An Interview With Adelaide’s Marc Guldimann
Published in partnership with Adelaide
For as long as I’ve known him, I’ve had tremendous appreciation for the way Marc Guldimann looks at the world. In 2015, I recall being fascinated by the cost-per-second model for pricing media that his prior company, Parsec, pioneered. It seemed like a no-brainer for high-quality publications with lots of long-form content, such as the Financial Times, to embrace, and perhaps one day will become much more commonly used. That business, which focused on monetizing media, was sold to Kargo in 2022 and the measurement capabilities of Parsec were spun out to become Adelaide. Now solely focused on media quality measurement, Adelaide offers attention metrics that allow marketers to compare publishers and placements across channels using an attention “score” and prioritize their spending incorporating that information. To explore the business further, I interviewed him via email.
Marc, how do you describe Adelaide in a nutshell?
Adelaide rates the quality of media placements using attention and outcome data. We help brands make smarter media investment decisions by easily leveraging precise media quality scores. We also help publishers highlight the value of inventory and drive demand with various activation tools. Our goal is to increase the transparency of media quality, align the interests of buyers and sellers, boost demand for high-quality media, and incentivize the production of higher-quality placements.
Was there any particular moment in your career that caused you to initially think about conventions in media trading that excluded time or attention? Or maybe put differently, what was the origin story of Adelaide and Parsec before that?
My fascination with digital metrics dates back nearly 20 years to my first startup, Spongecell. After raising money from IPG for our event promotions platform, we pivoted to display advertising. Digital media’s focus on impressions, clicks, and, eventually, viewability didn’t make sense—they seemed like poor proxies for media quality susceptible to gaming.
At Spongecell, we made a few attempts to replace clicks and impressions with engagement. We built some interesting functionality that made it easier to engage with ads but had limited success establishing it as a KPI or currency. I left in 2011 after the board decided to focus on DCO. In 2015, I got back into the rich media space with Sled/Parsec. Jonah Goodhart, who was working on attention metrics at Moat, invested and encouraged us to create an ad network that would transact on attention.
At Parsec, we learned that attention metrics were predictive of outcomes, and selling on a cost-per-second of attention drove more efficient outcomes than traditional metrics. It was only when we tried to optimize to the maximum amount of attention per impression that things started to get weird—our choices around creative and audience didn’t necessarily align with the advertiser’s best outcomes. For instance, we were reaching older and over-frequencied audiences, who typically spend more time with ads but not always because they’re interested in a product or brand. It was a great example of (Charles) Goodhart's Law.
When Adelaide developed AU, we focused on media quality: measuring a placement’s probability of capturing attention rather than how long it held attention (which is more influenced by creative). This approach helps advertisers avoid the unintended consequences we see with duration-based metrics and, instead, enables them to tune media buying algorithms to drive the best possible outcomes.
Presumably, you’ve quantified the advantage of buying against attention vs. the alternative. Can you summarize that here?
Advertisers don’t have a relative measure of placement quality on most channels. In some digital channels, it’s possible to use viewability, a hurdle of 50% of the pixels on screen for 1 or 2 seconds. Viewability was initially intended as a sanitary threshold but quickly became a KPI. This misapplication kicked off a negative feedback loop as buyers focused on vCPM and sellers diluted media quality to support lower prices.
Adelaide’s AU metric equips marketers with a more precise measure of media quality, applicable across 95% of their spend. It integrates hundreds of media quality signals, eye-tracking data, and outcome data to predict any placement’s potential for driving attention and subsequent impact. This allows advertisers to make smarter planning and buying decisions based on a metric that actually proxies their desired outcomes. Advertisers using AU see around a 20–40% improvement in campaign performance compared to traditional optimization tactics. Think of it like a credit score for media placements.
Our research indicates significant market inefficiencies and a high degree of variance between cost and quality still exist. So, in the short term, there’s an arbitrage opportunity for advertisers who adopt AU. And, over time, as AU becomes a media currency, it will ensure advertisers have consistent access to quality media while publishers can confidently monetize it.
Is all attention good attention? Meaning just because a publisher produces an environment that captures a consumer’s attention, does it necessarily follow that attentiveness is positive for brands?
In most ways, yes. There are certainly some environments that externalize costs to audiences or society, but outside of annoying placements running obnoxious creative, it’s similar to PR in the long run.
When it comes to premium publishers, there is very little attention that doesn’t drive a net positive for brands. Every study I’ve seen on the effectiveness of brand safety shows that attention levels and eventual campaign impact are substantially higher from “unsafe” inventory.
As branding becomes more of a performance game, I wouldn’t be surprised if media buyers started to experiment with removing brand safety tools on premium content.
In a recent ARF study intended to “evaluate and compare the current attention measurement methods in creative testing” there was a passage that noted “it is tempting to look for the relationship between attention and sales.” The study notes that only 2 of 12 measurement companies involved explicitly correlate their attention metrics with sales but where those correlations are noted they are very low. Of course, the ARF correctly adds that “many believe it is overly simplistic to expect a direct correlation between high quality creative and sales.” Can you talk about your thoughts on the connection between attention and sales or other outcomes?
