NEW YORK— In what the Association of National Advertisers has described as a key step forward in its efforts to improve cross media measurement, the ANA has announced that it is partnering with Comscore to conduct a pilot test to assess Virtual People ID.
“Cross-media measurement has been a longstanding yet elusive goal for the marketing industry,” said ANA EVP Bill Tucker.“This partnership with Comscore and the test we are conducting represents a significant step toward realizing our objective.”
Tucker added that the ANA expects to be in the market with a Cross-Media Measurement pilot late in the upcoming fourth quarter of this year or in the first quarter of 2022.
The test comes at a time when there has been widespread criticism of the way viewing is measured across platforms.
The ANA’s Cross-Media Measurement (CMM) initiative is a marketer-led industry measurement initiative that is working to overcome those problems.
As part of that effort, the CMM is launching a series of component pilot tests.
The pilot test of the Virtual People ID (VID) methodology will assess its privacy-preserving reach and frequency measurements for television and digital media audiences.
The VID approach assigns synthetic identifiers to media audience behavior without needing to use digital identifiers such as third-party cookies or mobile ad IDs.
The ANA and Comscore will test an approach to the VID methodology that will include television, accounting for co-viewing as well as digital/TV deduplication.
The pilot test announced today with Comscore will help determine how best to structure a Virtual People ID (VID) process for television and cross-media executions and how to validate VID for U.S. media outlets, the ANA reported.
“It is a privilege to partner with the ANA to help advance cross-media measurement by joining TV and digital data in an innovative and effective manner.” said Bill Livek, CEO and executive vice chairman at Comscore. “We’re excited to begin validating the VID methodology, including television, using Comscore’s set-top box and connected TV data sets.”
