Dozens of Premium Publishers Join Adelaide's New ‘AU Ecosystem’

The media measurement vendor Adelaide, which created the proprietary attention metric AU (attention unit), launched its most ambitious venture yet on Thursday, a marketplace called the AU Ecosystem.

The offering combines a suite of largely preexisting tools and services into a single, standardized marketplace through which media buyers and sellers can transact based on media quality, not just quantity.

More than 40 premium publishers—including The New York Times, Hearst Magazines, The Wall Street Journal, Spotify, the Financial Times, and NPR—have joined the ecosystem at launch, according to Adelaide founder and chief executive Marc Guldimann. 

“The vision is to create a new currency,” Guldimann said. “Gross rating points measure who you’re reaching. AU measures how well you’re reaching them.”

The rollout is the latest milestone in a years-long project of coalition-building, during which Adelaide has worked to educate and promote adoption of AUs among buy-side parties like brands and agencies, as well as their sell-side counterparts at publishers ranging from streamers to news organizations to audio platforms. The launch of the AU Ecosystem represents the culmination of those efforts, although the metric is still dramatically limited in its overall scale.

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How the AU Ecosystem works

The AU Ecosystem functions as a marketplace, but not in the traditional real-time bidding sense. 

Instead, it is a quality layer that sits across the buy and sell sides, facilitating attention-based transactions through four core offerings: sponsorship of AU measurement, inventory audits, high-AU curation, and AU guarantees.

Some publishers, like Hearst and Condé Nast, are covering the cost of AU measurement to reduce friction for advertisers. Others, like The Wall Street Journal and Spotify, are packaging their highest-performing inventory into premium attention deals. 

The Journal, for instance, ran six attention-guaranteed campaigns during the 2024 presidential race, according to Guldimann.

“The AU Ecosystem should be the gold standard for quality publishers,” said Brendan Spain, the vice president of advertising at the Financial Times. “It’s the first time the ad experience is aligned with the user experience.”

At the FT, AU scores have become central to how campaigns are packaged and priced, with clients now requesting them in RFPs. 

Some of the publisher’s ad formats have outperformed standard display ads by 40% to 52% on AU, according to Spain, which validates its historical emphasis on creating ad environments that prioritize reader engagement. 

The FT recently debuted a new high-attention product, called FT Focus, that reflects this philosophy.

From metric to market-maker

Since its founding in 2019, Adelaide has focused on positioning AU as the logical successor to viewability. 

Unlike viewability, which measures whether an ad is seen, AU attempts to quantify how well it is likely to be seen, taking into account placement, format, and surrounding context.

The concept has slowly gained traction among marketers and media owners. Adelaide now works with over 125 partners, including DSPs, SSPs, and major publishers, and has been integrated into Google’s Display & Video 360. 

On Tuesday, the measurement firm even published a case study using AU to compare YouTube inventory to that of other premium CTV streamers, which found YouTube ads to be 19% more effective.

“Every other market pays for quality,” said Guldimann. “In advertising, we’ve been stuck with proxies like CPM. We’re trying to change that by making media quality predictable.”

The goal is to position AU alongside legacy buying currencies like GRPs, but with a focus on the depth rather than the breadth of exposure. 

“It’s like Carfax or FICO for media,” Guldimann said. “We want to build a market-driven currency where price approaches value.”

Challenges remain for attention-based buying

Despite its momentum, the ecosystem still faces hurdles.

While AU offers a conceptual improvement over viewability, it brings its own challenges—particularly around education and standardization, according to U of Digital head of innovation Myles Younger.

“There’s an educational lift that has to happen,” said Younger. 

Publishers may also have to rethink how they bundle inventory. 

For instance, publishers often bundle high and low-quality inventory together to offer ad buyers scale, which helps publishers’ margins. A framework like AU, while beneficial in many respects to publishers, could put some of those margins at risk.

Despite these growing pains, the kind of industrywide reorientation that Adelaide is working to realize is a positive, according to Younger.

“Anything that moves the market toward judging quality is a good thing,” Younger said.