Comscore at Needham Conference: Cross-Platform Growth Strategy

On Tuesday, 13 May 2025, Comscore Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) presented at the 20th Annual Needham Technology, Media & Consumer 1x1 Conference, outlining its strategic vision and financial health. CEO John Carpenter highlighted the company’s focus on cross-platform measurement, while addressing both growth opportunities and ongoing challenges, such as capital structure concerns.

Key Takeaways

• Cross-platform capabilities will constitute nearly 20% of Comscore’s business by 2025, growing at 30-40% annually.
• The company has improved its balance sheet with a $45 million facility to address debt and invest in product enhancements.
• Comscore’s local measurement strength serves as a "Trojan horse" for cross-platform growth.
• A new curated deal ID capability with Magnite enhances advertiser access to targeted audiences.
• Linear TV data turnaround time has been reduced to 48 hours, improving campaign adaptability.

Financial Results

• Comscore has strategically increased prices, particularly for privacy-compliant audience segments.
• The renegotiation of a data contract with Charter is expected to save at least $35 million through 2031.
• The company raised a $45 million facility to address debt and invest in growth initiatives, offering more flexibility in capital deployment.

Operational Updates

• Comscore is leveraging its data for cross-platform ad and content measurement, focusing on programmatic environments.
• The new curated deal ID capability with Magnite aims to provide advertisers with access to trusted publisher sites.
• The company is exploring generative AI for content creation and optimizing data turnaround times for linear TV.

Future Outlook

• Comscore’s cross-platform capabilities are projected to grow significantly, representing nearly 20% of its business by 2025.
• The company is focusing on interoperability with existing workflows and maintaining a unique data-agnostic position.
• Local measurement remains a key differentiator, supporting double-digit growth in cross-platform solutions.

Q&A Highlights

• CEO John Carpenter emphasized the importance of partnerships in expanding brand safety and verification capabilities.
• The company is negotiating data contracts with OEMs to reduce costs and enhance measurement capabilities.
• Comscore is addressing concerns related to its capital structure to reassure common shareholders.

Comscore’s detailed strategy and financial updates at the conference underscore its commitment to growth and innovation. For a deeper dive, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 20th Annual Needham Technology, Media & Consumer 1x1 Conference:

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: So we’re

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: gonna get started. I’m Laura Martin, the senior media and Internet analyst here at Needham and Company, and we’re gonna interview John Carpenter at Comscore, CEO of Comscore. Thank you for being here.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: So let’s start with, like, level setting. Tell us what Comscore is doing now and tell tell us where you guys are in the cross platform measurement space, which was the sort of the great white hope of merging with Comscore with Renge Track in 02/2016, I think it was. So where are we on that? And then where are we? I think you guys have been really leading, Nielsen, in terms of real time measurement.

Like really closing this gap to real time measurement. Sure. So update us on the product suite of Comscore these days.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah. You’re you’re you’re right. I mean, we we lead with our cross platform capability. I mean, that was the original thesis when com the original com score business and and Rendrack came together in 2016 time frame. And I think if you look at what’s happened with media broadly speaking, that thesis is is arguably more important today than it’s ever been.

And so when you look at our product suite and where the investments across the portfolio that we’re making, they’re going directly into cross platform. And, you know, just, you know, you you point back to, you know, eighteen months ago, the cross platform capability was roughly less than 10% of our our business today. In 2025, it’ll make up somewhere close to 20% of the business growing, you know, 30 to 40% a year. And so we we’ve really leaned into it. We feel like the capabilities that we have are meeting a lot of client needs that the marketplace is looking for and that’s where our time and energy is is is spent.

And we’ve had a lot of success here over the course of the last What

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: was so hard? This is eleven years later. Okay. No. Sixteen.

I’m I’m lying. It’s nine years later. What took so long and what was so hard that we didn’t see in 02/2016 that took all the extra time to get a decent cross platform?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah. I think it’s it look, change is incredibly hard. It still is a hard hard solve. If you look at the way the industry transacts today, it still does transact very much in silos. You go to the buying teams in many many whole coast, they’re still siloed between local, national, digital, programmatic versus traditional buying systems.

