5 Minutes with Comscore's Steve Bagdasarian

As consumers continue to traverse the complicated and fragmented media landscape, a marketer’s approach to measurement needs to keep pace. Brands are looking for ways to connect the dots across traditional and digital environments to measure their entire media plans and make sense of the total impact of their advertising. That’s where Comscore comes in.

Comscore is mapping out the path for the future of measurement, across digital and traditional channels alike — an evolution that’s even challenging cornerstone processes like upfronts in TV. Comscore’s Chief Commercial Officer Steve Bagdasarian sits down with Stephanie Paterik, the editor-in-chief of The Current, to offer his perspective on the state of media measurement.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s your hot take on the industry?

We are an industry that has done such an expensive job of pitting channels against each other. “Linear television is dying, CTV [connected TV] is winning, online video doesn’t make sense.” There are all these components of people making cases in a bunch of different areas for siloed strategy.

And I’m just in the camp that every channel has its purpose. It just takes a mindset of thinking about the blend. Appropriately, you need the right metrics, and you need the right partners, which from a measurement perspective is critical for us to be able to offer products in that capacity. But I don’t think that there’s any sense of channel conflict or format conflict [between traditional and digital channels].

And then the other one is this concept of premium versus not premium, which is a very hot topic within the construct of how we think about the future state of content. You have to respect the consumer’s time and attention and the formats by which they’re looking to consume content.

And those two things ultimately come together for a better, more investible future of where the media state is if we actually think past that.

I love that you brought that up because I feel like we could have a discussion just about what premium is. What’s premium to you?

Premium, to me, is time and attention.

Content is king. Content comes in a lot of different forms and a lot of different formats. We have to respect how consumers want to choose where they’re going to apply their time and attention. There are totally missed environments like gaming that are absolutely underappreciated based upon the attentiveness of the consumer and the transaction of the economy that they’re playing in, [which] is no different than what we would see in traditional premium video.

It’s about captured time and attention and whatever format that comes in [and] whatever content experience that comes in. We as advertisers [and] we as those who serve the advertiser have to be able to be there to meet the consumer.

I’m very curious to know what your big swing is right now. What’s the big, ambitious, maybe even scary project or goal you’re driving toward?

We’re at this unique inflection point in the market. So, for us, it’s about disrupting the concept of what traditionally has been thought about for cross-platform measurement. And being able to provide a product that encapsulates speed, turnaround of data, and granularity and precision that is expected to allow for advertisers to utilize cross-platform measurement proactively, versus historically measurement being retroactive.

And frankly, be able to optimize nonlinear environments during in-flight linear to maximize the performance of reach and frequency output of that campaign.

You recently released some big news about TV measurement. I’d love to get your thoughts on what you think the impact is not just for Comscore but for the industry.

We’re a staunch supporter of the role that accreditation plays in the market. We’re the only big data measurement company that is MRC [Media Rating Council] accredited as well as JIC [Joint Industry Committee] certified from a cross-platform measurement perspective. And so, for us, the accreditation is a validation to the transparency of how we think about our products and our methodology.

It’s important that the market understands and appreciates the importance of being transparent with the backbone of your measurement products. And then, from a go-to-market standpoint, I think there’s a reliability that advertisers and publishers can look at with this being such a quality standard of television data to baseline so many of these products that we’re building for.

Whether it’s traditional television measurement or it’s the baseline of linear television within the cross-platform incrementality view, we’ve checked the boxes and we’ve done the hard work to be able to get the right recognition.

Advertising is always changing and there’s so much innovation coming at us. What is the thing that’s happening that you think is going to have the biggest impact on our industry?

I am super passionate about this topic. I think innovation comes in a lot of different forms.

But for us, innovation is really starting to embody itself around the importance of local. The reality is the vast majority of purchase decisions happen locally. The vast majority of influence around consideration happens locally.

And so, the innovation that is evolving within the local subset is bringing together this view of broad-based reach vehicles like television to highly performing vehicles like social and programmatic. [It’s about] being able to execute the best outcomes possible down to the localized level. And that’s how we see the world. And frankly, that’s the data set that we’ve built on top of.

And this mantra of “advertise nationally, optimize locally” is really starting to take hold with the emergence of focus in that area.