In addition to the growing body of evidence for the value of news media advertising, another reason to be optimistic in the long-term is that the market is finally starting to value, define, and price quality itself. 

In May, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (an industry trade association that is part of the well-respected Advertising Research Federation) published Quality Matters: Navigating Quality in Media Buying and Measurement, a paper I had a hand in alongside Erez Levin and CIMM’s Managing Director Jon Watts. 

The core argument is that media quality, the non-user attributes of a placement such as attention and context, has to graduate from a soft optimisation variable into market infrastructure. In other words, the market hasn’t considered where an impression actually runs to be relevant to its price at all, which has devalued the relationship of trust between source and audience that is strongest in quality news.

CIMM is now running an industry consultation to work out how to apply it in real buying, with CTV as the proving ground because that is where the CPMs, the competition, and the waste are highest. As Erez Levin put it when the work was previewed, 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.”

The point of turning it into shared infrastructure is to give agencies, platforms, and publishers a common answer when a buyer asks how they measure quality instead of letting every vendor grade its own homework. 

For a premium newsroom the payoff is concrete: It enables a proper consideration of the attention and context that is currently not included at all in the CPM. The goal is to create a set of measurable, transactable signals the market can use to value and price one impression against another. And if that happens, the impact on news will be only positive.

The timing is not an accident. As Watts argued separately, the industry spent a decade organising itself around identity, user IDs, behavioural targeting, and attribution. Those signals are getting significantly less deterministic across the open Web, and quality signals such as attention, context, and placement-level metadata are filling the gap as the better guide to what an impression is actually worth.

You can see why the appetite is there. Writing in The Media Leader, Omar Oakes called the CPM “cost per meaningless thousand,” a metric that does not measure value so much as make cheap inventory look like a bargain.

His point has real importance right now: Meta is on course to take 26.8% of global adspend, passing Google, after a 12% rise in its average ad price drove a 33% jump in ad revenue. 

A piece published in Mi3 by Guy Burbidge and Paul Butler focused on the “great reach trap” argues the industry took Ehrenberg-Bass’ case for reach and flattened it into “maximise reach, minimise CPM.” Only 20% of impressions get meaningful attention, which means billions in spend lands in places that are technically seen and never remembered.

The cheap-reach trade is getting more expensive and less effective (if it ever was), which makes the case for buying quality instead a great deal easier to make.

Quality is also starting to show up as a product, not just an argument. Gamera, a media-quality measurement startup for publishers, raised US$1.6 million from backers including The Trade Desk’s venture arm, to help publishers signal the value of their inventory in the bidstream rather than watch it get commoditised.

Its co-founder Gareth Glaser will be on stage at the INMA Media Advertising Summit, as will Adelaide’s Marc Guldimann, whose Attention Unit (AU) metric is one of the clearer attempts to put a single number on impression quality. 

I don’t want to overstate it, but all of this does seem to mean there are meaningful signals that aspects of the advertising market are starting to (finally) shift in publishers’ favour. As identity fades and machines do more of the buying, value moves to the environments that can prove attention, trust, and quality. 

We’re going to be discussing all of this in detail in New York in December, and once again, hope to see you there. 

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Banner photo: Adobe stock image by Bloomicon.

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