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The long-held advertising adage, "all media isn’t created equal," is being challenged by the prevailing practices in programmatic advertising. While the industry has increasingly focused on audience targeting, often treating ad formats and creative as interchangeable commodities, a new paper from the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) aims to re-center the conversation on the fundamental importance of media quality, particularly within the burgeoning Connected TV (CTV) landscape. Teased during CIMM’s East event in New York City, a pre-release review of the paper reveals a robust argument that current industry metrics are falling short, perpetuating inefficiencies and costing advertisers significant sums.
The core thesis of CIMM’s forthcoming publication is that media quality is not only measurable but also critically undervalued. The paper contends that the industry’s relentless pursuit of short-term performance metrics has inadvertently fostered an environment where low-quality inventory, often found on "made-for-advertising" (MFA) sites, can proliferate within programmatic ecosystems. This, in turn, leads to brands inadvertently overspending on less effective ad placements that are commingled with premium inventory, while ad tech vendors often prioritize audience data over the intrinsic value of the media itself.
Erez Levin, founder of ad tech consultancy Emet Advisory and a co-author of the paper, highlighted the pervasive ambiguity surrounding the term "quality" within the industry. "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, therefore, seeks to establish "an objective, industry-wide shared consensus and framework" to move beyond this "limbo" and foster a more coherent approach to media quality measurement. The goal is not to introduce novel measurement standards, but rather to catalyze an industry-wide dialogue that compels agencies, tech platforms, and publishers to articulate and adopt a unified understanding of what constitutes quality media.
The Growing Ecosystem of Media Quality Solutions
The impetus for CIMM’s paper is also rooted in the rapid proliferation of companies and services dedicated to media quality, curation, and programmatic verification. The market has seen the emergence of startups like Jounce Media, DeepSee, Sincera, Adalytics, and Gamera, each approaching the complex challenge of quality assessment from distinct angles. Furthermore, the resurgence of established players such as DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, now publicly traded entities, has injected new energy into the dormant verification category. Concurrently, evolving trends in attention measurement and sophisticated deal curation mechanisms are introducing innovative ways to transact based on quality signals.
This groundwork for the CIMM paper was initially laid during the organization’s collaboration 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 obstacle: the lack of industry-wide consensus on how to accurately measure the quality of ad impressions. While acknowledging the progress being made, CIMM aims to elevate awareness of the new measurement tools now available to advertisers.
Levin has been a vocal advocate for enhanced quality and attention measurement since at least 2017, when he served as a product specialist for Google Marketing Platform, engaging with both buy and sell sides of the advertising ecosystem. Gabriel Dorosz, the paper’s other co-author and global advertising initiative lead at the International News Media Association, brought a publisher-centric 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 explained. "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 Reimagining Value
Beyond advocating for publishers’ needs, Dorosz emphasized that the paper is equally focused on equipping buyers with the insights to avoid wasteful ad spending. The authors endeavor to debunk persistent myths that have taken root, particularly those stemming from the industry’s "overselling of the value of certainty," as Dorosz puts it.
A prime example is the industry’s heavy reliance on deterministic attribution as a proxy for audience value. The presence of a deterministic identifier in a bid request is often perceived as inherently more valuable than an impression lacking such a signal, with factors like time of day or contextual data frequently relegated to secondary importance. However, CIMM’s paper posits that probabilistic modeling, rather than solely deterministic data, offers a more accurate reflection of the true value across a broader spectrum of ad impressions.
The paper offers guidance on incorporating probabilistic metrics such as attention scoring and contextual relevance to better predict an impression’s likelihood of advancing a brand’s stated campaign objectives. It details how these metrics can fluctuate significantly based on temporal and contextual factors. Similarly, the paper scrutinizes the industry’s tendency to maintain high price points for premium CTV inventory, even for ad placements during off-peak hours when audience receptiveness is generally lower. Levin suggests that advertisers should be critically examining why their streaming campaigns might allocate substantial budget overnight, and express skepticism if such spending patterns are not well-justified.
A New Framework for Quality: The Quality Trifecta
To galvanize the industry into prioritizing media quality, CIMM introduces a new model that the authors believe harks back to the foundational principles of marketing. This model is primarily built upon "The Quality Trifecta," a concept championed by Levin, which advocates for the independent measurement of media quality, creative quality, and audience quality.
Within this framework, media quality is further segmented into two crucial components: "attention," referring to the prominence and visibility of an ad placement, and "situational context," which assesses the likelihood that the surrounding media environment fosters a receptive mood in the viewer. CIMM urges marketers to move beyond simplistic, binary quality assessments – such as the mere presence of an ID in a bid request or meeting minimum viewability thresholds. Instead, the paper champions the adoption of "non-binary, relative, and probabilistic" measurements, like attention scoring, which evaluate media quality on a spectrum of effectiveness.
These nuanced, non-binary approaches, Levin argues, are more conducive to cross-media comparisons and better equipped to capture the dynamic variations influenced by audience characteristics and time of day. The paper also underscores the importance of balancing short-term performance goals with long-term brand-building objectives, acknowledging that while smaller brands reliant on immediate results may need to prioritize short-term gains, the broader industry needs a more holistic view.
CTV as the Proving Ground and a Buy-Side Imperative
While CIMM’s paper offers guidance for the entire open web, the authors pinpoint streaming media and CTV supply as the critical proving ground. This segment represents the highest-stakes market, characterized by elevated CPMs, intense demand competition, and expansive creative canvases.
Dorosz further elaborates that CTV’s relative newness and lack of deep-seated dependency on 20+ year-old third-party cookie infrastructure mean its players are less constrained by existing industry inertia. Moreover, many traditional pixel-based measurement methodologies that function effectively on other platforms prove inadequate for CTV. For instance, the paper advocates for a complete re-evaluation of viewability measurement in the CTV context. Given that CTV ads typically autoplay with sound and occupy the full screen, the traditional definition of viewability becomes largely irrelevant.
Ultimately, while CIMM’s ambition is industry-wide adoption of its proposed framework, the authors concur that the buy side must spearhead this transformation. "These theories only matter," Dorosz concluded, "if the buy side demonstrates success and drives repeatability." This suggests that the onus is on advertisers and their agency partners to embrace these new measurement paradigms, prove their efficacy, and thereby drive systemic change throughout the advertising ecosystem. The implications of this shift are profound, potentially leading to more efficient media spend, enhanced campaign effectiveness, and a more sustainable and equitable advertising landscape for all participants.
