In a short-term context that prioritizes immediate results, the industry has tended to place greater value on quantity than quality, leaving aside, among other things, the value of advertising placements. However, a current within the sector invites us to redefine this conceptual framework and promote media purchasing based on quality.

Professionals and organizations argue that media quality, that is, the non-user-related attributes of a post such as attention and context, must move from being a passive optimization variable to becoming a fundamental element of market infrastructure. That is, the industry should take into account where an impression is actually published to determine its price.

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) published an analysis of this in May in which it defended the concept average quality (quality of the medium) as a fundamental element when evaluating the media that are part of marketing and communication strategies and better distinguishing mere impression from truly significant exhibitions.

The quality of the media

The CIMM defines media quality as attributes or characteristics of an advertising placement that are not tied to an individual user, but that help predict how effective that placement may be. Its two most important dimensions are Site Prominence; that is, the signals that indicate how likely it is that users will notice an advertisement in said medium; and Contextual Receptivity, that is, the signals that reflect the receptivity of the environment. The coalition claims that medium quality is one of the three drivers of effectiveness, along with creative quality and audience quality.

It also notes that media quality varies substantially within each channel and format, and should not be treated as a fixed or average characteristic. Each channel is determined by the prominence of the location, the context and the conditions of the printing, and can provide a varied distribution of them that ranges from a relatively small volume of high-quality, high-value exhibitions to a much larger proportion of lower quality inventory.

This has important implications for measurement and pricing. Channel-level averages hide that diversity, masking significant value differences between impressions that tend to be treated as equal in standard planning. As a result, purchasing decisions based on aggregate metrics run the risk of systematically overvaluing lower-quality offering and undervaluing high-quality inventory.

The movement towards quality

The CIMM believes that while it has been widely accepted by the industry that the characteristics of advertising placements – such as visibility, context or display environment – influence effectiveness, they must also be consistently integrated into media allocation and buying decisions to enable advertisers to distinguish, value and price the advertising opportunity.

The objective of giving greater importance to the quality of the media would be, among other things, budgetary efficiency. The authors of the text argue that decision-making based on the quality of the media will allow us to stop overpaying or spending excessively on a supply of low-quality advertising placements and begin to value them based on their real probability of generating commercial results.

The intention would also be to adapt to a new relational and communicative ecosystem in which artificial intelligence gains prominence in the way of discovering information, products and brands. At the same time, reframing identity-based targeting and attribution to protect user privacy also drives the need to evaluate the value of each impression.

Consciously or unconsciously, the market has been reorienting itself towards quality.
An example of this is the growth of private marketplaces and guaranteed programmatic purchasing. Advertisers increasingly prefer environments that offer greater transparency, greater integrity in the offer, less advertising saturation, more reliable content, better service conditions and more predictable delivery. This is not coincidental. It reflects a greater understanding by the market that inventory quality significantly affects effectiveness.

However, the CIMM considers it necessary to establish clearer and more aligned definitions and frameworks within the industry to help advertisers achieve quality in media purchasing and measurement. The coalition’s argument rethinks the concept of media quality, moving it away from the subjective and orienting it towards predictive effectiveness.

Measurable media quality

The term “quality” may seem relative, because the media, platforms and other agents in the sector can affirm that their spaces have quality. But the report notes that the concept should be understood as the degree to which location characteristics help predict advertising effectiveness.

It thus ensures that the variables involved in its definition are not measurable, and marketing professionals have much more visibility over these conditions than ever before. The industry can now analyze whether an ad has been shown, but also whether it was likely to be seen, whether the surrounding environment favored receptivity, whether the placement created strong conditions for recall, or whether the overall context increased or reduced the likelihood of impact.

The report advocates for the establishment of clearer, more aligned definitions and frameworks across the industry on quality in media buying and measurement of effectiveness. In order to translate the concept into practice, the coalition proposes a set of actions that involve deliberate changes in planning, purchasing and measurement workflows. They are the following:

• Audit current exposure to quality variation

Advertisers should analyze recent campaigns to assess how spend, impressions, and CPMs are distributed across key quality dimensions such as time of day, content type, and geography. The goal is to identify whether the current allocation reflects expected differences in value.

• Introduce quality as a pricing and budget allocation variable

Media quality must be incorporated as a continuous input into purchasing decisions. Simple implementations, such as adjusting bids or allocations by time slot or content type, can begin to align cost with expected effectiveness.

• Integrate quality into measurement frameworks

Measurement, including MMM (Marketing Mix Model), incrementality testing, and campaign reporting, must explicitly take Media Quality into account. When quality is not parameterized, its effects are likely to be misattributed or averaged, limiting decision accuracy.

• Establish a testing schedule

Organizations should implement a combination of testing and experiments to evaluate the impact of quality-based purchasing. The goal is to build an internal evidence base that links media quality adjustments to both short-term performance and long-term outcomes.

• Require and validate quality signals in planning

Agencies should request quality signals, such as placement characteristics, advertising load, and contextual data, in requests for proposals; and signals must be validated either through reporting, third-party measurements, or direct interaction with the media.

• Align business incentives with quality results

Progress depends on aligning prices with value. Advertisers and agencies must be willing to pay for demonstrably superior quality inventory, while media outlets must display signals in ways that enable differentiation without undermining performance.

• Prioritize connected TV as the deployment environment

Given its level of growth and other elements, such as its high CPM, its wide variation in quality and its evolving space purchasing infrastructure, the coalition believes that Connected Television (CTV) should be the initial focus for standardization, testing and quality-based purchasing efforts.

More info: Quality Matters: navigating quality in media buying and measurement