And so you still have siloed ecosystems that have been built up over time and have been built to to, you know, a certain way of of of transacting and and that workflow, if you will, that inertia is still very much in place, and we’ve got to work through that. I think what’s different today is look at the consumer experience. Pre pandemic, you still had, you know, 75, 80 percent of all viewing happening through the traditional pay TV bundle. You fast forward to today, and that fragmentation is rapid and broadcast linear television viewing is 50% of all audiences. And so pre 2020, right, that you can make the argument that the market really wasn’t ready or in need of a of a true cross platform solution.

You fast forward to today and some of the challenges that, you know, the incumbent measurement partners had and and keeping up with the pace of change from a fragmentation standpoint is a real reason why we’re winning in in some of our capabilities because just going back to that original thesis, we started with digital, we started the household level with our linear TV product, and we built from the ground up. And we think that’s an important differentiator as we think about solving for cross platform.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: What’s been happening to pricing? Because you guys had really robust pricing. This cross platform product is sort of by itself in the marketplace. Right? Or does Nielsen have one now?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Nielsen has Nielsen. They they talked a lot about Nielsen One and their big data plus panel. You know, I I think when you look at how we’re positioned in the marketplace, most of our growth is coming from programmatic environments where we’re embedded in in the in the the places where the bulk of advertising is being transacted today. And I think because we built our product to be interoperable with the workflows and with the way media is transacting, especially digital media transacting in programmatic environments, we’re having success capitalizing on Right.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Because they’re not competing, so you’re dividing up the market. They’re doing linear first, you’re doing digital first.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: They’re very much focused on that combination of, you know, call it, you know, of The US ad industry between linear and connected TV, maybe a hundred billion dollars of total ad spend. We we absolutely play in that space. But then if you look at, you know, the programmatic ad spend that exists, that TAM is $300,000,000,000. And so if you’re talking about how do you work with a partner and a client on solving for, you know, omnichannel measurements that that captures a holistic view of audiences, you’ve got to have capabilities that can span across linear connected TV, traditional digital, and, you know, now social, which is becoming an increasingly bigger chunk of all video viewing here in The US.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: I would say one of my learnings on the stage today, John, is that how many CEOs have sat up here just with the comment you made, whereas their competitive advantage and pricing power is coming from creating a product or service that crosses walled gardens to the open web. That increasingly, the demand that has pricing power by ad buyers is measure for me something or give me comparisons open web to walled gardens. Because even within the walled gardens, I can’t, I, the buyer, can’t compare Amazon to Google to TikTok to Facebook. So somebody that can connect all those and then you may as well on your way out, you probably those guys start from the open web. They don’t start

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: from the walled gardens.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Sure. Sure. So an open web guy that says, oh, we have the ability to add these other like pieces of information.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: And what’s incrementality that you’re getting across all

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: those Yes, even put them on the same basis. Don’t even tell me increment. Just tell me that the unit on the open web is worth a tenth of Google, it’s worth five times more than Amazon, and it’s worth a quarter of TikTok. They just want that measurement, I think, is valuable to them. Can you and you just said that that’s one of the things you’re doing is walled garden to open Internet.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: A %. I mean, some of our our our largest clients are walled garden, the kind of new media companies that have built massive advertising and video viewing platforms. They’re some of our largest clients today and you look back, you know, eighteen months ago and, you know, that that was a very different client picture. And I think it’s because we’ve got products and capabilities. Again, going back to that that combination of big digital at scale plus big traditional TV at scale from a measurement solution.

Those two things package together, and you bring you bring that to light for the buying community and for the content creators in environments where they want to transact walled garden open web, we’re there.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Okay. Because you’re really data, so you’re really agnostic is where your data sits.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Correct.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Are you taking advantage of this? Another thing that showed up on stage a lot today was this what we’ll call curation, which is this moving the data from being on the DSP Mhmm. To being on the SSP. Are you guys benefiting from that transition?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah. In fact, we just we just announced a curated deal ID capability that we launched with Magnite on their platform where we’re essentially bringing together Comscore’s, you know, trusted, you know, credible digital rankers. Right? You’ve got publishers that are in the Comscore top 500, top two fifty. We’re creating curated audience buying IDs that marry our proximate audience segments together with com scores traditional digital business and creating those curated IDs inside of Magna.

