The long-held adage that "all media isn’t created equal" is facing renewed scrutiny within the advertising industry, particularly as programmatic ad technologies often prioritize audience targeting over the intrinsic quality of the media itself. This prevailing theory, which suggests that ad formats and creative elements can be standardized and commoditized because the audience is the ultimate target, is being challenged by a forthcoming paper from the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM). The group, which teased its findings during its CIMM East event in New York City on Tuesday, aims to fundamentally reshape how media quality is understood and measured, with a particular focus on Connected TV (CTV) inventory. An early review of the pre-release document reveals a robust argument that goes beyond simply quantifying media quality differences. It asserts that the industry’s relentless focus on short-term outcomes has exacerbated persistent challenges, such as the proliferation of made-for-advertising (MFA) sites gaming the programmatic ecosystem, brands inadvertently overspending on low-quality CTV ads alongside premium placements, and ad tech vendors emphasizing audience value at the expense of media integrity.
Erez Levin, founder of ad tech consultancy Emet Advisory and a co-author of the paper, articulated the industry’s struggle with defining media quality. "Quality has been a buzzword for a while in this industry, and no one’s really defined it, except, for the most part, in self-serving ways," Levin stated. CIMM’s initiative, he explained, is to establish an "objective, industry-wide shared consensus and framework" to move beyond the current state of ambiguity. The goal is not to introduce new measurement standards per se, but rather to catalyze a comprehensive industry conversation, compelling agencies, tech platforms, and publishers to develop and articulate coherent methodologies for assessing media quality.
The Urgent Need for Industry Consensus
The rationale behind CIMM’s paper is deeply rooted in the rapidly expanding landscape of media quality, curation, and programmatic verification services. The market has seen a surge of startups like Jounce Media, DeepSee, Sincera, Adalytics, and Gamera, each approaching the complex challenge of quality assessment from distinct angles. Furthermore, the emergence of publicly traded giants such as DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science has reignited interest and investment in this critical category. Recent advancements in attention measurement and deal curation have also introduced novel approaches to transacting based on quality signals, further underscoring the need for a unified understanding.
The genesis of the CIMM paper can be traced back to the organization’s collaborative efforts with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on the Attention Measurement Playbook for Marketers, released in late 2023. During the development of attention standards, the working group repeatedly encountered a fundamental lack of consensus regarding the measurement of ad impression quality. While acknowledging that progress is being made, the CIMM paper intends to highlight the growing array of tools now available to advertisers to address these measurement gaps.
Levin has been a vocal advocate for improved quality and attention measurement since at least 2017, during his tenure as a product specialist for Google Marketing Platform, where he engaged with both buy-side and sell-side stakeholders. The paper’s other co-author, Gabriel Dorosz, Global Advertising Initiative Lead at the International News Media Association and formerly Head of Audience Strategy at The New York Times, brought a crucial publisher-side perspective to the project. "In the premium news publisher space, there’s a belief that the market is not serving those kinds of publishers well," Dorosz commented. "My passion is that quality publishers ought to be getting more of their fair share of ad spend, and this paper is a way to advance that."
Dispelling Myths and Redefining Value
Dorosz emphasized that the paper’s scope extends beyond enabling publishers to effectively demonstrate their media quality. It also aims to equip buyers with the insights needed to prevent the wasteful expenditure of advertising budgets on less effective placements. To this end, the authors directly confront and aim to dispel long-standing myths that have become entrenched as a result of buyers being "oversold on the value of certainty," as Dorosz put it.
A prime example of such a myth is the industry’s heavy reliance on deterministic attribution as a proxy for audience value. The prevailing belief is that a bid request containing a deterministic identifier inherently signifies higher inventory value compared to one lacking such an identifier. In this framework, factors like time of day, contextual data, and device type often hold marginal significance when weighed against the perceived value of an ID. However, the CIMM paper posits that probabilistic modeling, rather than deterministic data alone, offers marketers a more accurate assessment of the true value across a diverse spectrum of ad impressions.
The CIMM paper advocates for the integration of probabilistic metrics, such as attention scoring and contextual relevance, to better gauge an impression’s potential to advance a brand’s stated campaign objectives. It illustrates how these metrics can fluctuate significantly based on temporal and contextual factors, moving beyond simplistic binary assessments. For instance, while premium CTV inventory often commands high price points, Levin pointed out the anomaly of major streaming platforms maintaining similar pricing even during overnight hours, when audience receptivity is typically lower. This highlights a critical need for advertisers to question and understand why their streaming campaigns might allocate substantial budget to overnight placements, and to be wary of such allocations if they lack strategic justification.
A New Model for Quality: The Quality Trifecta
To galvanize the industry towards a renewed emphasis on media quality, the CIMM paper introduces a novel model designed to reconnect with the foundational principles of marketing. This new framework is primarily anchored in "The Quality Trifecta," a concept championed by Levin, which advocates for the independent measurement of media quality, creative quality, and audience quality.
Within this model, media quality is further delineated into two key components: "attention," which refers to the prominence and visibility of an ad placement, and "situational context," which assesses the likelihood that the surrounding media environment positions the viewer in a receptive state. The paper strongly advises marketers to transcend simplistic, binary quality measurement methods, such as merely checking for the presence of an ID in a bid request or confirming minimum viewability. Instead, it champions the adoption of "non-binary, relative, and probabilistic" measurements like attention scoring, which evaluate media quality on a continuous spectrum of effectiveness. Levin contends that these nuanced approaches are not only superior for cross-media comparisons but also more adept at capturing the variability influenced by audience characteristics and other dynamic factors, such as the time of day.
The paper also underscores the importance of balancing short-term performance metrics with long-term brand-building opportunities. While acknowledging that smaller brands heavily reliant on immediate returns should continue to prioritize immediate gains, it suggests a more holistic approach for broader brand strategy.
CTV as the Proving Ground and the Buy-Side Imperative
While the CIMM paper is intended as a comprehensive guide for the entire open web, its authors clearly identify streaming media and CTV supply as the critical proving ground. This is due to the high stakes involved: the market features the highest CPMs, most competitive demand, and the largest creative canvases. Furthermore, Dorosz highlighted that CTV has not been encumbered by decades of third-party cookie dependency, allowing for less adherence to existing, potentially flawed, status quos. Crucially, many traditional pixel-based measurement methodologies, effective on other platforms, prove inadequate for the unique characteristics of CTV.
The paper, for example, proposes a complete reevaluation of viewability measurement for CTV. Given that CTV ads typically autoplay with sound and occupy the full screen, the traditional definition of viewability becomes largely irrelevant.
Despite the aspiration for industry-wide adoption, the CIMM authors are unified in their belief that the buy side must spearhead this transformation. Dorosz concluded, "These theories only matter if the buy side demonstrates success and drives repeatability." The implication is clear: without demonstrable success and the establishment of repeatable strategies by advertisers and their agencies, even the most insightful frameworks for media quality measurement will struggle to gain meaningful traction in the dynamic digital advertising ecosystem. The path forward requires a fundamental shift in how value is perceived and measured, moving beyond the convenience of simplistic metrics to embrace a more nuanced and effective understanding of true media quality.
