'Potential Reach' Is More Than Potentially Misleading

Tod Sacerdoti for MediaPost

I was recently on a panel discussing online video advertising, and a fellow panelist proclaimed "reach is not a problem for us, as we reach 115 million people according to comScore."  This statement is factually incorrect. 

To accurately reflect his company's reach, the panelist should have said, "We can potentially reach 115 million people." According to comScore's methodology, in order reach those 115 million people, the network would have to buy every ad impression on every publisher they work with. Furthermore, only those publishers with more than 2% reach are verified to have an actual business relationship with the network.

As with most misleading metrics, potential reach was likely created to help sell something. comScore wanted to sell large annual subscriptions to video ad networks and video ad networks wanted a big reach number to sell advertising and compete effectively against the large display ad networks. The metric has fundamentally served its purpose - all video networks are paying customers.

Nearly every video publisher, network, blogger and journalist I talk to believes this metric is misleading. But, even more than the confusion it causes, I believe the potential reach metric is hurting all players.

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