Now it’s just launched last Monday.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Targeting idea. That’s a that’s a user that’s not like a cookie idea. Right? It’s an ID idea. It isn’t a target market idea, is it?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Well, it’s it’s it what it’s doing is it’s allowing advertisers who are flighting to quality and want to have confidence that they’re buying audiences that are on, in this case, trusted publisher sites, audiences that they can target directly. They’re leveraging Comscore’s targeting capability, which is our Proximic Audience segments coupled with the tried and true Comscore digital product now curated in one environment that’s available for you to buy against in Magni’s platform. Okay.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: So so they haven’t adopted double verifies. The reason they haven’t they, Magnite, have not adopted double verifies because they’re doing your segments? Or would they like, would they just did com score first and then they do others? Like, I don’t really get this.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah. Look, we’re excited about our offering. I think it’s fair to say that in the future, this opens up a lot of opportunity for us to to partner with, you know, brand safety, brand verification capabilities, fraud detection capabilities, make that part of the curated experience as we think about how we expand our offering across across these platforms. But, you know, our first approach here was to take the trusted Comscore digital product that all the the buying community is leveraging and buying today, making that available programmatically through a curated ID coupled with our audience segments. And that was the first step.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: And the SSP doesn’t charge you a fee. Right? So you make more money here than if it’s attached to the DSP. Correct. Right?

Are you is there a different product here? Are you attaching the same stuff to the DSP already, so it’s not that much extra Our

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: audience segments, the the the product that I just described doesn’t yet sit in DSP environments. It’s not to say that it it can’t our proximity audience segments do sit inside of the large DSPs and are available to for for buyers to transact against and

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: You didn’t just take those and put them on the SSP?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: We did. We coupled we coupled those same audience, that same audience capability with the the differences. We coupled it with the Comscore digital syndicated digital offering, which is our Comscore rankers. Think about publish you know, if you’re a publisher in the top hundred, top two fifty, making your making those IDs available with qualified audiences inside Magnet. That’s what we brought to life.

That doesn’t yet exist inside of the DSP.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: That’s really interesting. Okay. In terms of take rates, are you seeing any pressure on your pricing to the downside? Or are you able to do you still have pricing power?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: We one of the things one of the we we we took advantage of some pricing capability here early in the the second quarter, and we’ve been happy with how that’s performed both from a volume standpoint in terms of impressions that we’re seeing scale coupled with obviously the revenue upside that comes with the volume. And so we strategically and surgically took price Meaning, increased price in a couple of places based on the the uniqueness of our offering, particularly inside of the Proxima audience segments where we know we’ve got a competitive mode around some of the privacy compliance segments that we make available to, you know, health and wellness Mhmm. Big health and wellness buyers, think Financial services. Financial services, any regulated environment, the privacy focus there and the fact that we’ve got, you know, a ton of data governance and history managing that kind of that kind of audience targeting capability allowed us to to be surgical in terms of

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: And one of

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: the things

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: took a good difference is if you’re on a programmatic platform, it’s easier to take price. You just raise the price, and when somebody checks the box, you get the price increase. But you used to have a lot of stuff under contract, and it was so hard to raise price on those people because they were under margin pressure. Sure. Like they wanted to try to get you a lower price.

So what’s happening with this mix of programmatic where it’s easy to raise price versus contracts where they’re negotiated annually but it’s just really hard to price increase.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah. I I think for us, it’s just been surgical in terms of, you know, how do we monitor our impression volume against, you know, where we’ve got a uniqueness that we can differentiate. You know, we’ve a differentiated product that’s not available elsewhere. Again, I go to the privacy compliance stuff that we do with Proximic as a as a great example where there’s not a lot of other places that you can go to to get that kind of quality when you’re when you’re, you know, placing a campaign. And so that’s where we’ve been surgical, and we’ve had success doing it.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: I know you came in with a clear vision of what you wanted to achieve. What inning are you at and what do you have yet to achieve to get to your destination?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah. We we think we’re we’re onto something with our cross platform capabilities and the scale that we’re creating. Like I said, you you started with something eighteen, twenty four months ago that was less than 10% of our our revenue to something now that more more approaches 20%. There’s no reason to believe that that doesn’t continue to scale and that’s where we’re we’re focused. So I I think we’re still in the early innings in terms of what that opportunity is for Comscore as we continue to to invest in that side of the business.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: One of the things you were really good at is you made an acquisition of a Comscore girl that you brought back in house and she was all about real time. And maybe, I think her product was real time, but you guys shortened your feedback loop from like two weeks to Sure. I don’t know, twenty four hours, forty eight hours. I can’t remember. But where are you now in this real time ability to, like, mid campaign adjust and change based on feedback?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: The the the longest pole in the tent there is how quickly we can turn around our linear TV data as part of our cross platform offering, and and we’ve got that down to forty eight hours. And so we’re within what what many of our clients would consider a a perfectly acceptable, optimizable window. So if you’re trying to optimize your digital spend against, you know, what you’re seeing from linear, you know, it’s that linear that’s typically the lone pole in the tent in terms of just given the amount of data providers we have and how quickly they are to give us the data and how then how quickly we’re able to turn. So we took that from what was a a two week window down to two day window. And so now our both our linear TV product and our cross platform product are are within, you know, an optimizable window from a from an advertising optimization perspective.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: And is there a product that just is real time, it just doesn’t have linear? Because that’s like you said, that’s the one that gives you the cross platform. But is there a product that doesn’t is like a pre look, like fast look product that just doesn’t have linear? Or is that

