comScore Readying 'Total Home Panel,' Will Measure Up To A Dozen Devices Per Home

 

• by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, 10 hours ago

On the heels of its acquisition of Rentrak, comScore is preparing a “roadmap” on a suite of new products and services leveraging its combined assets. The new product deployment, which leverages Rentrak’s panel of 40 million digital set-top devices with comScore’s census-level sample of digital media tags, will “surprise the industry,” says comScore CEO Serge Matta.

 

While the company’s assets traverse universes of media, Matta says the focus of media consumption will be based on households. Leveraging what he calls the “Total Home Panel,” Matta says the new comScore will be capable of capturing any activity that happens as “IP traffic within the home: tablets, smartphones, Xbox, over-the-top.

 

“The only exception to it,” he says, “is linear TV,” which is where the integration with Rentrak’s digital set-top data comes in.

 

By integrating linear TV viewing behavior with all other IP device-related behaviors in the home, Matta says comScore will rapidly introduce new products that provide a holistic view of household-based media consumption.

 

The products will “definitely” start rolling out in 2016, he says, and will be capable of attributing media consumption to individuals within the household vis a vis personal device IDs.

The unifying principle behind comScore’s Total Household Measurement strategy, Matta says, is the home’s Internet router, which is the hub for connected and wireless connections to the Internet, even landline phone services that now use IP.

 

According to comScore’s estimates, the average household has between 10 and 12 individual devices connected through the household router.

 

As much as 30% of those devices will be not be eligible for inclusion in those household measurements, because Matta says they are attributable to people outside the household -- generally guests who logged into the home’s WiFi network while visiting.

 

Matta says comScore is working on ways to filter out the “noise” in those device signals and will eventually bring products to advertisers and agencies that enable them to calculate “incremental reach and frequency” among members of a household across the devices they use in the household.

“Cross-platform ad effectiveness is very important to them,” he says.