Comscore today expanded its partnership with Magnite, placing the AI-built audience segments of its Proximic division inside the platform Magnite sells to streaming publishers for serving and selling connected TV advertising. Comscore describes the arrangement as the first real-time contextual integration across Magnite's SpringServe, the system that fills ad breaks in streaming sessions and connects that inventory to programmatic buyers. Future Today, a free ad-supported streaming publisher, is among the first sellers using the segments. Neither company disclosed pricing, revenue terms, the markets covered or the figures behind the "preliminary findings" Future Today cited.

In Short

Comscore, a company known for measuring audiences, has plugged its audience prediction tool into the software many streaming TV services use to put ads in front of viewers. That lets a streaming service sell advertisers groups such as likely Halloween candy buyers without following each viewer around with an ID, which matters to brands working under privacy limits. Publishers on Magnite's system get a new way to package and sell their ad slots, but nobody has said yet what it costs or how well it works.

What the two companies announced

The announcement, dated New York, October 28, 2026, comes from Comscore (Nasdaq: SCOR) and names Magnite (Nasdaq: MGNI) as its partner. It brings three Proximic capabilities into SpringServe: Predictive Audiences, contextual intelligence and what Comscore calls "ID-free activation capabilities." According to Comscore, SpringServe "combines ad serving and programmatic capabilities," which places the audience data inside the same tool publishers already use to decide which ad runs in which break.

The stated benefit runs in two directions. Publishers get, in Comscore's words, "a new path to unlock demand." Buyers get "a privacy-forward way to scale campaigns across a range of CTV inventory," which Comscore says includes high-impact formats such as pause ads. The subheading of the announcement says the integration "connects audience intelligence, premium supply and activation workflows in one place."

What the word "expanded" refers to is left open. The announcement does not describe the earlier scope of the relationship between the two companies, nor does it say when the SpringServe integration went live, whether it is limited to the United States, or how many segments are available through it. "Real-time" is also undefined: there is no explanation of whether content is classified at the moment of each ad request or ahead of time.

How Predictive Audiences are built

According to Comscore, Predictive Audiences are "AI-driven" and "combine audience and contextual signals to predict where consumers are most likely to engage next." They are powered by Comscore's own datasets and a network of third-party data partners, and Comscore says they "deliver scalable, ID-free targeting that extends reach and improves performance." No data supports the performance claim in today's announcement.

The partner network has a public history. Proximic launched its AI-powered Data Partner Network on September 3, 2025, naming 13 providers including AnalyticsIQ, Circana, Dynata, TransUnion and Symphony Health. Their audiences run through Proximic's predictive models and Comscore's panel-based truth sets, and come out as segments that do not depend on cookies or mobile IDs. At that launch, Comscore said early adopter MiQ had reported 30% stronger engagement with Comscore predictive segments than with traditional ID-based segments in CTV campaigns. That comparison came from a client, without a published methodology.

The product has since been pushed into several channels. In January 2026, Bombora added 300 B2B contextual audiences to Predictive Audiences, activated through The Trade Desk's Contextual Marketplace or through Deal IDs via Microsoft Monetize. Proximic's audio targeting reached The Trade Desk the same month, covering 4.6 million podcasts. In March, Comscore and Yahoo DSP launched Proximic Political Audiences for CTV, and in July transcript-level classification was extended to Spotify, SiriusXM, Triton Digital, Acast and Libsyn.

Several of those routes ran through buying platforms such as The Trade Desk and Yahoo DSP. In CTV, today's integration puts the segments with the seller, in the publisher's ad server, where a publisher can attach them to its own inventory before a buyer sees it.

Future Today's seasonal packages

Future Today runs free ad-supported services including Fawesome, HappyKids and iFood.tv. When it partnered with ID5 in June 2025, the company cited more than 50 million monthly CTV viewers and 1.5 billion owned-and-operated ad impressions, sold through the Future Today Marketplace.

