Recently I joined Jon Watts, Managing Director of CIMM, on a panel to discuss media quality. The panel followed the publication of CIMM’s "Navigating Quality" paper, to which Adelaide contributed.
The industry’s understanding of media quality is evolving quickly. My answers to the questions Jon posed to the panel explain Adelaide’s point of view:
Jon: Why is everyone talking about "media quality" now? What is it, and what changed?
Claire: Media quality is becoming a high-interest topic because brands and buyers have noticed the declining impact of some of their digital media investments. Since the Media Rating Council (MRC) established the viewability standard in 2014, digital media quality has largely been described with basic hygiene metrics, like viewability and video completion rate. But viewability is widely acknowledged to have been gamed as an indicator of value and with the decline of third-party cookies, the rise of MFA sites, and now the flood of AI-generated online content, hygiene metrics aren’t discerning enough to guide planning and investment decisions in a fragmented media landscape. A media quality metric should be able to do exactly that.
Media quality describes the degree to which a media placement captures attention and contributes to a desired business outcome. All impressions are not created equal, and a media quality metric helps distinguish between them.
Jon: Not all impressions are created equal—what are the implications for buyers and sellers?
Claire: Buyers and sellers are used to transacting on audience reach and cost metrics. An ad impression comes with a certain audience estimate and a certain CPM but traditionally has not been differentiated much further in media terms. The idea of evaluating a quality metric alongside audience and cost metrics is relatively new in media, but not in other markets. Credit ratings and CARFAX scores are two familiar examples of quality metrics that complement evaluation and cost metrics in other markets.
A buyer’s opportunity is to use a media quality metric – Adelaide’s AU – to identify and purchase media at the quality level needed to support a client’s business objectives, either programmatically or directly from publishers. Since we’ve shown that media quality and media cost are not correlated, buyers may have a quality-and-cost arbitrage opportunity, depending on their objectives.
Sellers have an opportunity to claim credit for their high-quality ad inventory in a new way. We think high-quality inventory has historically been underpriced because the market has lacked a consistent way to identify and justify greater investment in it. As a result, advertisers have often focused primarily on cost and reach, leaving higher-quality publishers to compete on the same terms as lower-quality ones. A shared, transparent metric like AU allows buyers and sellers to evaluate quality alongside cost and negotiate based on a more complete view of the value of a placement. Because AU is both diagnostic and predictive of outcomes, it gives both sides a more valuable basis for negotiations.
Jon: What are we missing when we measure only who was reached, rather than where, when, and how?
Claire: When we measure only “who” was reached, we treat the specific characteristics of media placements, including environment, format, and attention, as noise when they are actually most of the signal. This can create an incentive to prioritize the cheapest way to reach an audience without accounting for meaningful differences in the quality of those exposures or their likelihood of driving an outcome.
Media research typically answers three questions: “How many, how often, and how long?” In other words, how many people use a particular media channel, how often do they use it, and how long do they use it for? The answers to those three questions have largely determined how media inventory is valued and monetized. At Adelaide, we answer an additional question: “How well?” This means: how effectively did the media inventory capture attention and lead to a business impact? We now have a way to quantify that difference for the market. Without accounting for quality, buyers may save on media costs while sacrificing overall campaign performance.
Jon: What does "premium" mean now—content, context, audience, platform, experience, outcomes?
Claire: With the media landscape evolving quickly, inventory that buyers viewed as premium ten or even five years ago may no longer be seen that way. We need a new definition of “premium,” and it should be something more than “most expensive.”
At Adelaide, we think “premium-ness” is a property of the placement – not of the media brand or the platform – measured by its predictable likelihood of driving impact. That is a framing that legacy media publishers who have traditionally been considered “premium” may have to get used to, but it’s also their great opportunity, because AU is real evidence of their media quality from a neutral, validated third party.
Jon: Is the high- and low-quality gap clear and appreciated across the market? Is it baked into pricing?
Claire: The gap is real and significant, and it is not yet broadly reflected in pricing, which creates an inefficiency buyers can currently exploit to their advantage. We've seen cases where the highest-viewability inventory had the lowest AU and the weakest conversions. High-quality media exists in every channel, and the most expensive inventory does not always offer the best value. The market appreciates the gap in the abstract but hasn't broadly repriced for it, partly because, until now, there hasn’t been a shared quality currency to transact on.
