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.
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.”
