It’s All About Audience Reach Across Screens: Key Themes from CES 2024

As for Comscore, Brian Pugh and I had a great session called “You Had Me at Cross-Platform: Reach, Frequency and Beyond in Advertising” with our partners, Google/YouTube (Marta Martinez) and the NFL (Dave Bolger). The use case was about reaching audiences across platforms during the biggest sporting event of t he year: Super Bowl LVII. Our collective research showed that YouTube reached 88% of adults 18-49 with a Super Bowl ad vs. 68% on linear TV, highlighting that it is not only what viewers are watching but also where and how they consume content that matters to a campaign’s success.

Here are some more of the key themes we saw in Vegas:

It is all about Cross-Platform Audiences

• The linear versus digital narrative is no longer an “either/or” conversation. Consumers are watching and interacting with content everywhere, and for marketers, it is all about maximizing the total audience reach across screens. While we see CTV continue to strengthen and grow, linear television is still holding steady, and remains a key platform for capturing a broad audience reach
• The foundational baseline we should be obsessed with is a very simple one - optimizing the right platform mix to capture total audience reach. It is all about finding consumers where they are consuming content, and reaching them there regardless of the screen.
• In 2024, we are excited to expand and evolve our cross-screen reach and measurement solutions to help marketers and publishers capture their audiences where they are- beyond just a general audience at the national level. Reaching the audience is about executing with precision, and this means going beyond national activation and measurement all the way down to the local market level.

Generative AI Will Play a More Prominent Role in Advertising

• 2023 saw a sharp turning point in the uptake of AI technologies readily accessible to consumers. Software such as ChatGPT has become a symbol of the new wave of AI since its release just over a year ago. At CES, we heard from advertisers who have been using GenAI to streamline content and ad creative processes across different formats. GenAI has also helped them with both process automation and efficiency as well as improving conversion rates with more adjustable and personalized creative.
• Tech providers too are jumping onto this trend. Microsoft, for example, announced the addition of a new Creative Studio element to its Retail Media tool, which will allow users to create new ads via conversational AI prompts.
• Comscore continued to advance its solutions by leveraging AI in 2023 and going into 2024. For example, we made significant enhancements to our search market collection and reporting through our qSearch solution suite to deliver measurement of generative AI queries. GenAI is also a key force behind our contextual, cookie-free audience segments in Proximic, our programmatic targeting division and an industry-leading provider of programmatic solutions. 

Third-Party Signal Loss is Top-of-Mind for Marketers Looking to Sustain Audience Reach

• Third-party (3P) signal loss is top-of-mind for marketers as Google moves forward in 3P cookie deprecation. In the first few weeks of January of this year, Google activated Tracking Protection for 1% of a randomly selected group of Chrome users globally, thus taking 2024’s first step in this initiative.
• Advertisers are also planning for the transition and have accepted that they need a replacement tool to help them leverage first-party (1P) datasets and offset the signal loss from 3P cookies (in some instances, using integrations via data clean rooms). They are having to think long and hard about how regulation and consumer attitudes toward privacy are changing. There is a new reality — and arguably it might be a more efficient one if brands are prepared to think more holistically about their audiences in all the different environments where they consume content.
• Comscore is continuing to innovate and evolve to future-proof measurement and activation. We recently launched Unified Digital Measurement (“UDM”) 2.0, the next generation of our core UDM methodology, designed to address the deprecation of third-party signals with the use of 1P identifiers. On the activation front, we are al lowing advertisers and agencies to bring their own 1P data to activate against on digital and TV. On digital, we have Proximic, our programmatic activation solution, and on TV, we have our Advanced Audiences Custom Segments, which enable the buy-side to build their own custom segments to seamlessly transact on within TPPs at the local level.

Retail Media is Primed for Growth

• Retail Media is well positioned for growth in 2024, as marketers move shifting budgets to sources with robust 1P data. This is a prime setup for Retail Media Networks who can provide 1P data-powered advertising solutions linked to conversions that are the pinnacle of a marketer’s goal to understand closed-loop attribution. 
• The landscape is massive and there is a continuous flow of new entrants. With this arises a need for third-party validation and measurement, as marketers look to determine the true ROI across many partners to optimize their brand advertising mix. It is all about quality, performance, and transparency. 
• At Comscore, we are actively partnering with advertisers and publishers to provide solutions that can help them maximize audience reach through Proximic, our activation solution that allows publishers to bring their own 1P data, and validate total cross-platform campaign performance through our Comscore Campaign Ratings solution.   

Overall, it’s going to be an exciting year in advertising and at Comscore. And it’s always a pleasure to kick every new year off with colleagues, old friends and partners at CES.

To learn more about our solutions to reach and measure audiences across screens, get in touch with us here.