TechBytes with Gary Warech, SVP at Comscore

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Comscore.

I am the Senior Vice President, Comscore Brand Direct, I lead Comscore’s direct to brand business including our Branded Content division, which analyzes the effect of brand integrations/sponsorships across all platforms and content types. We help clients quantify the results of branded content, sponsorship, promotional campaigns, influencer marketing and any integration of a brand in content. Our team delivers a holistic view of the brand engagement including dollar value of integration and consumer impact via brand lift, recall, and purchase consideration. This includes delivering results across all forms of integrations, including passive product placement, active brand in-content integration (unscripted), organic integrated branding (scripted), sponsorships and custom branded content across TV, Digital, Social, Movies, and PR.

What powers Comscore’s Branded Content engine including its social media capabilities?

Comscore’s Branded Video content measurement service leverages a Science-based approach to measuring brands in Video content. The solution is a classification system whereby a Human Analyst watches every second of each piece of Video content and classifies each brand occurrence by one of 18 treatment levels and the corresponding duration of each. Each occurrence is then assigned a score/weight. The total score/weight of the entire integration is then used to feed two different algorithms. One for assigning a total media value of the integration and one fueling a predictive model assigning impact scores for estimated brand recall, favorability lift, and purchase interest. This scientific approach has resulted in consistent and reliable measurement across all analyses for over a dozen years. Comscore and ListenFirst have entered into a business partnership, whereby ListenFirst is Comscore’s exclusive provider of social measurement capabilities for branded content measurement.

Tell us about ListenFirst and how it will benefit Cross-Marketing campaigns?

We’ve found ListenFirst to be the most comprehensive social media analytics solution, and the best partner to provide a complete view of a branded content performance across TV, digital and social. The company is an authority on social analytics and partners with the world’s leading brands to unlock the power of Big Data on social media.

With a breadth of analytics and domain expertise, they provide a streamlined solution allowing us to leverage social insights in an increasingly fragmented world. With brands and advertisers leveraging a multitude of new channels to reach consumers in more nuanced or personalized ways, we were keen to find a partner that could really hone-in on the performance of content across social.

The ListenFirst platform delivers a holistic view of branded content performance on social, ensuring we’re able to effectively translate the value of this strategy to our clients, ultimately helping them meet their goals. The Comscore and ListenFirst partnership provides advertisers with the only complete, across platform Branded Content measurement source in the market.

Using ListenFirst technology, how do you differentiate between various data points- Audience, Customer, Intent, Sentiment, and other useful analytics?

The driving force behind our partnership with ListenFirst Media is how they complement our Science-based approach to measuring brands in content. With ListenFirst’s capabilities, Comscore really has an ability to understand content performance across platforms that can’t be found elsewhere in the market. In particular, ListenFirst allows us to look at different types of analysis in context, which helps us deliver valuable insights for our customers. They also provide sentiment analysis to uncover how customers are feeling using signals beyond just the positive, negative and neutral across both organic and paid social media. Comscore’s clients also benefit from ListenFirst’s Brand Reputation Index, which tells how your customers feel towards your brand at any given time, which is ideal for understanding if there is a potential brand crisis that needs to be addressed.

ListenFirst is quite robust when it comes to providing extensive insights into owned and competitive social audience demographics. Our partnership is really about offering the most comprehensive means of measuring the impact of branded content across all platforms.

Tell us about your product roadmap for the next 2-3 years?

According to industry sources, Branded Content has become ubiquitous as just another form of advertising. As such, Comscore is uniquely positioned to provide currency-like branded content measurement as part of our overall cross-platform measurement focus well into the future.