Comscore and SeeHer expand gender equality measurement to digital platforms

Audience measurement company Comscore has expanded on its partnership with the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) SeeHer initiative in the US by extending its gender equality-focused measurement capability to digital platforms.

The new measurement tool allows marketers to understand the importance of gender equality among targeted audiences directly within Comscore’s digital planning suite.

Digital media planners can contextualize their ads with scoring attributes from SeeHer’s Gender Equality Measure (GEM), a metric created in 2016 to track authentic representation of gender equality in traditional media and entertainment.

According to a press release, the partnership will give digital marketers the ability to “understand, beyond demographics, how to reach and engage consumers with a gender equality mindset.”

Comscore’s expansion of the partnership with SeeHer, which works to increase accurate depictions of women and girls in advertising, builds on Comscore’s “belief that every dollar, every screen, every person counts,” said Danan Ren, senior vice president and head of client insights at Comscore. “It’s part of our greater effort to support responsible and representative media by leveraging our huge data set.”

The data brings a new depth of meaning to Comscore’s Plan Metrics Suite, added Ren.

“We need to go beyond just looking at demographics and generalizations to understand the psychographic components of the audience.”

This information, allows marketers to be “more intentional about messaging around gender equality around women,” said Latha Sarathy, chief research officer at the ANA. 

With the capability to understand a target audience’s support for gender equality already embedded into a highly used tool, Sarathy hopes that more marketers will make the effort to better understand audience attitudes around the issue, moving past demographics and stereotypes.

“[Stereotypes] can be used as a sort of crutch sometimes,” she added. “Those stereotypes don't really show thinking about the full dimensionality of women’s lives.”

Stereotypes are also not great for sales: data provided by SeeHer and Comscore noted that ads scoring high on the GEM scale increased sales by five times, and high-scoring programming doubled sales.

Not only do gender balanced ads prove beneficial for audiences of women and girls, but men as well. In fact, with regard to high GEM scoring ads, the biggest increases in sales were among men, particularly Hispanic and Black men, per Comscore and SeeHer data.

“It's important for men to see women as they want to be seen,” noted Sarathy.