• by Melynda Fuller , September 20, 2018

The Magazine Media 360° Brand Audience Report reveled some impressive numbers across video and mobile for July 2018. Video showed an increase of 56.7%, while mobile was up by 22.5% from a year ago.

The report notes that the video audience metrics are revamped, being culled from comScore’s Video Metrix Multi-Platform, which measures net audience viewed on desktop and/or mobile devices.

Included in the top 10 magazine sites for mobile are People, ESPN the Magazine, New York and Cosmopolitan, while among the top 10 magazine sites for video are ESPN the Magazine, GQ, People and Time.

In previous reports, only desktop video was included. But growth was better measured as unduplicated views across desktop, smartphone and tablet audiences.

The numbers also showed how quickly media is shifting.

As video and mobile audiences increase, so does advertising spending, making precise calculations of audience numbers all the more important to a company’s survival in today’s market place.

In an interview with MarTechSeries, comScore’s Chief Product Officer Dan Hess offered some insight into where he thinks video and mobile are headed.

Hess stated: “Marketers are getting smarter than ever about the role mobile plays for their specific brands and are designing experiences around that. We’ll see this manifest in higher quality, more interactive mobile content and ads – especially using video.”

He believes that the transition between platforms will become smoother and targeting will become more precise and that tighter controls over consumer data will emerge across the U.S. in the wake of GDPR.

Hess also sees a greater impact for Artificial Intelligence.

“There’s no way humans alone can find all the meaningful signals within this noise. But AI can do it and can also figure out what to do with what it found,” he stated. He added the use of AI frees up resources to pursue other projects.

Video, conversely, in Hess’s view “continues to fragment across mobile, desktop, linear TV and OTT.” This fragmentation makes it difficult for buyers and sellers to know how to reach their target audience, particularly when it could be spread across platforms.

comScore, however, is attempting to tackle this issue with a Campaign Ratings solution, now in beta.

The new solution is expected to deliver unduplicated measurements to buyers and sellers, making the video marketplace a bit more transparent and its audiences easier to target.

The full interview is available at MarTechSeries.