Roku has added comScore’s validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) to its list of video measurement partners.
Although Roku had embedded Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings directly into its operating system in 2015, its customers wanted to use the vCE currency for measuring OTT, said Scott Rosenberg, VP of advertising and audience development for Roku.
“We’re not trying to be exclusive or proprietary with partners,” he added.
Agencies like Mediavest requested vCE because they wanted consistency between the currency they use for digital impressions with OTT. The main goal is to validate audiences and provide reach guarantees across platforms.
By adding vCE, Roku can begin to show with more granularity when and on which device a consumer viewed an ad.
ComScore increases its audience scale in partnering with Roku, which has more than 10 million active accounts and traffics more than 30% of OTT ads through its platform.
“Roku has contributed their demographic information for us to measure and validate against, which is bringing a key new data set to the table,” said Timur Yarnall, SVP of corporate development for comScore.
Publishers or advertisers must opt in to access vCE through Roku, so comScore doesn’t get unfettered access to Roku publisher app data.
Despite the large digital footprint comScore has established through its PC measurement panel, it only recently waded into mobile and traditional TV via its merger with Rentrak – which aggregates data from about 52 million set-top boxes (stemming from Charter, Cox, Dish and AT&T/DirecTV and a few other smaller MVPDs) representing 22 million households, according to comScore.
“When you start looking at mobile and OTT measurement, Roku is a key [player to bring in more demand] because of the number of devices they have in market,” Yarnall said.
Third-party measurement is critical for smart-TV providers, which will help expand marketer access to viewing and demo-based data sets.
Although cable and satellite providers like Comcast, Dish and Cablevision already provide access to viewership data, cable operator-owned set-top box data also has its limitations depending on the operator’s reach in certain regions.
Activating and comingling new data sets, such as insights derived from Roku’s ad framework, therefore gives advertisers more cross-platform coverage – at least in theory, for now.
“Nobody has a [comprehensive] footprint when it comes to TV data yet,” Yarnall said. “There’s a lot to be settled.”
