Why Media Quality Should Be The Center Of Attention | AdExchanger

"Consider how everyday systems rely on consistent and agreed-upon standards for measuring quality and quantity, like fueling a car or calculating electricity by wattage. If you went to a gas station, for example, and they didn't have gallons and octane, how would you know what you were buying or how much you were getting? You'd have to invent complicated systems to track every little factor - like tire pressure, weather conditions and whether to roll up your windows - just to try and guess how well that fuel would get you where you wanted to go."

"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," Guldimann says on this week's episode of AdExchanger Talks. Ad tech has that exact problem, Guldimann says. "We don't have a good measure of the quality or quantity of the advertising we bought, so we build this big attribution system," he says. "Except that, instead of being a weirdo that measures all the different metrics in your car, we just wholesale invade the privacy of 400 million people."

"A lack of media quality standards is also responsible for the industry's recent obsession with measuring outcomes. But fixating and transacting on outcomes "is a bad idea," Guldimann argues. It sounds great on paper, he says, but the end result is a bunch of media companies tripping all over themselves to chase cheap, low-value results. So what's the fix? Unsurprisingly, Guldimann believes measuring attention isn't a bad place to start. And it's hard to argue that attention isn't a reliable indicator of quality and performance - and that's worth shelling out for."

A lack of shared standards for measuring media quality drives invasive tracking and complex attribution systems that harvest user data. Without consistent measurement units, advertisers manufacture elaborate proxy metrics that escalate privacy intrusions. The industry's fixation on outcomes incentivizes chasing cheap, low-value results and undermines media value. Measuring attention offers a clearer, purchase-worthy indicator of ad quality and performance. Attention-based metrics can provide buyers with transparency into media quality and reduce reliance on per-user tracking, aligning spending with demonstrable audience engagement rather than noisy outcome proxies.

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