Comscore and Yahoo DSP this week announced a first-to-market partnership designed to improve political advertising effectiveness across Connected TV (CTV), launching a product called Proximic Political Audiences. The announcement, dated March 5, 2026, brings together Comscore's (NASDAQ: SCOR) linear television measurement infrastructure and Yahoo DSP's scaled programmatic platform - with the express aim of helping political campaigns navigate the 2026 midterm election cycle. House, Senate, and Gubernatorial races are all within scope.

The core technical premise of the partnership is straightforward: political advertisers have historically struggled to unify messaging across linear television and streaming. Viewers watching the local news at 6 p.m. and the same voters watching a streaming service at 9 p.m. have often been addressed as separate audiences, with little coordination between linear buys and CTV placements. Proximic Political Audiences attempts to close that gap by feeding Comscore's verified linear TV exposure data into CTV targeting, creating a signal layer that allows campaigns to increase incremental reach - meaning they can target voters not yet reached by their linear spend, rather than serving duplicate impressions to people already exposed on broadcast.

According to Rachel Gantz, Managing Director of Proximic by Comscore: "Political campaigns can't afford to treat linear and streaming as separate worlds. By bringing linear exposure data into streaming, Proximic and Yahoo are helping advertisers connect the dots across screens, turning fragmented impressions into coordinated, more effective voter reach that makes every ad dollar work harder."

The product is available for both PAC and candidate advertising campaigns and can be measured at the local market level - a technical detail that carries significant weight in down-ballot races where district-level precision matters more than national reach efficiency.

How the technology works

Proximic by Comscore is a programmatic division of Comscore Inc. focused on contextual targeting and privacy-forward audience products. The Political Audiences product sits within that broader portfolio. At the infrastructure level, Comscore contributes its depth in local TV measurement - the company holds MRC accreditation for demographic television metrics across all 210 U.S. markets, a standard reached in April 2025 - while Yahoo DSP provides the demand-side platform infrastructure through which campaigns actually purchase streaming inventory.

What distinguishes this setup from a generic programmatic CTV buy is the identity layer. According to Danny Dikovsky, Head of Independent Agency Sales at Yahoo DSP: "Comscore's depth in local TV measurement in conjunction with Yahoo ConnectID gives us unmatched precision and the foundation to make streaming political campaigns more efficient and effective. Together with Proximic by Comscore, we're helping advertisers make smarter streaming activations and drive voter impact where it matters."

Yahoo ConnectID is Yahoo's deterministic identity product, built on a logged-in user base. Earlier this week, a separate announcement confirmed that Yahoo ConnectID reaches 232 million logged-in users in the United States, providing the identity foundation that makes deterministic audience matching viable at scale. When a political campaign knows that a household has already seen a linear television ad, the Proximic system can route subsequent CTV impressions toward voters in that geography who have not yet been reached - in theory improving both reach and frequency management simultaneously.

The partnership also designates MiQ's dedicated political division as a primary activation partner. MiQ is not new to this configuration. The company previously reported 30% stronger engagement when using Comscore predictive segments compared to traditional ID-based segments across CTV campaigns, following its role as an early adopter of Comscore's AI-powered Data Partner Network announced in September 2025. That earlier experience gives MiQ a head start in operationalizing Proximic audiences at scale.

According to Jesse Contario, Regional Vice President, Southeast and Political at MiQ: "For political campaigns to engage voters in premium, high-attention environments, CTV is a critical part of a holistic media strategy. Supported by a leading programmatic partner in Proximic by Comscore and Yahoo, we help our clients optimize their CTV performance and understand true voter impact."

Why 2026 specifically

The timing of the partnership is not incidental. The 2026 election cycle brings contested House, Senate, and Gubernatorial races into focus across dozens of states. Political advertising operates on compressed timescales, with concentrated spending in the weeks immediately preceding primary and general election dates. The pressure to demonstrate measurable voter reach - not just impressions delivered - has intensified as programmatic buying has matured and campaigns have grown more data-sophisticated.

Proximic by Comscore's 2026 State of Programmatic Report, released January 20, 2026, found that 45% of marketers increasing programmatic CTV budgets are reallocating dollars from linear television. CTV is expected to capture 26% of media budgets this year across all advertising categories. In the political advertising context, that reallocation has particular urgency: as more viewers shift from broadcast and cable to streaming platforms, the share of the voting-age population reachable through linear alone shrinks each cycle.

The programmatic CTV market itself showed substantial momentum heading into 2026. Magnite reported CTV contribution ex-TAC growth of 32% in the fourth quarter of 2025 when excluding political advertising, according to results announced February 25, 2026. The exclusion of political is standard in those disclosures because political spend is cyclical and uneven - but it also underscores just how much political budgets can move CTV platform economics in election years. Magnite's Q4 2025 total CTV contribution ex-TAC reached $93.6 million.

Yahoo DSP's own trajectory has accelerated heading into 2026. The platform integrated agentic AI capabilities on January 6, enabling automated campaign management workflows. Netflix added Yahoo as its fourth global programmatic advertising partner in June 2025, expanding the premium inventory available through Yahoo DSP's infrastructure. These developments matter for political advertisers because premium, high-attention environments - the streaming equivalents of primetime broadcast - command greater influence per impression.

Local market measurement as a technical differentiator

One of the more technically significant aspects of this announcement is the emphasis on local market measurement. Comscore has historically differentiated through its local television measurement capabilities, which span all 210 U.S. Designated Market Areas. National programmatic campaigns can optimize on broad demographic signals. Political advertising, by contrast, operates district by district. A Senate race in a state with multiple television markets needs to manage reach and frequency separately across each DMA - a level of geographic granularity that most standard programmatic CTV products do not natively support.

