• by Joe Mandese , March 26, 2025

Aquila, the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) cross-media measurement venture, has signed Comscore to be the service’s TV data provider. The move is another feather in Comscore’s cap toward U.S. TV measurement currency dominance vs. Nielsen and a litany of other “alternative” currency suppliers.

“I’m super excited to work with our friends at Comscore,” Aquila President and COO Tina Daniels said this morning after announcing the deal during the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) Audience x Science conference in New York City.

The deal follows previous contracts Aquila made with other research providers and management consultants leading up to what Daniels said will be a live market trial of the service in the third quarter of this year.

“Let me give you a high-level sense of how this works,” she told the ARF attendees, adding: “First, we take census-level impression data from our digital partners and we combine that with projected television data from our partner Comscore.

Daniels noted that data then gets “mapped over a virtual ID spine” representing the entire U.S. population, which another research supplier -- Kantar Media -- applies to “train their virtual ID model” enabling advertisers who subscribe to Aquila to create a “deduplication analysis” and produce deduplicated reach and frequency reports.

Daniels went on to note that Aquila believes one of the most powerful applications of the system will be informing the marketing-mix models marketers use to determine the ROI of -- and adjust -- their media plans.

Daniels said Aquila’s “target” is for Kantar Media to build a panel of 5,000 households representing about 8,000 individuals, and she said it already has been installed in “almost 2,000 homes.”

In terms of timing, Daniels said Aquila will begin its virtual ID training model next month, “and we hope to be in marketer trials early Q3."

“We will be using real data and we expect that we will learn a lot from these marketer trials.”

She said interest is high among the marketers Aquila has been meeting with and cited a recent conversation with an undisclosed marketer that has a campaign “trying to reach 15 million consumers in the U.S. who regularly order breakfast from a quick-service restaurant.

“It’s very complicated for them, because their campaign is across all channels, including television, and they don’t know if they’re reaching 5 million of these consumers three times, or 3 million five times, or 1 million 15 times.”

Daniels said Aquila currently is actively marketing its product directly to marketers -- both the big Aquila board level ones as well as smaller ones -- and that Aquila is trying to be transparent about its cost model, noting, “We are intending to run this as a very low-cost model, so it is not a big investment for marketers to participate in.”

Following her announcement, Daniels conducted an interview with Unilever Head of U.S. Consumer Data Strategy Adam Frazier, who asked her why the ANA, which owns Aquila, is a non-profit but Aquila is for profit?

“What’s the deal?” he asked.

“Good question, get that a lot,” Daniels responded, adding: “The real deal is sort of a boring, legal tax reason, because we’re obviously creating a platform that is entering the commercial space and we got very strong counsel from our lawyers that it had to be set up as an LLC.

“A lot of revenue will run through this platform. Our intent though, is to run it as a break-even for profit company. We want the fees that marketers pay to be as low as possible. We really see this right now as an ‘and’ tool to the toolkit. We’re not out to disrupt other measurement companies.

Daniels said the rest of 2025 would be about deploying, testing, learning and adjusting, and that Aquila will be ready for general release in 2026.