According to Comscore, Future Today combines its own first-party data on viewership with contextual signals "to enable privacy-compliant targeting across its expansive CTV inventory." The examples are seasonal. Future Today can package inventory around "fall allergy sufferers for allergy medicine advertisers" and "Halloween candy buyers for CPG brands," which Comscore says gives buyers "greater precision and scale when purchase intent is likely to be high." Halloween falls on October 31, three days after the announcement.

Tim Ware, VP of the Future Today Marketplace, framed the deal around reach into new buyers. "This partnership gives us access to a broader range of demand partners through Magnite while creating new ways to showcase the value of our inventory and content," he said. He added: "By combining Proximic's AI-driven Predictive Audiences with Magnite's ad server and programmatic infrastructure, we can quickly and efficiently package our inventory in new ways. Our preliminary findings indicate that this approach can improve both precision and scale, unlocking more creative opportunities and stronger outcomes for our growing portfolio of advertisers."

Those findings come with no numbers, no time period and no comparison group. Nor does the announcement say how Future Today's viewership data is matched to contextual signals, where that processing happens, or whether the data leaves Future Today's systems. There is also an unanswered question about how the two approaches relate: in June 2025, Future Today added ID5's identity resolution to its ad-serving stack to recognize both logged-in and anonymous viewers. Today's segments are presented as ID-free. Whether the two run side by side is not addressed.

The companies' framing

Jessica Trainor, SVP Partnerships at Proximic by Comscore, placed the problem in the plumbing rather than in supply or demand. "CTV isn't short on premium content or advertiser demand; the challenge has always been connecting those pieces across the entire transaction chain," she said. "This integration puts audience intelligence right inside the infrastructure publishers already use to manage and monetize CTV inventory. That matters for advertisers that need more interoperable, privacy-forward connections between supply, data, and outcomes."

Magnite's emphasis was on independence and packaging. ClearLine, Magnite's buyer-facing tool for curation, runs on the same infrastructure as SpringServe, and Kristen Williams, SVP, Partnerships at Magnite, tied the integration to that business. "Partnering with Proximic by Comscore brings a trusted, independent layer of audience intelligence to our curated CTV deals," she said. "We're making it easier for publishers to package their inventory with contextual signals into addressable opportunities that buyers can act on. Bringing Proximic by Comscore's predictive audience intelligence directly into SpringServe adds a unique layer to this partnership by connecting contextual signals with the ad-serving infrastructure publishers already use to manage and monetize their CTV inventory."

The word "independent" carries weight here. Comscore sells measurement, and Magnite describes itself as the world's largest independent sell-side advertising company. The framing sets both companies apart from platforms that control inventory, audience data and measurement at once.

Where SpringServe sits in CTV

SpringServe decides which ads fill each break in a streaming session, weighs direct-sold campaigns against programmatic bids and assembles ad pods. Magnite announced in July 2021 that it would exercise its option to buy the company. On April 23, 2025, Magnite combined the SpringServe ad server with sell-side platform capabilities, and a Jounce Media benchmark from March 2025 credited the platform with connecting buyers to 99% of US streaming supply.

The list of clients has grown through 2026. Magnite built a seller agent into SpringServe in January, naming Disney Advertising, LG Ad Solutions, Paramount, Roku, Samsung and Warner Bros. Discovery as SpringServe clients. In April, Magnite added anomaly detection, demand path optimization and dynamic pricing to SpringServe's mediation layer. In September, HP TV+ picked SpringServe as its primary video ad server, and on October 14, LG Ad Solutions extended its Magnite partnership by three years, with SpringServe remaining its exclusive CTV video ad server.

Comscore has been here before with a rival system. In August 2024, Proximic's data was built into FreeWheel's ad management platform, with more than 1,000 ID-free interest and purchase-intent audiences made available in FreeWheel's Audience Manager and Paramount as the first adopter. On October 23, a trade newsletter reported that Comcast plans to move FreeWheel to NBCUniversal when the media company is spun off, a move Comcast has not confirmed in public. With today's deal, Proximic segments are available inside both FreeWheel's and Magnite's publisher tools.

Comscore is not alone in selling identity-free signals into CTV. Nielsen's Gracenote launched Gracenote Content Connect in December 2025, offering program-level metadata such as genre, rating and mood for targeting across streaming TV.