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Well, our digital data is is you know, digital on its own tends to be a much faster turnaround. And and so that that capability typically we can turnaround audiences especially within Proximic within twenty four hours depending on what you’re wanting to model against. But I but in terms of a cross platform capability and market that has the size, scale, transparency, and credibility that buyers demand, there’s not a product that’s faster than Comscore’s capability.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: And that gives you competitive advantage, I see.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yes. Sure does.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Right. Because if you can adjust in in the middle of a campaign, you you save a lot of money. Yes. To because if you can optimize. Okay.

What do you do you have any play in this you know, generative AI is gonna allow us to do content creation. So one of the issues I have with programmatic writ large is we’re doing a lot of work on targeting an ad to the best target market, and we keep the creative the same, which seems like a really lost opportunity. To the extent we’re spending a fortune in the programmatic world finding audiences, it feels like those audiences might be best served by the girls in pink. The girls 21, not 47 or vice versa. You know, it feels like there should be content iterations that generative AI opens up.

Do you have any play in that? Do you benefit from that kind of trend at all?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Well, I think one of the one of the other differentiators that Comscore has versus, let’s say, some of the other measurement players that we bump up against is that we’re cross we do cross platform ad measurement and content measurement. So if you think about it, you’re you’re a content producer, whether you decide you wanna put something on your local o and o’s, you wanna put it in a prime time lineup, you wanna put it on your d to c channel, or you wanna license it all together, clients will leverage Comscore’s cross platform content capability to help them determine how they monetize their content across their platform or outside their platforms. And so, you know, as they’re making investments in AI and creative around what’s showing up on their platforms, our audience capability in terms of a measurement function plays a critical role in that. And we see the content measurement arm of this as being as big a differentiator in market as as our proximate audience segments are. But we don’t we don’t play directly in the creative.

There are some of our competitors that are more upper funnel. They get involved in some of the creative measurement. We we we generally do not get involved in that.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: What’s interesting is that just thinking about DoubleVerify, DoubleVerify used to have they started when they came public. It’s only a post solution. You’d run your campaign, and then they were a currency after the fact and said, look, a million of these impressions were not viewable. You know, it was a bot, not a human that viewed it. Or they were out of out of the demo target.

Like, you delivered a 49 year old and this and then you don’t have to pay. But then they smartly introduced a pre product that’s bundled. Like, you can’t buy the pre product without the post. So it feels to me like this thing about content. What would be smart on measuring content is to have a pre where you basically, it’s like an AB test where you’re doing pre before you roll it out.

Where you would do a and then you would only roll out the one that had the better of the a b test. But you would bundle it with the post like you wouldn’t let them just measure that because that’s probably small. It’s probably a hundred thousand people each. But you would bundle it with the post product, but it’d be an upsell. Do you guys ever think about that for content?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah. I mean, in in virtually every case where we’ve got a cross platform capability, it’s more often than not married to, again, one of our traditional products. So you’re not leveraging Comscore’s cross platform capability unless you’ve got a subscription to our, you know

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: It’s an upsell not a

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: stand alone. It’s an add it it it it it’s it’s an add on. So if you want cross platform capabilities, you also need to be laddered on with our linear TV product and our digital product. But