Creative needs to balance capturing and holding attention with showing branding like logos and distinctive assets. There is an inherent tension between the amount of attention an ad captures and how heavily branded it is. So it’s not surprising that the ARF Phase 2 study couldn’t find a connection between the amount of attention paid to creative and business outcomes.
It’s important to note that, when used to measure media quality, the connection between attention metrics and business outcomes has been consistently proven.
Marc, is your solution MRC accredited? Does that have any practical implications for your clients?
It’s not accredited yet. AU is currently under review. There won't be any day to day changes for our clients - still the same AU offering the same accurate measurement, performant targeting and insightful planning. However, the MRC’s rigor might make it easier for early-adopters to convince the rest of the market that attention metrics are a trustworthy option for measuring media quality.
A general observation of mine when I’ve thought about the world of television, at least: innocuous content makes ads stand out while engaging content can make ads seem irritating. In other words, it seems like the type of content someone is consuming can qualitatively impact attention. Have you ever found that?
Yes, content impacts the probability and quality of attention. We license a lot of data from TVision to build AU models for TV and CTV and have found that the genre of channels and shows is very predictive of attention.
Advertisers should think about the impact of context on attention two ways: generally, some genres perform better than others across all campaigns, and then, more specifically, the relevance of content to an individual advertiser or creative will impact performance.
What do you observe publishers can do to improve the attention that consumers pay to their content?
Advertising environments with fewer, more prominent ads tend to be higher quality. We’ve found that increasing ad load to just two or three in-view ads can drive a 3–15% decrease in AU scores across all ads on the page. Clutter affects outcomes across nearly every channel. So, generally speaking, less cluttered environments will enhance overall media quality, advertising outcomes, and consumer experiences.
Regardless of any of the considerations above, buying media using attention metrics seems obviously beneficial. But I observe that when marketers choose not to make a seemingly obvious decision, there’s often a good explanation for it. What’s the best reason you have heard that explains why some marketers don’t want to consider incorporating these metrics?
There are two reasons: broken solutions or incentives.
The most glaring issue is vendors selling “attention metrics” that either lack actionable insights or don’t work very well in practice. We’ve engaged with several advertisers who struggled to connect duration-based attention metrics with business outcomes, so there’s a bit of a reeducation process. In many ways, it’s harder to convince someone who was burned by bad attention metrics than a late adopter.
Thankfully, recent research from Kantar and the ARF data mentioned previously help explain why duration-based metrics aren’t a good approach for creative or media. In short, duration-based metrics create unintended audience and creative incentives, which can cause campaigns to malfunction when used programmatically.
Outside of broken products, incentives around lowering cost are the biggest factor holding broad adoption of attention metrics back. After decades of opaque quality, many marketing organizations have devolved into setting goals around lowering CPMs. If a marketer is goaled on lowering CPMs without regard for quality, and subsequently value, they typically won’t have much interest in attention metrics.
Performance-based or outcome-based media is dominating digital advertising, and I don’t see any path back toward branding being the primary focus—in terms of budget allocations—for today’s largest marketers. In a world where marketers are focused on “performance,” even superficial performance, such as when you attribute the sale of a product to someone who was already going to buy that product, does attention still have a role?
A couple of ideas to unpack here.
First, efficient performance relies on strong branding. The idea that people will buy things from brands they don’t know because the offer is presented at the right time in the right context is silly. Advertisers who focus on the bottom of the funnel exclusively will soon find the cost of lower funnel outcomes dramatically increasing. Tracksuit and Tik Tok recently released some research where brands with high awareness had 3x the conversion rate or low awareness brands. This is something that Binet and Field have been talking about for years.
Second, when attention metrics are used to measure the placement quality, those ratings are equally useful for upper and lower funnel campaigns. High quality media will help creative perform better no matter what that creative is trying to accomplish - for the most part.
What’s next on your product roadmap? How do you see what’s next complementing or extending your existing offerings?
We have some very exciting endorsements of AU in the works—in fact, we’re actively working towards accreditation with the MRC.
On the product side, we just concluded our beta for pre-bid targeting with The Trade Desk, so AU-based pre-bid segments are now available to advertisers globally. This advancement is particularly exciting, as our clients can now dynamically target higher-quality media using AU with the click of a button.
We also recently announced the launch of AU Guarantees with the Wall Street Journal, which will be available during election season. Overall, we’re starting to see a bunch of premium publishers lean into “guaranteed AU” products, so more to come on that front.
Outside of business, what are you paying outsized attention to in the world or in day-to-day life?
I’m getting old, so selfishly, my health. I’ve been fasting, lifting, and meditating a lot more. Starting this month I’m going to be spending most of my time in the Bay Area, which will allow me to be closer to my friends and family and spring skiing in Tahoe.