RESTON, Va., June 10, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX News Network/ -- comScore, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the addition of Acxiom's PersonicX segments to the comScore Segment Metrix service for the U.S. market. This powerful new offering is targeted at advertising agencies and marketers seeking higher performing online media plans. Using comScore Segment Metrix, media planners can reach specific lifestage segments with an optimized buy across thousands of offline and online publishers.

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"This helps us really optimize our online media spend because, with this new capability, we know which sites have the highest traffic from our clients' core PersonicX lifestage targets," said Ted Washburne, Director of Business Intelligence, OMD. "Plus, now we can synchronize two media channels at once because we can buy impressions of those PersonicX clusters online and direct mail lists of those same clusters through Acxiom. Feeding these data into our analytics for our clients opens up whole new areas for us, such as evaluating the offline sales lifts of multimedia campaigns at a cluster level."

PersonicX Segments Enable Advertisers to Optimize Media Spend

PersonicX is a household-level segmentation system developed by Acxiom and used by marketers that groups consumers into 70 different lifestage-based segments based on several demographic variables. For example, the "Trucks & Trailers" segment in the table below represents people between the ages of 30-45, either married or single with no children, who either own or rent, have annual household incomes of less than $100,000, and live in rural areas.

Predictive of U.S. consumer behaviors, media preferences, shopping patterns, and financial needs, marketers rely on Acxiom's PersonicX to target more specific segments in an offline environment than is possible using simple age breaks. comScore Segment Metrix - PersonicX now enables marketers to reach these targeted segments via online as well as offline media, helping marketers better hone their messaging strategy, value proposition, and media placement.

"This powerful offering is a must-have tool for any media buyer looking to achieve a better return on marketing investment," said Tim Suther, Acxiom senior vice president for digital marketing services. "The unparalleled insight into the interests of various lifestage interests created as a result of this partnership will allow marketers to generate enhanced planning strategies driven by improved segmentation and better execution by using targeting approaches that accurately align their online and offline marketing efforts."

Consider, as an example, visitors to the Web sites for home improvement retailers Lowe's and Home Depot. Although these direct competitors have very similar product offerings, the lifestyle makeup of their online customer bases are markedly different. The following analysis shows the top five PersonicX lifestyle segments based on their relative consumption of pages at each of the sites:

    Top 5 PersonicX Lifestage Segments for Lowes.com and HomeDepot.com
     Visitors
    Ranked by Page View Index*
    April 2008
    Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
    Source: comScore Segment Metrix - PersonicX

    Lowes.com             PV Index      HomeDepot.com         PV Index
    Trucks & Trailers       320         Apple Pie Families       352
    Country Ways            229         Collegiate Crowd         244
    Humble Homes            217         Solo and Stable          182
    The Great Outdoors      212         Country Ways             160
    Young Workboots         209         Country Single           149

    *Page View Index = average page views by segment/average page views for
    total Internet x 100; Index of 100 represents parity

Of the top five segments for each site, there is only one segment of overlap -- Country Ways. If Lowe's or Home Depot identified this as a key consumer target segment, comScore Segment Metrix - PersonicX would allow them to determine where to market to these consumers online. The following profile demonstrates which ad-supported sites have the highest concentrations of visitors from the Country Ways segment:

    Top 10 Ad Focus* Sites with Highest Concentration of PersonicX 'Country
     Ways' Visitors
    April 2008
    Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
    Source: comScore Segment Metrix - PersonicX

                                    PersonicX 'Country Ways'    Index to Total
                                  Visitors as a Percentage of      Internet
                                      Total Site Visitors         Population
    Total Internet:
     'Country Ways' Segment                  0.7                       100
    Marapets.com                             9.9                      1414
    MetaCrawler                              5.5                       786
    DriverGuide.com                          5.4                       771
    Lycos.com Home Page                      4.5                       643
    Self.com                                 4.2                       600
    Biography.com                            3.1                       443
    MyHomeIdeas Network                      3.0                       429
    Men.Style .com                           2.9                       414
    Elise.com                                2.5                       357
    CarsDirect.com                           2.4                       343

    *Ad Focus sites are content sites that support online advertising

These sites represent an opportunity to reach the Country Ways segment, as a means of reinforcing an offline marketing message or campaign through the use of online advertising or other online marketing tactics.

"Recent comScore research has shown that 84 percent of the impact of online marketing effort is latent and occurs offline," said Linda Boland Abraham, comScore executive vice president. "This reality made it clear that marketers needed better tools to synergize their online and offline media planning efforts, and comScore Segment Metrix - PersonicX helps fulfill that need."

To request more information on comScore Segment Metrix, please visit http://www.comscore.com/contact

About comScore

comScore, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world. For more information, please visit http://www.comscore.com/boilerplate.

About Acxiom Corporation

At Acxiom, we make information intelligent for many of the world's leading and most dynamic companies, enabling them to acquire new customers, retain their most valuable customers, communicate with customers in the methods and times they prefer, and make profitable marketing and business decisions. Acxiom's unmatched customer insight is achieved by blending the world's largest repository of consumer data, award-winning technology and analytics, multi-channel expertise, privacy leadership, and superior knowledge of a wide spectrum of industries. Founded in 1969, Acxiom (Nasdaq: ACXM) is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, with locations throughout the United States and Europe, and in Australia and China. For more information about Acxiom, visit http://www.acxiom.com.

SOURCE comScore, Inc.

http://www.comscore.com

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