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Warner Bros. Discovery is bringing on new partners in its push for multiple currencies.
Top line
Today, the company announced that it’s partnering with Comscore and VideoAmp to enable alternative currencies for national advertisers transacting across its linear inventory and data-driven advanced advertising solutions ahead of the 2023-2024 upfront season.
Between the lines
The company started evaluating currency partners in 2021, according to Andrea Zapata, evp, head of ad sales research, measurement and insights at Warner Bros. Discovery, and these latest partnerships look to provide marketers with options to ensure the impact of investments are fully captured as the company looks to operationalize against multiple currencies at scale.
“With the rigorous evaluation, the beginning of competence, methodology but also understanding the product roadmap that in particular Comscore and VideoAmp had for transaction capabilities, it gave us real confidence that we could make the announcement that they would indeed be part of our optionality when it comes to transactions in the next upfront,” Zapata told Adweek.
Zapata explained that the strategy will allow the market to dictate how it transacts, whether that’s on Nielsen, which is introducing Nielsen One; Comscore, which Warner Bros. Discovery has already been utilizing across its advanced advertising business; or VideoAmp, which the company said will be ready for optionality for the upfront.
Though companies had been looking for more accurate measurement for years—understanding that panel-based solutions weren’t capturing viewership across screens on how audiences were actually consuming—Zapata explained that the optionality didn’t truly exist until now.
“We’ve got a lot of confidence. We are constantly innovating with our partners and with new technology, bigger datasets, more accurate reads, and ultimately, we have a lot of conviction around how we can have better ways to measure, better ways in which to garner value of the investments that advertisers, clients and the holding companies are putting across our inventory in order to reach our audiences and their customer bases,” Zapata said.
In separate statements, both Jon Carpenter, CEO at Comscore, and Michael Parkes, president of VideoAmp, praised the partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery.
Carpenter noted that Comscore was excited “to power marketplace demand for greater transparency, consistency and interoperability,” and Parkes added that VideoAmp was “committed to providing advertisers with greater visibility into the true value of both the breadth and depth of the Warner Bros. Discovery portfolio.”