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: those are all after the fact measurements.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Those are all a %.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: And I’m saying, isn’t there a space here to do pre measurement that’s tied to the post that makes, doesn’t waste as much money? The way you guys have it, somebody runs an ad campaign, you measure it. Now they go away and fix it for next time. A pre measurement product lets them do like a little test market before they.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Well, that’s where we’re, that’s generally where we’re working with, whether it be the buying community or in other cases, it could be directly with the publisher ecosystem with their planning capabilities. So oftentimes our data is already integrated into their planning capabilities where they’re looking at prior campaigns that ran or something they want to run up front and how’s that going to perform. And then our product helps them determine where to optimize again. So, you know, I I wanna suppress linear eyeballs and target social or digital display, video display programmatically. They’re using our product to do that, but that’s all based off of some of the pre upfront planning work that we would have done with them ahead of time to integrate that offering.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Questions from the audience? Okay. I’ll keep going. Okay. Great.

Okay. Okay. Bring us up to date on the balance sheet. What’s happening with the balance sheet? Because I haven’t looked lately.

So what’s happening with the balance sheet?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: I think we’ve made quite a bit of progress over the course of the last twelve years on on the balance sheet. Twelve years. Twelve months on the balance sheet. Wow. At the end of the year, we raised $45,000,000 facility, which helped us address an old Bank of America line that we had in place, gave us some extra dry powder to to to to to on investment against our cross platform capabilities and some of the product enhancements that we talked about here today.

So I feel a lot better about our balance sheet now than I did twelve months ago. That said, you know, we still have a capital table that frustrates a lot of my common shareholders that, you know, we spend a lot of time talking about and figuring out how to how to resolve. But, you know, in terms of balance sheet, flexibility to put capital to work in the areas that are going to drive growth for the business, I feel a lot better about that today than I did twelve months ago.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Great. Well, know you needed access to capital and it was frustrating Yeah. The capital.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: I mean, look, the company hadn’t had any any growth capital to speak of since that 2015, ’20 ’16 time So you talk about, you know In the world How far the market has come and you know, on one hand, it’s remarkable what team has been able to achieve just in terms of the product progress that has been made in the absence of any meaningful capital. But now to have a bit more dry powder, I’m more excited about the investment opportunity in front of us.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: And one of the things that the two let’s talk about Comscore first. The Comscore, let’s call it legacy Comscore, had such, I would say, siloed, had such a siloed, and there was so much inefficiency in it. And I don’t know if it was poor work ethic, but have we gotten rid of a lot of those issues in the culture of the historicallegacycom score?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: We’ve we’ve made a lot of change over the course of the last three years. And, you know, we still have some wood to chop, but I’m pleased with the way we’ve reorganized the company to get hyper focused on the areas of the business where we’ve got a very clear right to win. And to me, that is bringing together, going back to that original thesis when Comscore and Rentrak came together, that cross platform omnichannel capability. We’ve totally aligned the organization around that mandate and have been very deliberate about the things that we say yes to and the things that we say no to. And we’re saying no to a lot more things than I think the the company has has done in the past.

So I’m pleased with the progress that we’ve made. Like anything, a company that’s been around twenty five years, you’re sitting on a fair amount of tech debt and that creates resource debt. And there’s still work to do there, but we’ve come a long way. And I think the team is excited about some of the growth prospects that

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: And I remember Rentrak essentially had a monopoly in local. And Nielsen had been uncredited or discredited, whatever it’s called, had lost its accreditation, is maybe how you say it. And I think they recently got it back. But I mean, what’s happening in the local side of the you had two monopolies. One that was a real monopoly, which was your box office measurement, which really a monopoly.

And then you had what I would call a monopoly or a clear what do you call it? A clear right to win in local measurement. Are you guys the currency now in local?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: We are the currency in many instances in local. Our main competitor we’re the only measurement company outside of Nielsen that can produce a local rating and I’d argue that Nielsen’s ability to produce a local rating is is highly suspect. And so I think what what we’ve been able to do because we’ve invested in that part of the business because we believe it’s a big differentiator in not just our ability to command and win in that marketplace, which is, you know, a a $20,000,000,000 marketplace that is not going away. We’re the only other player that can deliver a product there, but it’s also core to what our cross platform capability. If you’re an advertiser, your ability to not not just advertise at a national level, but to be able to optimize down to a hyper local level requires you as a measurement company to have that, not just the linear data set, but the digital data set to help them do that.

