Adelaide

Uber Advertising, in partnership with Adelaide and Kantar, launched a first-of-its-type custom attention metric score for its platform advertisers.

Online advertising’s privacy problem isn’t just about bad actors; it’s about bad metrics, says Marc Guldimann, CEO and founder of attention startup Adelaide. “I think a lot of the invasive behaviors in the ad tech space can be traced back to a lack of a shared understanding of quality,” he says.

Google’s DV360 adding attention as optimization signal could finally help wean buyers and platforms off bidding on ad inventory based on viewability.

The open web is dead; long live the open web. It’s healthy; it’s full of opportunity; it’s doomed; it’s a mess. Also, what even is the open web, and do consumers care about the definition?

Current ad pricing often doesn’t correlate to a site’s attention score, which means there’s an arbitrage opportunity for buyers and resellers.

Adelaide may become the first vendor to receive accreditation for an attention metric. Plus, the IAB is leading a lawsuit against the FTC.

By applying Adelaide’s Attention Unit scoring, buyers can target low-, medium- and high-attention inventory via TTD’s self-serve platform.

The initiative will kick off this month, and the IAB and MRC expect to have draft accreditation guidelines open for public comment by Q1 2025.

Special guest and prolific ad tech investor Eric Franchi of Aperiam Ventures discusses his firm’s recent bet on attention metrics startup Adelaide. Plus: What’s up with Meta’s new third-party attribution partnerships?

Adelaide used this latest cash injection to boost its valuation to $60 million ahead of an all-stock acquisition of Rita, an Amsterdam-based data marketplace with a focus on the EU.

Since launch, 82% of advertisers that buy inventory through the Yahoo DSP have tried Backstage at least once. And buyers are seeing lower CPMs from cutting out SSPs.

In today’s newsletter: Adalytics reveals Forbes was running a separate MFA sub-domain; The New York Times seeks to use attention benchmarking to validate its premium publisher status; and Google is reportedly looking to buy HubSpot.

In today’s newsletter: Criteo invests heavily in the Privacy Sandbox; the open web is not too big to fail; and Amazon aims to grow its ad business to rival Google’s and Meta’s.

The results of Haleon’s recent test of Adelaide’s attention scoring solution within Amazon’s DSP could strengthen the case that low-attention inventory isn’t worth buying.

Index Marketplaces activates the curation capabilities of DSPs, DMPs and RMNs – and the demand for their PMP deals – across Index Exchange’s network of publishers.

Advertisers’ attempts to engage consumers could end up leaving them cold. After all, not all attention is created equal.

Attention metrics are fast becoming a priority for advertisers, especially as a cookieless world looms large. But the technology requires more standardization before it can reach its full potential.

After years of courting lower-funnel performance budgets – and charging on a cost-per-click basis – Outbrain foresees further growth in attracting upper-funnel spend. It’s doing so by giving brands a way to measure their return on investment in awareness campaigns by tracking whether people are actually paying attention to their ads.

Is there a correlation between high attention scores, low emissions scores and business outcomes? To find out, Mars and Nestle-owned Nespresso are testing two new private marketplace (PMP)-based products developed by attention metrics provider Adelaide.

We’re close to the onset of true cross-media measurement – with the understanding that all video impressions are not created equal. That seems obvious, but one key player in the ecosystem, YouTube, disagrees.

The SSP Sharethrough partnered with attention metrics provider Adelaide to curate ad inventory packages based on attention.

Advertisers are starting to gravitate toward attention as a way to measure a campaign’s impact on the lower funnel, including conversion rate. Luxury car manufacturer Audi recently experimented with using attention metrics to algorithmically adjust programmatic bidding on ad inventory based on the amount of attention those ad placements are likely to draw. Audi then measured the impact high-attention placements had on post-click conversions.

Rather than looking at one particular data signal, attention metrics include a variety of data points, which are fed into a machine-learning model to predict the likelihood that a given media environment and ad creative will draw attention from a hypothetical audience member.

Former Fox executive Joe Marchese’s early-stage investment fund, Human Ventures, is paying attention to attention with a $7 million seed investment in Adelaide, a startup that helps advertisers measure and evaluate media based on attention rather than proxy metrics like viewability or video completion rate.

Mobile ad exchange Kargo has acquired attention sales platform Parsec Media. The deal reflects Kargo’s investment in attention as a viable metric for post-cookie mobile advertising, said Kargo CEO Harry Kargman.

The National Basketball Association is scoring higher tune-in for live games by optimizing its media planning using attention, including on connected TV. The league has been on the hunt for a more effective real-time optimization metric tied to larger business goals, like brand lift and tune-in, said Larisa Johnson, VP of paid and CRM media […]

The online ad tech startup Adelaide raised $2 million its first investment round from a crew of industry angel investors to build out its attention-based advertising currency, the Attention Unit [AU], as an alternative to campaigns determined primarily by viewability. Adelaide’s AU factors in the context of the ad placement and the likelihood that the […]

The lowest priced ads don’t always deliver the best results – especially for digital branding campaigns – so ad buyers are re-calculating CPM to a quality CPM (qCPM). The qCPM only counts impressions that are viewable, with on-target delivery, optimal frequency and in brand-safe environments. By looking at performance factors beyond cost, ad buyers can […]