‘Predictive Audiences’ will allow brands to reach audiences based on contextual information such as age and gender demographics, television viewership, over-the-top consumption and consumer behaviours such as car purchase and location data.

This will be achieved without the use of third-party cookies, and instead use Comscore’s media consumption data and contextual crawler and intelligent categorisation technologies to help targeting.

The switch to a targeting tool that is not dependent on third-party cookies follows an announcement by Google last year that it anticipated removing third-party cookies from its ‘Chrome’ browser by 2022, following similar policy announcements by rivals Firefox and Safari.

Predictive Audiences will be available will be available in the first quarter 2021 from Comscore, IHS Markit, PlaceIQ and TransUnion for use across digital, mobile, and connected television campaigns.

Rachel Gantz, general manager, activation solutions, at Comscore, said: “With a cookie-free future fast approaching, it’s important to develop privacy-forward new approaches so that brands will still be able to utilise consumer behaviour to reach refined audiences.”