New, Unified Audience Measurement Capabilities to Provide Publishers a Deeper Understanding of Audience Reach and Advertisers the Intelligence Needed for More Effective Media Planning
New York, Advertising Week, Sep. 21, 2009 – Omniture, Inc. (NASDAQ: OMTR), a leading provider of online business optimization software, and Comscore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced a strategic partner relationship to deliver a unified digital audience measurement system. Specifically designed to meet the unique demands of the digital advertising world, the offering will combine the power of Omniture’s Web analytics with Comscore’s new MMX 360 hybrid audience measurement to help provide publishers and advertisers with a unified and comprehensive view of online audiences.
Two of the keys to implementing a successful digital marketing initiative are the ability to measure and analyze online marketing performance and to capture accurate views of audience reach across multiple information sources. To date, publishers and advertisers use two primary sources for measuring the impact of digital advertising – Web analytics and panel-based audience measurement. Because the two measurement methodologies have disparate objectives and employ different data collection technologies, the resulting dissimilar metrics can cause confusion and uncertainty among publishers and advertisers. This strategic partner relationship blends these two methodologies in a highly automated way to create a unified approach for audience measurement designed to enable publishers to represent themselves in a more comprehensive manner to advertisers, and for advertisers to better optimize their media planning with the benefit of more extensive media reach data.
This relationship between Omniture and Comscore will enable organizations to unify their online and panel-based audience measurement information, providing more consistent and more comprehensive standard metrics. With the combined offering, publishers and advertisers will be able to automate data integration and reconciliation, eliminate the need for publishers to implement time consuming multiple data collection methods and reduce the labor-intensive steps needed to deliver unified audience measurement.
“We are excited to join forces with Omniture, a leader in quality and innovation in the Web analytics industry, to bring this solution to the marketplace,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, Comscore President & CEO. “As leading providers of Internet audience measurement and Web analytics, Comscore and Omniture are working to provide the marketplace a much-needed solution for consistent Web-wide measurement. This relationship will deliver to our customers the solution that they have been seeking, thus helping to promote and accelerate the usage of digital marketing intelligence for delivering actionable business results and competitive advantage. We believe it will also help the industry overcome concerns of inconsistent measurement of digital audiences and promote further adoption of digital media advertising.”
“Since the rise of digital advertising, advertisers and publishers alike have sought ways to reconcile their Web analytics and panel-based measurement data to establish a unified measure of online audiences,” said Josh James, Omniture CEO and co-founder. “With this relationship, Omniture and Comscore will enable publishers who have rich, highly targeted audience segments to reliably demonstrate their value to advertisers and also help advertisers find these attractive consumer segments. The combined offering will provide advertisers and publishers with a common currency to measure the value of online audiences across an ever-increasing number of digital channels.”
Tangible Customer BenefitsToday and in the Future
The strategic partner relationship is intended to allow joint Omniture and Comscore customers to use Omniture tags to collect and share information with MMX 360 using Omniture Genesis integration technology, quickly bypassing the normal implementation process for MMX 360.
The relationship also opens up the possibility of joint product initiatives that will leverage the granularity of the Omniture site-specific data with the Web-wide view of Internet user behavior provided by Comscore.
Availability
Comscore and Omniture customers interested in the new service should contact their respective account managers.
Industry Support
“The partnership between Omniture and Comscore represents a significant step forward for the digital media measurement community,” said David McBride, director of Business Intelligence at Comcast Interactive Media. “To have these two leaders forge an alliance and provide the industry with an integrated solution for server and audience measurement will help us better understand and improve upon our digital performance.”
“Despite digital being the most measurable medium, it has unique dynamics that make measurement significantly more challenging than simply counting clicks,” said Larry Gelfand, senior vice president, digital sales and business development, National Hockey League. “Both census-level web analytics and person-based audience measurement services are essential to evaluating digital media performance, and to finally see these two measurement technologies brought into alignment is an extraordinarily positive step for those invested in the digital medium.”
“Publishers have always relied on both site analytics and audience measurement data for understanding the performance of our web properties,” said Tomer Strolight, president, Torstar Digital. “Even though the two measurement platforms are used for different purposes, the disparities between the two have been somewhat disconcerting. This effort to harmonize the two data sets and understand the source of the disparities will give everyone in the industry a better understanding of their data and give us more confidence in the decisions we make based on these metrics.”