That is starting to change as media partners in the AU Ecosystem increasingly package, guarantee, and price inventory based on AU. Brands are also using media quality thresholds and AU-weighted MMMs to guide investment decisions. But we're still early, which means buyers willing to act on AU now may benefit from a temporary arbitrage opportunity.
Jon: What convinces a skeptical marketer or CFO that quality is a performance argument, not a branding one?
Claire: Relevant evidence. We need to show marketers and CFOs that quality matters, which is why we have invested in partnerships with multiple research providers, including Nielsen, as well as in independent third-party audits and our ongoing MRC accreditation process. We publish dozens of case studies in our annual Outcomes Guide each January, demonstrating the upper- and lower-funnel impact of AU applications. Our latest guide included 60 case studies across 16 industries, with higher-AU media delivering an average 33% lift in upper-funnel outcomes and 53% lift in lower-funnel outcomes. Together, this evidence shows a consistent link between media quality and campaign performance in terms that matter to brands, including cost efficiency and bottom-line business outcomes.
Jon: Which quality signals are most predictive of real impact?
Claire: AU is a quality signal that is predictive of real outcomes impact.
Quality is complex and multidimensional, so AU accounts for the many placement characteristics that influence media quality. These vary by channel, from clutter, position, duration, and size in display to genre, daypart, app/publisher, and pod position in CTV. Eye-tracking research helps guide characteristic selection, while outcome data determines how those characteristics are weighted so that AU reflects a placement’s likelihood of contributing to business results.
We’ve tested thousands of model variations and leveraged several hundred thousand brand survey responses and more than 100 million middle- and lower-funnel conversion events to train and refine AU. We update our channel models regularly and continue to improve their predictive accuracy across major purchase-funnel KPIs.
Jon: What needs to happen to make quality an operational tool, not just a principle?
Claire: AU is already operational on the buy-side, and the sell-side is catching up quickly. We have adopted “AU Everywhere” as our company rallying cry and worked to embed AU across the media landscape. The principle becomes a tool the moment a planner can write a minimum AU threshold into a buy and a DSP can execute against it automatically. For many of our customers, that’s already happening today.
Operationalizing quality requires:
- A standardized metric. Quality has to be expressible as a number agencies can put on a media plan, buy against, and report on, the way they already do with GRPs.
- Availability in the workflows buyers already use. That includes pre-bid segments and custom bidding algorithms in DSPs, PMPs in SSPs, and guaranteed deals with built-in thresholds. Adoption cannot require entirely new workflows, complex integrations, or significant additional overhead.
- Independent audits and validation. Third-party scrutiny is essential to building trust in any metric used to inform transactions.
Jon: How do buyers fold quality in without making it too complex or expensive?
Claire:Start by measuring a set of campaigns to establish a baseline and identify an appropriate AU threshold for a specific client, then let buying tools do most of the work. Pre-bid segments and curated PMPs allow buyers to prioritize high-AU supply without hand-managing placement by placement. As measurement experience accumulates, the brand’s AU dataset becomes a planning asset that can inform future campaigns. Buyers also gain confidence when they see that other brands and agencies have adopted quality-based buying without adding significant complexity to their operations.
Jon: How do buyers and sellers collaborate on quality without it becoming another negotiation battleground? What changes in three years?
Claire: Media quality should not become a bargaining chip used only to negotiate lower prices. It should give buyers and sellers a shared way to evaluate the quality of a placement alongside its cost and determine whether it represents fair value.
When both sides transact using the same independently validated score, they can agree on clear quality thresholds or guarantees rather than debate subjective definitions of “premium.” Quality becomes a measurable contract term that can be guaranteed, much like a GRP.
Within three years, I expect quality thresholds to become a standard part of insertion orders and high-quality inventory to be priced more appropriately as its value becomes easier to quantify. Blended CPMs will become less useful as buyers gain a clearer view of the quality, cost, and expected impact of the placements they are buying.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.