By incorporating Comscore's local linear data into CTV targeting, the Proximic Political Audiences product aims to carry that DMA-level accountability into streaming. A campaign running in a competitive Senate race could, for example, segment its CTV buy to prioritize voters in media markets where linear spending is lower, or where local television inventory is more expensive, while maintaining consistent frequency management across the full media mix.

This local precision connects to broader developments in Comscore's measurement architecture. Comscore's cross-platform measurement expansion, announced December 15, 2025, extended its campaign reporting suite to include streaming audio and enhanced Meta social reporting. The underlying methodology combines Comscore's digital opt-in panel with census network data and passively-collected set-top-box viewership information from cable and satellite distribution partnerships. That same infrastructure anchors the linear exposure signal being fed into Proximic Political Audiences.

The company's July 2025 partnership with HyphaMetrics added person-level audience measurement and CTV program-level reporting targeting the 2026/2027 upfront season, and was described at the time as a multi-year arrangement. That person-level capability - identifying individual viewers rather than households - increases targeting precision for campaigns operating under strict budget constraints where efficiency matters as much as scale.

The measurement challenge in political CTV

Political advertisers face a challenge that commercial advertisers share but that carries higher stakes: demonstrating that spending produced measurable impact rather than just impressions. For consumer brands, the question is whether an ad drove a purchase. For political campaigns, it is whether an ad reached a likely voter in a persuadable segment - and whether that voter was already reached on another screen.

The cross-screen deduplication problem is not solved by any single product. IAB Tech Lab's December 2025 CTV ad format standardization effort addressed technical fragmentation at the inventory and creative level. The broader measurement standardization work continues in parallel. Cross-media measurement initiatives examined by the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement and WFA in January 2026 reflect how far the industry remains from unified standards - even as individual partnerships like this one build proprietary approaches to the same problem.

The Proximic Political Audiences product positions itself as a practical, available solution rather than a standards-body initiative. Campaigns can activate it through Yahoo DSP today, with MiQ as a designated operational partner for agencies managing political accounts. The measurement outputs are local-market accountable, meaning that campaigns can evaluate spend efficiency at the DMA level and compare CTV delivery against linear flight records.

Context for the marketing community

Political advertising has always occupied a specific space within the broader programmatic ecosystem. The budgets are substantial - political advertising in the United States runs into the billions of dollars in major election years - but the buying patterns are compressed, the targeting requirements are geographically specific, and the measurement accountability expectations have grown dramatically as digital targeting tools improved. A campaign that cannot demonstrate incremental voter reach from its CTV spend relative to its linear buy is effectively operating blind on a potentially large line item.

The infrastructure underpinning this announcement reflects several years of investment by both Comscore and Yahoo. Comscore launched its AI-powered Data Partner Network in September 2025, adding more than ten data providers to its Proximic audience activation ecosystem. That network architecture - where external data runs through Comscore's AI predictive technology and panel-based truth sets - provides the foundation for the political audience products announced today. Yahoo, meanwhile, has systematically expanded its DSP's premium inventory access and identity infrastructure over the past 18 months.

Yahoo's January 2025 adoption of IAB Tech Lab Data Transparency Labels - making Yahoo the first DSP to implement the standard - is relevant here as well. Political advertising is subject to scrutiny from regulators, journalists, and voters. A demand-side platform that can document how audience segments are constructed and what data underpins them provides a form of accountability that campaigns increasingly require.

For agencies managing political accounts, the practical question is whether this combination - Comscore linear exposure data, Yahoo ConnectID identity matching, Proximic audience activation, and MiQ operational support - delivers genuinely incremental voter reach at measurable local market scale. The announcement describes the direction. Whether the performance bears out across 2026 races will be known only when the cycle closes.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Comscore (NASDAQ: SCOR), through its Proximic by Comscore division, partnered with Yahoo DSP to launch Proximic Political Audiences. MiQ's dedicated political division is designated as the primary activation partner for agencies and campaigns. Key executives quoted include Rachel Gantz (Managing Director, Proximic by Comscore), Danny Dikovsky (Head of Independent Agency Sales, Yahoo DSP), and Jesse Contario (Regional Vice President, Southeast and Political, MiQ).

What: A first-to-market programmatic CTV targeting product that incorporates Comscore's verified linear TV exposure data into streaming audience targeting through Yahoo DSP. The product - Proximic Political Audiences - is available for both PAC and candidate advertising campaigns, can be measured at the local market level across U.S. DMAs, and is designed to improve incremental voter reach by coordinating CTV buys against existing linear television exposure.

When: The partnership was announced on March 5, 2026. It targets the 2026 U.S. election cycle, which includes House, Senate, and Gubernatorial races.

Where: The product operates across premium CTV inventory within Yahoo DSP's platform, with measurement capabilities covering local U.S. media markets. Comscore is headquartered in Reston, Virginia; Yahoo DSP is headquartered in New York.

Why: Political campaigns face mounting pressure to unify fragmented media strategies as viewing audiences migrate from linear television to streaming platforms. With CTV expected to capture 26% of media budgets in 2026 and 45% of programmatic marketers reallocating linear television dollars to CTV, political advertisers need tools that can coordinate impressions across screens rather than treating broadcast and streaming as separate channels. Proximic Political Audiences attempts to address that coordination problem by feeding linear exposure data into CTV targeting, enabling incremental reach management at the local market level for campaigns operating under tight geographic and budget constraints.

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