The long-held advertising adage that "all media isn’t created equal" is being revisited with renewed urgency, particularly within the burgeoning Connected TV (CTV) landscape. A forthcoming paper from the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) aims to dismantle the prevailing programmatic theory that ad formats and creative can be standardized and commoditized, with a singular focus on audience targeting. This new research, teased during CIMM’s recent East event in New York City, argues that media quality is not only measurable but critically important for effective advertising, challenging an industry fixation on short-term outcomes that has perpetuated inefficiencies and inflated costs.
The paper, a pre-release copy of which was reviewed by AdExchanger, directly confronts the programmatic ecosystem’s tendency to overlook the intrinsic value of the media environment itself. It asserts that this oversight has led to significant industry challenges, including the proliferation of made-for-advertising (MFA) sites that exploit the programmatic system, brands unknowingly overspending on low-quality CTV placements, and ad tech vendors prioritizing audience metrics over the inherent quality of the media where ads are served.
"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," stated Erez Levin, founder of ad tech consultancy Emet Advisory and a co-author of the paper. He explained that CIMM’s objective in publishing this guidance is to foster an "objective, industry-wide shared consensus and framework" to move beyond the current state of ambiguity surrounding media quality measurement. This initiative seeks to prompt a fundamental shift in how agencies, tech platforms, and publishers approach and articulate their strategies for assessing media value.
The Exploding Ecosystem and the Need for Consensus
The impetus for CIMM’s paper is rooted in the rapid proliferation of media quality, curation, and programmatic verification services. This burgeoning sector includes innovative startups like Jounce Media, DeepSee, Sincera, Adalytics, and Gamera, each offering distinct approaches to tackling similar challenges. The re-emergence of established players such as DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science has further revitalized the media quality measurement category. Furthermore, recent advancements in attention measurement and deal curation have introduced novel methods for transacting based on quality signals, underscoring the growing demand for a standardized approach.
The genesis of this CIMM paper can be traced back to its collaborative work with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on the Attention Measurement Playbook for Marketers, released in late 2023. During the development of these attention standards, the working group repeatedly encountered a fundamental lack of industry-wide consensus on how to accurately measure the quality of ad impressions. This realization highlighted the critical need for a unified framework to guide the industry forward.
While progress is evident, with new tools becoming available to advertisers, the CIMM paper aims to elevate awareness and encourage broader adoption of these advancements. 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 gained insights from both the buy and sell sides of the advertising equation. Gabriel Dorosz, the paper’s other co-author and global advertising initiative lead at the International News Media Association, brings a valuable publisher-side perspective, having previously served as head of audience strategy for The New York Times.
Dorosz articulated his motivation for contributing to the project: "In the premium news publisher space, there’s a belief that the market is not serving those kinds of publishers well. 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." His involvement underscores a key objective of the paper: to ensure that high-quality publishers are recognized and rewarded for the value they deliver, moving beyond a system that often favors volume over substance.
Dispelling Myths and Redefining Value
Beyond advocating for publishers, Dorosz emphasized that the paper is equally aimed at empowering buyers to cease wasting valuable budgets on less effective advertising. The authors endeavor to debunk deeply ingrained myths that have taken root due to the industry’s overemphasis on the "value of certainty," as Dorosz puts it.
A prime example of this myth-building is the industry’s heavy reliance on deterministic attribution as a proxy for audience value. In the current programmatic landscape, a bid request containing a deterministic identifier is often perceived as inherently more valuable than one lacking such an identifier. Consequently, factors like time of day, contextual relevance, and device type are frequently relegated to secondary importance, overshadowed by the perceived certainty of a deterministic ID.
However, the CIMM paper presents a compelling argument that probabilistic modeling, rather than solely deterministic data, offers a more nuanced and accurate assessment of the true value of a wide spectrum of ad impressions. The paper provides actionable guidance for incorporating probabilistic metrics such as attention scoring and contextual relevance. These metrics are crucial for discerning an impression’s potential to advance a brand’s stated campaign goals, acknowledging that such effectiveness can fluctuate significantly based on contextual factors, including the time of day.
This perspective is particularly relevant in the CTV market. While premium CTV inventory has commanded high price points, the CIMM paper points out that major streaming platforms often maintain these elevated costs even during off-peak hours, such as the middle of the night, when audience receptivity is generally lower. Levin suggests that advertisers should be questioning why their streaming campaigns allocate significant budget to overnight slots, and be suspicious if such spending patterns are not clearly justified.
A New Model for Quality: The Quality Trifecta
To reorient the industry towards a greater emphasis on media quality, the CIMM paper introduces a novel framework designed to reconnect with the foundational principles of marketing. This new model is primarily based on "The Quality Trifecta," a concept that Levin has championed since last year. The core tenet of this trifecta is that media quality, creative quality, and audience quality should be evaluated independently, each contributing to the overall effectiveness of an advertising campaign.
Within this model, media quality itself is further dissected into two critical components: "attention," which refers to the prominence and visibility of an ad placement, and "situational context," which gauges the likelihood that the surrounding media environment places the viewer in a receptive state for advertising.
The paper strongly advises marketers to move beyond simplistic, binary quality measurement methods. Instead of relying solely on metrics like the presence of an ID in a bid request or whether an ad meets minimum viewability standards, CIMM advocates for the adoption of "non-binary, relative, and probabilistic" measurements. These include sophisticated attention scoring systems that assess media quality along a spectrum of effectiveness, providing a more granular and insightful evaluation.
These non-binary approaches offer significant advantages, according to Levin. They facilitate more accurate comparisons across different media types and are better equipped to capture the dynamic variations that occur across different audiences and other influencing factors, such as the time of day. The paper also underscores the importance of balancing short-term performance metrics with the long-term objectives of brand building, a crucial consideration for sustainable marketing success, although it acknowledges that brands heavily reliant on immediate returns may still need to prioritize short-term outcomes.
CTV as the Proving Ground and the Buy-Side Imperative
While the CIMM paper is intended as a guide for the entire open web, the authors identify streaming media and CTV supply as the primary proving ground for these principles. This is due to the high stakes involved in the CTV market, characterized by its elevated Cost Per Mille (CPM) rates, intense demand competition, and expansive creative canvases.
Dorosz further elaborates that CTV’s relative youth, compared to the two-decade-long reliance on third-party cookies in other digital channels, means its ecosystem is less constrained by established norms. Moreover, many traditional pixel-based measurement techniques, which are effective on other platforms, are not well-suited for the unique characteristics of CTV.
For instance, the paper proposes a fundamental rethinking of viewability measurement for CTV. Given that CTV ads typically autoplay with sound on and occupy the full screen, the conventional definition of viewability becomes largely irrelevant. The focus, therefore, must shift to understanding the true engagement and impact of these ads within their contextual environment.
Ultimately, while the goal is industry-wide adoption of these more sophisticated quality metrics, the authors concur that the buy side must take the lead in driving this change. "These theories only matter," Dorosz concluded, "if the buy side demonstrates success and drives repeatability." This suggests that advertisers and media buyers, by actively seeking out and transacting on higher-quality media based on these new frameworks, will be the catalysts for broader industry transformation, compelling publishers and ad tech platforms to adapt and prioritize media quality. The paper serves as a roadmap, but its impact will depend on the willingness of the market’s most influential players to embrace its insights and implement its recommendations.