Pause ads and high-impact formats

The mention of pause ads connects the deal to one of the more active corners of CTV this year. Magnite rolled out pause ads across DIRECTV, DISH Media and Fubo in August 2025. Philo launched the format in June 2026 with Magnite among eight supply partners, and on July 22, IAB Tech Lab finalized signaling guidance for six CTV formats, including pause, overlay and screensaver units. A WunderKIND benchmark from June put pause ad attention at roughly twice that of standard 60-second CTV spots.

Today's announcement names pause ads only as an example of eligible inventory. It does not say whether Future Today sells them, or whether the segments behave differently on a paused screen than in a mid-roll break.

The business backdrop

The two partners arrive from very different quarters. Comscore reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $79.2 million in August, down 11.3%, and set out $20 million to $25 million in annual cost cuts. Its Cross-Platform segment, which includes Proximic products, fell 2.1% to $12.5 million as lower usage of Proximic products was partly offset by new content measurement business. Activation was named as one of four investment priorities. A new CTV distribution point inside a widely used publisher ad server fits that priority, though the announcement gives no revenue expectation.

Magnite's streaming business has been growing. Magnite reported CTV contribution ex-TAC of $97.1 million for the second quarter, up 36%, or 51% of total contribution, and guided to $98 million to $100 million in CTV contribution for the third quarter.

Proximic's own survey data points to why sellers want contextual products, and to the limits of that demand. The 2026 State of Programmatic Report, based on more than 200 decision-makers surveyed in November 2025, found CTV expected to take 26% of media budgets in 2026. It found 74% planning to maintain or increase contextual targeting, but the share planning an increase fell to 43% from 54% a year earlier. In privacy-regulated verticals such as healthcare, 50% named contextual as their main targeting tactic. The allergy medicine example sits close to that category.

The case against identity-based TV targeting has its own data. A study commissioned by CIMM and Go Addressable found IP-to-postal-address linkages accurate only 13% of the time on average, and IP addresses remain a core identifier in CTV.

What is not in the announcement

Several gaps limit any assessment of the deal. There is no pricing and no indication of whether publishers or buyers pay for the segments, or how revenue is split between Comscore, Magnite and the publisher. There is no launch date, no country list and no count of segments. Other than Future Today, no publishers are named, and no DSPs or agencies are named as buyers. The "preliminary findings" have no figures. And the mechanics of combining a publisher's viewership data with Proximic's models, including what "ID-free" means once first-party data is involved, are not explained.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For CTV sellers, the deal puts a third-party audience product inside the ad server, the layer where inventory is packaged before it reaches a bid request. That gives a publisher such as Future Today a way to price its supply around predicted intent, such as a seasonal purchase, rather than around a show title or a device graph.

For buyers, the question is whether a segment built by a measurement company and attached by the seller is worth a premium. Comscore also sells campaign measurement, as it did when it paired Proximic targeting with its own measurement tools on The Trade Desk in January. The announcement does not say which measurement, if any, applies to campaigns bought through SpringServe with Proximic segments. It offers a quote about preliminary findings, but no results.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Comscore, through its Proximic by Comscore division, and Magnite, the sell-side advertising company that owns SpringServe. Future Today is named as one of the first publishers using the integration. Jessica Trainor of Proximic, Kristen Williams of Magnite and Tim Ware of the Future Today Marketplace are quoted.

What: Proximic's Predictive Audiences, contextual intelligence and ID-free activation are now available inside SpringServe, letting CTV publishers package inventory, including pause ads, around predicted audiences without device or user identifiers. Comscore calls it the first real-time contextual integration across SpringServe. Pricing, markets, launch date, segment counts and performance figures were not disclosed.

When: Announced today, October 28, 2026, in New York.

Where: Across CTV inventory managed through Magnite's SpringServe platform. The announcement does not specify countries.

Why: Publishers want new ways to attract demand to their streaming inventory, and buyers face limited identifier coverage and privacy restrictions in CTV. For Comscore, which reported falling revenue and lower Proximic product usage in the second quarter, the deal adds a distribution point for its activation business inside an ad server used by many large streaming publishers.