Observed Signal · Jan 7, 2026 · Partnership · Source: ExchangeWire · Impact: 3/5 · Sentiment: Positive
Adelaide Enhances Media Quality with Index Marketplaces Integration
Adelaide's AU attention-based media quality metric is now integrated into Index Marketplaces, expanding access to Adelaide’s measurement within sell-side curation workflows. The collaboration positions AU as a standardized, outcome-linked quality signal at deal creation, enabling buyers and marketplace partners to evaluate and package media quality at scale across DSPs. Index Marketplaces, Index Exchange’s omnichannel platform for curated, signal-rich supply activation and sell-side decisioning, also highlights GPID support, with testing indicating a 25% improvement in accuracy. Adelaide’s AU metric predicts placement attention and impact, helping brands and agencies optimize spend while publishers reflect value. Executives Marc Guldimann and Marybeth McGaugh emphasize that this integration advances transparent, higher-quality curated supply and broader data activation.
Expansion of attention-based media quality into sell-side curation via Index Marketplaces; signals broader data activation for programmatic buying.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Adelaide's AU metric is now available in Index Marketplaces.
- Index Marketplaces is Index Exchange’s omnichannel platform for curated, signal-rich supply activation and sell-side decisioning.
- The integration introduces an outcome-linked quality signal at the point of deal creation.
- GPID support is highlighted, with testing indicating a 25% improvement in accuracy.
- Adelaide's AU metric predicts placement attention and impact and is used as a trading signal.
Connected Companies & Entities
2 Entities mappedRelated Market Signals & Shifts
Recent verified developments and strategic activity across this market segment.
Adelaide Attention Targeting Goes Live in Amazon DSP
Adelaide, an attention measurement provider, announced that its AU attention metric is now available for pre-bid targeting in Amazon DSP, allowing advertisers to target high- and medium-attention inventory and filter out low-attention placements. Amazon DSP will also adopt Adelaide’s AU Quality Floor to exclude impressions in the bottom 10% of AU scores and, by default, inventory from publishers flagged as made-for-advertising (MFA) per Jounce Media. AU-based pre-bid targeting is already available in multiple DSPs (The Trade Desk, Viant, Yahoo DSP, Adobe Advertising DSP, Equativ), and Adelaide says it measured attention across Amazon’s owned-and-operated properties during the integration. Adelaide supports AU scoring across CTV, online video and display today, with audio planned later. Nestlé is testing attention as a potential currency for media deals but continues to treat it as one of several publisher-quality signals rather than a sole determinant of media value.
Heineken Combines Attention and Brand Lift Metrics
Heineken is testing a new approach that combines brand lift studies with attention metrics to validate the effectiveness of its display advertising and secure more budget for non-walled-garden channels. Working with GumGum, the brewer uses "Attentive Lift" to overlay brand awareness data from On Device with attention time measurements. A test for the Birra Moretti brand showed an 8% increase in unaided awareness and a 4% increase in familiarity among consumers who viewed ads for more than 2.2 seconds. Heineken's in-house media team plans to use these benchmarks to guide media planning, optimizing for quality of exposure rather than just volume. The method is being adopted across U.K. display campaigns, including for Old Mout. Critics warn against relying solely on attention metrics, but the combination with brand lift is seen as a more balanced approach.
Former Utiq and Xandr/Microsoft Leader Joins illuma for AI Scaling
illuma, a London-based AI company specializing in contextual decision intelligence, has appointed Michel Guillon as head of solutions architecture. Guillon brings two decades of adtech leadership experience from Utiq and AppNexus/Xandr/Microsoft, where he worked closely with illuma's integrations. His role will help partners integrate illuma's contextual intelligence into their systems at enterprise scale, leveraging his deep knowledge of DSP and SSP architecture and data interoperability. illuma's AI technology is used by brands, agencies, publishers, and platforms to optimize advertising decisions in real time, and is available through major platforms including The Trade Desk, Equativ, Index Exchange, Amazon, DV360, Yahoo, OpenX, PubMatic, and Magnite. The appointment underscores illuma's expansion across leading advertising platforms.
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