The event is important to me for two reasons. First, it brings together the measurement community itself, with no egos and a focus on solution solving across the board. Often, when you look at surveys done in our industry or instruction guides about newer technologies, they are written for the advertiser, agency, or publisher. Measurement partners (and platforms that we are integrated into) need their own forum to jointly solution solve for those constituents. Secondly, and to address the solutioning piece, it creates a space for measurement to hear from those we serve directly.

Comscore sponsored a session at the Summit called ‘Balancing User Privacy Preferences and Effective Advertising.' The workshop, for over 50 minutes, challenged participants to reposition how our industry can better communicate to consumers the value of “data sharing” and “personalized ads” juxtaposed against the accessibility of content. Phrases like cookie banner fatigue, fraud and the dark web, and content creators were among all the right words brought up in conversation. Multiple next steps were presented involving pursuing ‘test and learn’ approaches, creating knowledge bases for sharing those learnings, and developing ways to understand the consumers’ motivations for wanting and not wanting to share their information.

Throughout the event I heard pockets of conversation around hesitancy to “get started” on privacy initiatives, on unknowns as to where to go for advice, and on paralysis on bringing together various parties across a company.

For our part, Comscore is not waiting on the “when” or “if” as it relates to 3P signal loss or changing regulation. We are doing the work now, as it is a perfect time to test, learn, and implement changes – before it is too late for those actions and because some environments already act as testing grounds after having changed their regulations.

It is important to note that privacy initiatives aren’t the headlines of product launches or press releases. They are embedded in everything we do behind the scenes, they are ongoing, and they often require cross-company collaboration.

Here are some Initiatives you may not know that Comscore has undertaken to meet the needs of the ecosystem, while staying in the graces of legislation and consumers:

• Evolving UDM into UDM 2.0 by working with publishers to move from 3P signals to 1P signals, and using it in probabilistic modelling of behaviors (cross domain, cross device, and cross time periods) rather than the deterministic tying to individuals, allowing for audience reach that is critical to customer insights and media plans to provide accurate and granular reporting;
• Working with clients and partners on various use cases via data clean rooms, multi-party computational systems, and PETs;
• Building a strong data governance foundation with internal tools and policy around data lineage/governance programs around permissioning, data ownership, files copying, etc.;
• Researching and experimenting with the Privacy Sandbox to determine how it fits with measurement; and
• Doubling down on our ID-free contextual solutions in our programmatic advertising division, Proximic by Comscore, whose Predictive Audiences are powered by the latest in AI.

My message at the Measurement Leadership Summit to brands, agencies and publishers who feel stuck on making the next steps was to know that they are not alone and that they should be open to discussing with partners who are living and breathing it for their own futures already. Comscore is striving to set an example as we continue to collaborate across our company and the industry on the newest and developing privacy requirements and regulations.

If you’d like to connect with me to discuss these highlights from the Measurement Leadership Summit or how any of these initiatives can be used in your organization, get in touch with me here at this link.