And so, you know, we think, you know, our local strength is big differentiator and it’s the Trojan horse for everything that we’re unlocking as it relates our growth strategy going forward, whether it be cross platform, whether it be our ability to work with advertisers across both local and national traditional measurement landscape. And so, yeah, we’ve taken share in local. The clients recognize the investments that we’re continuing to make there. And the good news is is it supports not just those local broadcasters and local ad marketplaces, but it supports the double digit growth that we’re driving in cross platform.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: One of the things that’s been happening is this, I’m gonna call it the underfund, the defunding of news. That affects local broadcasters, affects a lot of things on the open web too. Right? A lot Washington Post or USA today. So my question is, I mean, is there a future for local broadcasters and or for news on the open web that needs measurement if we don’t turn around this ability or the willingness of advertisers to advertise in live in news content?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Well, I think you still you still I mean, like I said, it’s still a very robust marketplace. You look at just last year’s political season, those battles are all won at the local level. The amount of money that got dumped into local markets and local broadcasters specifically was was significant. And so the power of local, think about it like most purchase decisions are generated at the household level. We all live hyper locally.

We live in the restaurants that we go to, the weather we care about, the news that we’re tuning into most often or not. It all comes back to a local local route, if you will. And you see the biggest players in the in the market investing against their local offerings. Amazon just announced a big team that stood up their local capabilities. Look at all the investment that local broadcasters are making in sports and against the demise of regional sports networks.

The local broadcasters are the ones that are making significant investments in those spaces. The advertising dollars are

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Well, to stay on that, it doesn’t actually save an industry to every two years have record levels of political fundraising going to broadcasters if they can’t then sell in the other year and a half between those six month political cycles? So that’s my question. In the eighteen months between political money coming into the area, if there news isn’t getting funded because people don’t wanna be near political. They don’t view a brand safe because it can hurt people purchasing their brand. And a lot of it’s war, which so they don’t like news.

So the question is, can can, you know, can the open Internet survive not funding news? And, actually, can linear broadcast survive if eighteen months if people aren’t gonna fund news?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Well, I think that’s why you you see many of them again continue to invest against their sports their sports rights in their local communities.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Just diversifying their content offerings. Yeah. You’re saying. So news might not get funded, but if they spend a bunch of money on a new form of content, that might be able to get funded is what you’re

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: You’re commanding audiences that still do tune in to the lineup of programming that you have across your offering. So we’re certainly focused group of one here, but I don’t see a future in which local the way it transacts, the way it’s the way sales teams maybe make their inventory available may change, but audiences are hyper local and I don’t I don’t see that changing in certainly in the next five years, five, ten years.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Which makes your currency your best in class local currency for investors. Okay. I’ll be interested to see somebody on my stage this day, and I haven’t seen any content guys, was saying that they’re gonna do more with RMNs. Oh, they were saying that the RMNs, which are going bankrupt, are now the leagues are creating fast channels.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Mhmm.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: And they’re putting the fast channels programmatically on platforms to generate to generate ad revenue directly to the fast channel that represents not the big, not like the NFL, NBA, but like the sports you don’t you and I don’t think of, cricket

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Yeah. Sailing and biking and stuff like that. Which I thought was sort of a smart idea.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah. Agreed.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Okay. So let’s talk about your recent data partnerships with the MVPDs, the OEMs, and the platforms, how it affects your measurement capabilities and your competitive moat.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Look. We’ve got when we think about our data partnerships specifically in terms of what it supports for our business, we think about it in a couple of different ways. There’s the there’s the data that we collect from our MVPD relationships that support, you know, largely, you know, that that pay TV bundle, traditional broadcast, linear television viewing and we’ve got partnerships with all the major players in that space. And we see we sure anybody can buy that raw material if you will, other measurement companies do. It’s one thing to be able to turn that data into a product that can be used as a currency in the marketplace to transact billions of dollars of advertising.

And I think that’s where we’ve differentiated ourselves in terms of that capability. We get over a 45 patents that support the work that we do around all that data that we bring in on the linear TV side. So that’s one piece of it. And then we’ve got partnerships with whether it be direct integrations with d to c platforms to ingest their data to then complement the linear TV data. So we capture the streaming behavior that way.