“The partnership between Comscore and Omniture has the potential to move the measurement of online media several steps forward,” said Scott McDonald, SVP Research, Conde Nast Publications. “For more than a decade, we have fretted about – and sometimes quarreled about -- the discrepancies between the audience estimates derived from third-party panels like Comscore’s and those derived from web site analytics systems like Omniture’s. This collaboration represents the most significant effort to date to harmonize the two approaches and give the industry, at last, a common and convergent set of numbers.”
“It is terrific to see these two industry giants collaborate on a solution to this longstanding problem of reconciling panel and server data,” said Patrick Lauzon, executive vice president, SUN Media (Quebecor Media Co.). “This is yet another example of Comscore and Omniture being leaders in the field and providing the mission critical solutions the industry has been calling for.”
“The digital industry has grappled with the differences between panel and server information for many years,” said Graham Mosey, SVP and General Manager, CanWest Digital. “We were one of the first Comscore clients to support the MMX 360 project because we saw the obvious benefits. The Comscore-Omniture partnership eliminates the implementation burden and will expedite the expansion of this new form of measurement. Having as many publishers as possible involved can only be good for the industry. This is a groundbreaking development which is extremely exciting.”
About Omniture
Omniture, Inc. is a leading provider of online business optimization software, enabling customers to manage and enhance online, offline and multi-channel business initiatives. Omniture's software, which it hosts and delivers to its customers as an on-demand subscription service and on-premise solution, enables customers to capture, store and analyze information generated by their Web sites and other sources and to gain critical business insights into the performance and efficiency of marketing and sales initiatives and other business processes. In addition, Omniture offers a range of professional services that complement its online services, including implementation, best practices, consulting, customer support and user training through Omniture Education. Omniture's over 5,000 customers include eBay, AOL, Wal-Mart, Gannett, Microsoft, Neiman Marcus, Oracle, Sony and HP. www.omniture.com
About Comscore
Comscore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital marketing intelligence. In an independent survey of 800 of the most influential publishers, advertising agencies and advertisers conducted by William Blair & Company in January 2009, Comscore was rated the 'most preferred online audience measurement service' by 50% of respondents, a full 25 points ahead of its nearest competitor. Comscore's capabilities are based on a massive, global cross-section of approximately 2 million Internet users who have given Comscore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing. Comscore panelists also participate in survey research that gathers and integrates their attitudes and intentions. Using its proprietary technology, Comscore measures what matters across a broad spectrum of digital behavior and attitudes, helping clients design more powerful marketing strategies that deliver superior ROI. With its recent acquisition of M:Metrics, Comscore is also a leading source of data on mobile usage. Comscore services are used by more than 1,100 clients, including global leaders such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, BBC, Carat, Cyworld, Deutsche Bank, France Telecom, Best Buy, The Newspaper Association of America, Financial Times, ESPN, Fox Sports, Nestle, Starcom, Universal McCann, the United States Postal Service, the University of Chicago, Verizon Services Group and ViaMichelin.
Copyright (c) 2009 Omniture, Inc. All rights reserved. Omniture and SiteCatalyst are registered trademarks of Omniture, Inc. in the United States, Japan, Canada and the European Community. Omniture, Inc. owns other registered and unregistered trademarks throughout the world. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Omniture Note on Forward-looking statements
Omniture management believes that certain statements in this release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the abilities and expected benefits of Omniture’s services to customers and the impact and benefits of the strategic partner relationship, financial or otherwise, to Omniture from the relationship. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions regarding future events and business performance and involve certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including but not limited to, risks described in Omniture's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2009, and from time to time in other reports filed by Omniture with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. These reports are available on the Investor Relations section of our web site at http://www.omtr.com. Omniture undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statement to conform the statement to actual results or changes in the company's expectations.
Comscore Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including, but not limited to, expectations regarding the impact and benefits to Comscore of the strategic partner relationship, financial or otherwise. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially, including, but not limited to: the impact of changes in methodology of Comscore’s respective data; the risk and potential dependence of Comscore key partners; the rate of development of the digital marketing intelligence, Internet advertising and eCommerce markets; continued growth of the Internet as a medium for commerce, content, advertising and communications; the risk that the parties will be unable to integrate their data platforms to provide a product for customers; and the acceptance of new products and methodologies by the industry, including existing and prospective clients.
For a detailed discussion of these and other risk factors, please refer to Comscore’s most recent respective Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Annual Reports on Form 10-K and from time to time other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”), which are available on the SEC’s Web site (http://www.sec.gov).
Stockholders of Comscore are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date such statements are made. Comscore does not undertake any obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements to reflect events, circumstances or new information after the date of this press release, or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.
PressBill DaddiDaddi Brand Communications646-370-1341press@comscore.com