to fit an advertiser's needs and to help with future media campaign planning.  Please visit advertising.microsoft.com for more information about the CPG Online Effect product or email [email protected] for more information about Audience Advantage for CPG.

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Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including, but not limited to, expectations regarding the impact and benefits to comScore of the comScore Audience Advantage product, financial or otherwise. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially, including, but not limited to: the features and characteristics of the products, the rate of development of the digital marketing intelligence, Internet advertising and e-Commerce markets; the growth of the Internet as a medium for commerce, content, advertising and communications; and the acceptance of new products and methodologies by the industry, including existing and prospective clients.

For a detailed discussion of these and other risk factors, please refer to comScore's most recent respective Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Annual Reports on Form 10-K and from time to time other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), which are available on the SEC's Web site (http://www.sec.gov).

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SOURCE comScore, Inc.