ACR technology is another investment that we have made to capture streaming viewing. And then we invest, you know, in any given year, you know, call it $15,000,000 or so against the panel asset that gives us real first party intelligence in terms of what consumers are doing on a fully consented, opted in basis that we then calibrate our big datasets against. That gives, you know, gives us the ability to have a a true set, if you will, against our big data offerings that we we bring to market. And then, of course, we’ve got the Comscore digital footprint, which is, you know, in in some cases, the combination of third party data plus first party data across 10,000 publishers globally that make up our our digital footprint. And so those partnerships are what make up the the anchor tenants, if you will, of our, you know, our cross platform and overall measurement capabilities.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Okay. Alrighty. So so you have all these you have big competitive advantage. Has the price so one of the things you guys have always bought is you always had this sort of anchor tendency in all the big OEMs, Comcast, Charter.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Sure.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Is their price going down? Is the number of data points they give you, or do they want a price increase even though the number of linear TV subscribers is falling?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Well, we’ve we I mean, we’ve most of those contracts have been in place for many years. Charter’s investor in Comscore. And so we’ve had in a lot of ways a unique data partnership relationship with them. Part of the deal that we did at the end of the year was we renegotiated that element of the contract. It was our most expensive data partnership, and, you know, that renegotiation will result in at least at least $35,000,000 of cash and operating expense savings over the remainder of that deal, which goes till 2031.

And so as these deals have come up or where there’s opportunity to to engage in conversations, we’ve taken the liberty to to try and right size those as their business models have changed to to benefit not just, you know, their their business models are changing too. They’re getting they’re getting data from you you look at some of the deals that they’re doing with, you know, with content providers. They’re getting different data today than they were previously. And so we’re we’re trying to be, you know, take take a a very strategic approach when those things come up to try and reduce our cost in in reliance.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: I would guess you don’t need as many of them to the extent, like, you probably used to have everybody. Now you could probably get away with half of the market because you only have to compete against the other guy who has a panel of 40,000 people.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah. It depend it depends. Right? Because there’s not a lot of overlap. Right?

Charter and Comcast are in completely different markets.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: You must know by now how to turn one into the other.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Well, that’s the beauty of that’s the beauty of, you know, having a a nationally represented panel as well that we continue to invest in that also allows us long term to take more control over our data costs as things change.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: That makes sense to me. But even with ten years of data, knowing how Comscore can change I’m sorry, how Charter versus Comcast lives. If you got rid of, let’s say, Charter you have to keep because they own part of you. But I mean, it seems like you could get rid of Comcast if they were being ridiculous on the price of their data, and just model that based on historical behavior, because households don’t change that radically.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: But their viewing behaviors do, right? If you just look at how rapidly things have changed, and so we feel like we’ve got

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: compared to the charter people?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: We’ve got a we’ve got a again, there are there are data is this is another thing that gets lost, but from a data governance standpoint as well, many of these agreements do require us and other partners they work with to have multiple parties so that they’re they’re not the the only source of viewing in a particular marketplace. And so that comes into consideration as well as we look at our measurement capability and but again, that company, you we’re so diverse that I feel like we’re uniquely positioned versus some of the other players that are out there that don’t have the history that we have to know this and.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: It’s about cost and negotiating leverage. Like, even if they need they don’t wanna be the only guy in Mississippi. You don’t wanna have to pay for Comcast data as your second source to keep these them not being the only one because they’re Comcast isn’t a professional negotiator as

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: course. Yeah.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: So you’d rather be able to say Comcast, we’re willing to walk away and we’ll find EyeSpot or Samba in this market to be our second. Right?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Yeah. Good luck getting accurate measurement.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Good luck. Well, still. But it but again, that’s my point. If you have ten years of how Comcast viewers compare to charter viewers, you still have

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: the charter not disputing the point. Like cost is a big factor and data costs have been, they’re a large portion of our P and L. And I think what we continue to do is figure out ways in which we can take more control over our future as those deals come up for renegotiation. And so investment in

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: our Five year deals or longer?

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Some of them now are are we’ve got an annual opt out on some of our data agreements now, but most of them we try and lock in because we’re building products. Right? And so we need to be thoughtful about that investment against the right time horizon.

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: Yeah. Yeah. No. That makes sense. And usually, can get cheaper prices if you Correct.

Do it longer. So but you can lock it in. Questions from the audience? Okay. So I’ll call it there then.

John Carpenter, CEO, Comscore: Alright. Thank you

Laura Martin, Senior Media and Internet Analyst, Needham and Company: very much. Thanks. Bye.

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