Yahoo Launches ComScore vCE Integration To Lure Brand Advertisers

Today, Yahoo announced the integration with comScore’s audience verification service, Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE), is now live on its ad buying and reporting platforms in the US. The two companies first announced the partnership at the Digital NewFronts in April.

The comScore solution gives media buyers access to TV-comparable metrics such as audience demographics, reach, frequency and GRPs for digital campaigns. Yahoo says it’s the first publisher to offer vCE across its platforms.

“Integrating comScore vCE® with Yahoo ad platforms provides advertisers with one place to buy, measure, and analyze campaigns against all available data,” said Eric Lange,  VP of Product, Yahoo. “That’s something advertisers can’t get anywhere else today.”

For now, programmatic and direct buys for both display and video will include vCE. Yahoo says it will work with comScore to add delivery and verification for mobile campaigns and expand the integration globally over the next several months.

As brands increasingly look to digital to reach mass audiences, they’re looking for trustworthy metrics that provide the same types of audience reach and deliverability verification that TV has long offered. Nielsen and comScore have been tapped by digital ad sellers such as Facebook, Twitter and Google to provide audience metrics and enable them to offer audience guarantees to brand advertisers. In February, Google announced its own comScore vCE integration into DoubleClick, the company’s ad serving platform.

On Yahoo’s latest earnings call, CEO Marissa Mayer, said that the company’s PC display ad business would turn around in the next couple of quarters, and that weaker performance was due to internal issues rather than market problems (namely lack of demand).

Yahoo is betting that tools like comScore’s vCE will help make the platform more attractive to major brands, particularly on its shiny new digital magazines in verticals such as Tech, Food and Beauty, which debuted with L’Oreal USA as the launch sponsor.