Comscore and WideOrbit expand linear TV and radio partnership

Digital and linear media measurement company Comscore is expanding its partnership with media buying and selling platform WideOrbit in order to introduce new media sales and measurement capabilities for traditional, or “linear,” TV and radio outlets.

Why are they doing this? The aim is to automate buying and selling by offering a way to purchase and measure ad buys on broadcast TV and radio. The partnership covers 1,700 local TV stations across 210 markets. With the agreement, over 65 agencies, brands and DSPs will have access to the inventory, which can be bought through WideOrbit’s SSP, WO Marketplace.

WO Marketplace is powered by Comscore TV data from more than 50 million homes

Why we care. Brands have been able to access linear inventory programmatically in the past, but the coverage has been patchy as the linear TV industry continues to transform. Marketers can only guess what the difference is in reaching audiences through, for instance, the streaming app or web version of a local news broadcast, versus advertising on linear TV screens.

Marketers need the ability to measure cross-screen impact, and they need impressions-level data on all screens, including linear. Comscore has asserted this role in the transformation of measurement by introducing the cross-platform Comscore Everywhere solution earlier this year.

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About The Author

Chris Wood

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country's first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on "innovation theater" at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.