Adelaide links creative measurement to media buying with partner ecosystem

Attention measurement company Adelaide has launched the AU Ecosystem for Creative Partners (AECP), bringing together creative measurement companies to help advertisers better align creative and media decisions.

The initial partners include Adverteyes (formerly Realeyes), CreativeX, DAIVID, Ipsos, Neurons, Sundogs, and System1, enabling advertisers to use creative quality insights to influence media decisions.

Historically, creative and media have been evaluated separately, with advertisers testing the effectiveness of an ad independently from deciding where it should run. The AECP enables those decisions to be made together.

Speaking to The Media Leader at MAD//Fest yesterday, Adelaide CEO and co-founder Marc Guldimann said the company developed AECP after hearing that advertisers often struggled to translate creative testing into practical media decisions.

“We tried to make this really straightforward for advertisers because one of the things that we heard was when they get creative insights, sometimes it’s hard to action that on media,” he said.

Advertisers using AECP will receive adjustments to media quality based on the strength of an advert. Guldimann suggested that advertisers with particularly strong creative could potentially achieve the same results without paying for the highest-quality media inventory.

“The premise is basically, if your creative is really good, maybe you can save a little bit of money on media,” he said when talking about the launch during his panel session at MAD//Fest.

When speaking to The Media Leader, he added: “If you have great creative in a really bad placement, it’s going to struggle. And if you have really bad creative in a really good placement, you’re wasting money on media. If you get the right creative and the right media together, it’s going to have a compound effect.”

Adelaide said that early pilot work with launch partners suggests advertisers achieve stronger results when creative and media quality are considered together rather than in isolation.

In one study with Adverteyes and Teads, six display and online video campaigns were measured using Adelaide’s AU metric and Adverteyes’ creative scoring before being validated against independent brand lift research involving more than 16,000 respondents.

Campaigns that scored highly on both creative and media quality delivered 5.3 times greater brand awareness lift than campaigns that scored poorly on both. Campaigns that performed well on only one of the two measures also underperformed those that scored highly across both.

Through AECP, advertisers select a creative measurement partner based on their needs. The partner evaluates creative strength and delivers insights alongside the recommended Creative AU Adjustment, a signal for the level of media quality needed to support that creative. Advertisers can then use those combined signals when planning, buying and optimising campaigns.

According to Adelaide, the wider AU Ecosystem now includes more than 70 sell-side members and over 50 buy-side partners activating Adelaide’s AU metric through their offerings.

Guldimann said the company had previously attempted to combine creative and media measurement itself, but ultimately decided that partnering with specialist creative measurement companies would be more effective.

Ian Forrester, CEO and founder of DAIVID, told The Media Leader that bringing creative and media together in this way is “powerful for brands”.