What’s Up At Comscore? It’s Stock Price

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Until one week ago, many wondered what the future of Comscore would look like.


Today, it appears a lot of the severe trauma that has enveloped the audience measurement company and its stock may be in its past.

Comscore shares soared 23% on Wednesday morning — a residual effect from the installation of a new CEO and, perhaps, a positive shout-out from the nation’s No. 1 owner of broadcast TV stations during that company’s Q3 earnings call.

As RBR+TVBR first reported Nov. 6, Bill Livek, a Comscore executive who has been Exec. Vice Chairman and President since exiting the Vice Chairman/CEO role at Rentrak in early 2016, was appointed by Comscore’s board of directors to take the role of EVP/CEO.

He succeeds director and interim CEO Dale Fuller, who was thrust into the role following the very-public exit on March 31 of CEO Bryan Wiener and President Sarah Hofstetter.

With experience at Portland, Ore.-based Rentrak, a global media measurement and research company serving the entertainment industry, along with his Comscore tenure, Wall Street appears excited about Comscore’s future.

It should: In its past are not only Wiener and Hofstetter, but also Serge Matta.

He took over as Chief Executive in February 2014, as Dr. Magid Abraham, Comscore’s co-founder and then-CEO, became Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors. Matta had been with Comscore since shortly after its inception in 1999. From June 2013, he had served as President of Comscore. With Matta misleading Comscore accountants, he signed off on overvalued deals where it provided data sets to other companies, MarketWatch reports.

Another problem: Comscore’s customer rolls were declining, but to avoid sharing this the company, admittedly, changed its definition of what a customer was without telling its investors. Furthermore, the SEC said Comscore misled investors on the sales of one of its core products, one that measures ad campaigns. It said sales increased; they decreased.

This led to the Sept. 27 announcement by Comscore that it will pay a $5 million civil penalty for fraudulently inflating its revenue by $50 million between February 2014 and February 2016.

A separate SEC proceeding against Matta saw his own settlement with the SEC, in which he has agreed to pay a clawback to Comscore of $2.1 million.

Free of its past misdeeds, Comscore is in full rebound mode. Its shares surged by 25.5% within the first 35 minutes of trading on Nasdaq during Wednesday’s trading, to $4.07.

At the Closing Bell, SCOR was priced at $3.96, on volume of 3.03 million shares; average volume is 953,000 shares.

Could Perry Sook and Nexstar Media Group have anything to do with the strong stock rebound?

In its Q3 earnings call, it cited Comscore as its source for declaring that the combined active users of the Nexstar and Tribune websites combined would be the nation’s top site for news and information.

Then, there’s Nexstar’s “Comscore switch” — something Daniel Kurnos, a research analyst at The Benchmark Company asked Sook to discuss during the call.

“We have been a subscriber of Comscore all along,” he said. “Our entire portfolio has access to Comscore.” But, like other broadcast TV companies, it is shifting to impressions-based currency from ratings points; Comscore is a key data measurement provider in allowing Nexstar, and other TV companies, to do this.

That may be its salvation, given the push by TVB and the nation’s biggest broadcast TV groups to move in this ad-attraction direction.

For Sook and Nexstar, however, there’s no real “switch” in play. He explained, “It made no sense to us that if I was trying to reach [Nexstar EVP/CFO] Tom Carter as a television advertiser, I would keep track in terms of rating points but for every other device that we use to try and reach him — digital, mobile, streaming — we keep tracking impression. This makes the business easier to sell.”

However, Nexstar happens to have developed a tool with Comscore which he thinks “will put us down the road further, faster in making this transition.”

This affirmation of Comscore’s services is highly important for the company — especially now, with Nielsen splitting into two publicly traded companies in the absence of a buyer.

“We are still a subscriber to Nielsen in some of our LPM markets, and we’re a subscriber to Comscore across the portfolio,” Sook said. “So, no change in strategy there, other than the change to impressions.”

Sook can downplay it all he wants, but Wall Street clearly thinks otherwise: Comscore’s future is bright, and his company — along with others in the broadcast TV space — are to thank.

Of course, Comscore’s newly installed leadership is also a source of investor confidence. SEC filings show Livek between November 7 and November 12 acquiring 312,580 shares of SCOR at prices ranging from $3.18 per share to $3.38 per share.

At the same time, Board Chair Brent Rosenthal acquired 46,500 SCOR shares on Nov. 7 in two transactions, while Fuller snagged 20,000 shares — also in twin transactions, spread across Nov. 7 and 8.

“This is a sign of top people putting their money where their mouths are and betting big on Comscore winning,” an industry observer tells RBR+TVBR.