More than 100 years after its founding, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) finally has its own product to advertise. Sort of.
Aquila – pronounced “Uh-kee-lah,” as in “Akeelah and the Bee” – is a cross-channel measurement platform currently being developed by Aquila LLC, a for-profit offshoot of the ANA.
Aquila’s goal is to provide census-level impression data as a rating service for walled garden ad platforms like Meta, Google, Amazon and TikTok. Comscore will also provide linear and digital TV data, which Aquila President and COO Tina Daniels announced at the Advertising Research Foundation’s AUDIENCExSCIENCE event earlier in March.
The baseline data is then “mapped over a virtual ID Spine” calibrated based on a 5,000-household panel from Kantar Media, which is also calibrated to the census data. Using that ID model, marketers could produce deduplicated reach and frequency reports that better inform their marketing results across different channels.
After five years of development, the platform isn’t quite “fully baked” yet, Daniels told AdExchanger during this year’s ANA Media Conference. It won’t be ready to launch until 2026 and won’t even be available for beta testing until the second half of 2025.
Still, the ANA is already pitching the platform to marketers in the hopes of obtaining additional feedback, trial participation or financial support (they are trade group members, after all).
“We need their insight,” said Daniels. “We are very reliant on them to give us guidance on how we develop the platform and what the outputs are.”
Function over fanciness
Early conversations with marketers have already helped the Aquila team figure out what ANA members even want from the potential service.
When the project first kicked off, Daniels said, it was assumed that the final product would consist of an elaborate UI dashboard. After talking with marketers, however, they shifted their approach to an API-focused dashboard and have since landed somewhere in the middle.
Both UI and API capabilities will be available, but the idea is to be functional rather than “fancy,” Daniels told AdExchanger. That’s also why there won’t be any AI-powered elements to the platform. Enterprise publishers and marketers working with the ANA already have their own sophisticated processes in place for that kind of analysis.
“We’ve always had a vision of powering outcomes, even at the global level,” Aquila CEO Bill Tucker told AdExchanger. Where the marketers themselves are concerned, “everyone’s got their own way of doing it.”
(Not) for profit
The conversations that led to Aquila started as early as 2019, said Kanishka Das, the senior director of global media, analytics and insights at Procter & Gamble.
As a founder of the ANA’s CMM Initiative, Das told attendees at the ANA Media Conference that he helped to establish the “advertiser’s north star” of principles and expectations for cross-media measurement. “We set out the priorities, not the platforms,” he stressed.
By June 2024, those priorities had coalesced into a soon-to-be-launched product offering, as well as the need for a separate for-profit entity. According to Tucker, this is because the IRS would classify Aquila as a competitor to similar products built by for-profit companies, meaning the ANA cannot offer the platform itself – and not without charging for it.
Despite this, Tucker said, turning a profit isn’t the whole goal. And, in fact, the ANA reps said Aquila will likely run as a break-even endeavor.
Which isn’t to say money doesn’t matter, especially at this stage. Aquila still needs advertisers to back the initiative in the form of minority match funds, both to continue its development and to further convince platforms of its long-term viability. Or, as Tucker put it, to show that there’s “skin in the game.”
“We really want everyone to participate,” added Daniels. “We want more publishers to be involved, [and] we want as many marketers as possible.”
