If you are trying to be the media measurement provider of choice, in age of outcomes, leveraging the point of sale can move the needle.

As more media buyers look to attribute ad exposure to customer purchase, more players in the space are looking toward purchase data.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Carol Hinnant, Chief Revenue Officer, Comscore, says her company is working with partners including Affinity Solutions to do that.

Banking on measurement

They have unique data that comes from credit and debit card,” Hinnant says. “That intelligence that they provide is highly valuable to the market.”

Affinity receives data from over 3,000 banks daily, over 7 billion credit and debit card transactions annually. It makes that data available to firms like Deloitte, Accenture, BCG and McKinsey in order to develop purchase insights and to retailers and others who want to understand consumer behavior outside of their own data footprint.

Affinity Solutions CEO: How Purchase Data Can Fuel The Media Ecosystem

Hinnant says Affinity is one of the many third-party providers with which Comscore integrates in order to bolster its measurement offering. But Comscore also builds upon it.

She says: “You have to really work with the measurement providers to make sure that the identity spine that you connect that to is usable across all the platforms…

“We want to make sure that that identity of the Affinity targets, or any other third party data set that we work with can scale from television to digital across platform.”

The evolution of measurement

Media measurement – in which each channel had typically relied upon a chosen measurement vendor for many years – has been shaken-up by the complexity of the multi-platform era, and by reliability concerns faced by big names in the space.

When it comes to TV, we are seeing the rise of smaller, alternative measurement vendors and currencies, as networks look to piece together enhanced cross-screen measurement for ad buyers.

Hinnant says the marketplace has finally caught up to Comscore. She says that Comscore launched its television product, Rentrak, in 2010, being the first measurement service to offer an advanced audience.

New Currencies Are Old News: Comscore’s Carol Hinnant

This meant marrying the Polk Automotive data set and political targets to television measurement, providing an alternative to age and gender currencies.

Fast forward to 2023, and she says there are now four new currencies in the marketplace, including Nielsen One.

Despite the competition, Hinnant is excited, saying Comscore’s work has been “vetted and anointed”, and the company is looking forward to the next decade of measurement.