• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 8, 2025

In the battle for advertising currency supremacy, Comscore moved up a notch, receiving a new accreditation from the Media Rating Council (MRC) for its national and local TV measurement service covering households with demographic data, the first step toward becoming accredited for persons-level viewing data.

The move effectively moves Comscore closer to Nielsen as a standard for national TV audience measurement, but actually makes Comscore the new gold standard for local TV audience measurement.

That's because Nielsen's local TV audience measurement service lost MRC accreditation in September 2021, though it remains under review.

While MRC accreditation does not officially make an advertising and/or media measurement provider a de facto currency, it is considered a crucial stamp of approval by advertisers and media buyers, theoretically giving them greater confidence to do business on the basis of accredited audience estimates.

The move also is another in a series of developments moving Comscore into a greater position of overall market currency, including a recent announcement by the Association of National Advertisers' cross-media measurement service, Aquila, naming Comscore it's source for TV audience measurement, as well as last year's MRC accreditation for Comscore's national and local TV household ratings.

Back then, Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao issued a surprising congratulatory note to Comcscore upon receiving MRC accreditation, and both Nielsen and Comscore have been profusely supportive of the MRC's costly and time-intensive accreditation process as the ad industry's gold standard, amid efforts by others -- most notably the networks-based U.S. JIC (joint industry committee) move to begin "certifying" new alternative currencies in the TV and video advertising marketplace -- creating new marketplace confusion over what actually constitutes a currency.

This morning, during its CIMM East conference in New York City, the Advertising Research Foundation's Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, will unveil details of a new initiative to conduct an analysis of the economic impact of new, alternative currencies like iSpot, TVision, etc., as well as established ones like Nielsen and Comcscore, with an eye toward understanding what the marketplace will ultimately tolerate. The expectation is that the study will reaffirm the long-standing view that the U.S. advertising marketplace can support two -- not more -- marketplace currencies, as was the case in the earlier days of local TV measurement in which Nielsen and Arbitron battled it out, etc.

On the eve of this morning's MRC accreditation analysis, Comscore Chief Data & Analytics Officer Frank Friedman said the new households with demos accreditation is an important milestone for Comscore's position as a market currency, but he implied it's more of a stepping stone toward ultimately gaining accreditation for persons-level viewing, which is what advertisers actually want.

In the households with demo data, Comscore is ascribing the demographic composition of its accredited household ratings, as opposed to measuring what individuals in those households actually are watching.

Nonetheless, Friedman said its an important milestone as Comscore continues to move forward, and begins the equally arduous process of getting its data more seamlessly integrated into the planning and buying systems of individual agencies, a well as major data processors such as Mediaocean.

"This accreditation is for households with demo," he noted, adding, "We needed to get that first before we come back for the real hot sauce, which is persons-level data."