LAS VEGASÂ – Canadian broadcasters stand to learn more about the content-consuming habits of their audience in an age where the television is just one screen among many, after Adobe Inc. and comScore Inc. announced a global partnership today at Adobe Summit.
The two firms will be teaming up to provide shared customers with access to a more fulsome view of analytics by swapping their relevant data. Specifically, comScore will be getting fed data from Adobe Analytics and adding it to its Cross Media, Audience, and Advertising Product Suites. On the other end, Adobe will be taking comScore’s audience tracking data – such as demographics – and integrating it into Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Where broadcasters could rely on Nielson ratings data not so long ago, the fragmentation caused by content being served up on multiple devices has posed a new challenge in how to accurately track that audience. When one person might watch one program on TV, but stream another one online, then download a movie to their Xbox, tracking habits can become muddled pretty quickly. Adobe says that digital TV views have doubled over the past two years, yet broadcasters may not be properly communicating that shift to their advertisers.
“It’s like baking a cake and it’s going to fall apart because you didn’t add the eggs,” says Kelly Barrett, vice president of partnership integrations at comScore. “We want to help our joint customers measure their entire consumer base.”
There’s already a shift taking place in advertising, with money being spent on emerging channels in addition to traditional broadcasting channels, says Bill Ingram, vice-president of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social. That trend will likely continue as advertisers are given a fuller picture of where viewers are spending their time.
“The audience sits in many places, not just one place,” he says. “Adobe is just helping fill in the gaps with granular level data.”
Rogers Communications will be the first Canadian broadcaster to take advantage of the shared offering. Already a user of Adobe Analytics and comScore, the firm lent a support statement to the announcement of the collaboration. It reads:
“We need to be able to show advertisers where our engaged multiscreen audiences are consuming content in order to effectively monetize our premium content everywhere,” said Greg Dinsmore, director digital insights and cross-platform management at Rogers Communications.
CBC and Shaw are other Canadian broadcasters that currently use Adobe Analytics and comScore services that could potentially take advantage, according to Barrett. If they do, they’ll have some of the backend work of enabling a capability like this lifted from their shoulders.
“There’s not this SDK fatigue going on, our customers don’t have to go back to the drawing board and go through all that,” she says. “You don’t have to open 12 different dashboards every morning.”
Beyond answering the question of where advertising is best placed, Barrett says that users will be able to glean some specific metrics they couldn’t previously access. Broadcasters could know how many people are in a single household, for instance, and how much time is being spent on content.
Plus that data can be fed back into Adobe’s Audience Manager software for unique segments. To take Barrett’s example – “I want the Donald Trump supporters that are in the car market and watch the food channel.”
Forecasting of how marketing campaigns will perform against such segments is also supported.
