Advances in comScore's vCE Campaign Measurement Service Aim to Increase Transparency and Accountability in Digital Advertising

RESTON, Va., Feb. 22, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- comScore today announced key milestones in the advancement of its holistic multi-platform advertising measurement offering, validated Campaign Essentials™ (vCE®). The enhancements include sophisticated fraud protection, new industry accreditations, expanded global reporting and reporting for Facebook, Instagram, and the Facebook Partner Network, and a dramatically improved user experience.

These vCE enhancements directly address the growing industry need for transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem, allowing advertisers to be confident that their campaign investments are reaching target audiences. Solving this challenge of trust in digital advertising also helps pave the way for comparable cross-platform measurement across digital and television campaigns.

"The message was clear at the recent IAB Annual Leadership Forum: leading advertisers will increasingly require trusted third-party campaign verification," said Dan Hess, executive vice president of products at comScore. "Having pioneered this market, we're delighted to share our continued progress in MRC accreditation, reporting coverage, fraud detection, mobile measurement and usability – reinforcing vCE's position as a leading, comprehensive industry solution."

"ANA is very pleased at comScore's continuing evolution to address the measurement and fraud detection needs of the marketing ecosystem," said Bob Liodice, president and chief executive officer of the Association of National Advertisers. "We are impressed by the ongoing development of sophisticated tools that elevate marketers' confidence while enabling improved decision making."

With a single, integrated tag, vCE provides advertisers with comprehensive campaign and audience validation metrics – such as in-target demographic delivery, validated GRPs, viewability, invalid traffic (IVT) and brand safety – for display and video campaigns across desktop and mobile platforms.

Sophisticated Ad Fraud Protection
Through a data science team focused on IVT and other forms of digital ad fraud, comScore continues to expand its unique capabilities to detect and filter such activity. While detection of general IVT requires only an industry-standard blacklist of known IVT, comScore employs sophisticated forensics to identify previously unknown forms of IVT that may inflate or obfuscate traffic. In Q4 2016, such sophisticated IVT (SIVT) accounted for 86% of all IVT detected and filtered by comScore, highlighting the critical industry importance of effective SIVT detection.

comScore recently received accreditation for SIVT detection and filtration of desktop and mobile web traffic for both vCE and Media Metrix®, making it the first company to provide MRC-accredited SIVT filtration in both content and campaign measurement.

"Our longstanding relationship with comScore laid the groundwork for the viewability and audience delivery guarantees we've been able to put in place when working with publishers," said Heather Dumford, global marketing director for media and advertising technology at Conagra Brands. "We've been able to build upon this foundation to continue to stamp out invalid traffic and improve overall ad quality, both are essential tasks that help us to reach the right audiences and achieve our business goals."

Expanded Reporting Capabilities
comScore continues to extend vCE capabilities globally, most recently with the addition of in-target delivery of mobile advertising in Canada, UK and Spain. This complements existing global measurement of delivery validation for mobile campaigns, including viewability, general and sophisticated IVT, geographic delivery, and brand safety.

Additionally, with enhanced vCE Facebook reporting, comScore now reports key viewability metrics for ads running on Facebook, Instagram and external publishers in the Facebook Audience Network. comScore and Facebook are currently working to expand this partnership to add campaign demographic measurement in the US across these Facebook properties, with additional markets to follow during 2017.*

Technology Innovation to Benefit Publishers, Advertisers and Service Providers
comScore has also focused vCE development efforts on substantially improving productivity, performance and ease of use for clients across the advertising ecosystem.

Unlike other solutions that require multiple tags to collect all campaign metrics, comScore provides a single measurement tag that collects holistic audience and validation metrics across desktop and mobile devices, websites and apps, and display and video formats. This reduces the implementation burden and negative performance impact of multiple tag implementations.

In January 2017 comScore also released an updated software development kit (SDK) to further simplify in-app instrumentation and improve mobile campaign coverage.

Finally, comScore is improving the vCE user experience through development of a new reporting interface. This new UI makes it easier for clients to track and optimize campaigns in-flight by quickly surfacing the most important metrics across publishers, placements, and strategies. It also allows users to easily use vCE norms to compare campaign performance to industry benchmarks. comScore expects to make the new interface available to clients by early second quarter.

Recent Industry Certifications and Accreditations for vCE
comScore has a long history of working with third-party audit bodies to receive certification for its products. Recently, comScore announced renewed certification by ABC for display viewability measurement, with further reviews in progress for video viewability and anti-fraud. Additionally, comScore has been awarded the Certified Against Fraud Seal by TAG, as well as being a Validated Digital Advertising Assurance Provider (DAAP) through the TAG Anti-Piracy Program.

comScore also works closely with the MRC to achieve accreditation across its offerings. In the past year, comScore has built on its previous MRC accreditations for desktop validation, to extend to additional measurement capabilities across devices. In addition to becoming the first company to offer MRC-accredited SIVT detection for both content and campaign measurement, comScore has recently achieved two additional MRC milestones:

• comScore was recently granted accreditation by the MRC for vCE mobile viewability measurement across display, video, web, and in-app ads.
• comScore was also the first company to offer an MRC-accredited viewable GRP for desktop display and video campaigns, and remains the only accredited solution today. The company's Audience module of vCE – which includes its reporting of digital campaign age, gender, and behavior-based ethnicity demographics, and the resulting reach, frequency and GRPs – received MRC accreditation in April 2016.

Learn more about these and other accreditations at comScore's Third-Party Accreditation, Certification and Review Page: http://www.comscore.com/About-comScore/Third-Party-Review.

*Note: Facebook-related metrics in vCE are not accredited by the MRC.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (OTC: SCOR) is a leading cross-platform measurement company that precisely measures audiences, brands and consumer behavior everywhere. comScore completed its merger with Rentrak Corporation in January 2016, to create the new model for a dynamic, cross-platform world. Built on precision and innovation, our unmatched data footprint combines proprietary digital, TV and movie intelligence with vast demographic details to quantify consumers' multiscreen behavior at massive scale. This approach helps media companies monetize their complete audiences and allows marketers to reach these audiences more effectively. With more than 3,200 clients and global footprint in more than 75 countries, comScore is delivering the future of measurement. For more information on comScore, please visit comscore.com.

SOURCE comScore

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