Yahoo Lets Advertisers Buy Based on Attention With Adelaide Tie Up

Yahoo and attention vendor Adelaide are letting advertisers buy high-attention pre-bid segments through the Yahoo demand-side platform, according to Yahoo chief revenue officer Elizabeth Herbst-Brady.

This is the latest industry move focused on elevating attention-based advertising, which should, if successful, make ads more effective, improve the reading experience and, ultimately, lead to higher revenues for publishers.

The integration, available in Q3, will let marketers use attention units (AU) as a filter in the Yahoo DSP, letting advertisers bid on inventory that Adelaide predicts will net higher rates of attention, said Marc Guldimann, founder and chief executive of Adelaide. 

“Attention is growing more important to clients as the world gets more complicated, and it also drives toward transparency,” Herbst-Brady said. “Advertisers have always wanted to understand the value of their investment, and this allows them to do that.”

The solution makes Yahoo the first major DSP to make AU available in pre-bid segments, according to Guldimann. It also makes Yahoo the first DSP to onboard data through the Adelaide API, meaning the segments will refresh over the course of hours rather than weeks.

For Yahoo, as concerns over supply chain optimization prompt media buyers to reassess their ad-tech partners, this gives it a key element of differentiation. In February, Yahoo shuttered its supply-side platform to focus exclusively on its demand business.

For Adelaide, this offers a key point of distribution for its technology, a new line of revenue and an early mover advantage in the nascent industry of attention-based advertising, as parties throughout the supply chain scramble to find alternative methods of measurement that don’t rely on third-party cookies.

But while advertisers have expressed early interest in attention, the technology needs buy-in from the supply side, which will have to pass AU data in the programmatic bidstream in order for the Yahoo DSP to segment it.

Whereas with other DSPs they are using Adelaide as a post-campaign reporting tool, with Yahoo they are getting ahead of it.

Shiv Gupta, founder, U of Digital

For publishers, such buy-in could spur a shift in site design, as it would reorient websites around a metric that prizes an uncluttered ad experience.

Unlocking brand performance

Historically, marketers have used attention as a post-campaign tool, but a pre-bid integration lets media buyers make use of the data before and during campaigns, said Shiv Gupta, founder of U of Digital.

To quantify attention, Adelaide measures and combines three variables—the quality and placement of the ad unit, eye-tracking feedback from focus groups and a machine-learning algorithm trained on outcome data—to assign ad placements an attention score between 0 and 100. 

Through the new integration, advertisers using the Yahoo DSP will be able to see the predicted AU score of an ad unit and bid on it accordingly, said Guldimann. 

In theory, the inventory Adelaide rates as high-attention will outperform those it rates as low-attention, so advertisers can avoid waste by knowing ahead of time which inventory will be effective.

“Whereas with other DSPs they are using Adelaide as a post-campaign reporting tool, with Yahoo they are getting ahead of it,” Gupta said. “So your outcomes should be much better.”

If the technology works as advertised, marketers can use attention to tie their brand-marketing buys to specific outcomes and be able to optimize those campaigns and produce better results, said Gupta, potentially increasing brand marketing budgets.

Aligning incentives

Adoption from the buy side could also encourage publishers to embrace attention, a shift that could reshape the open web.

Currently, many publishers design their websites to perform well against rubrics like viewability and video completion—which tick performance boxes for advertisers but rankle readers, who must contend with invasive pop-up ads and full-screen takeovers.

In its more than 50 case studies, Adelaide has found that publishers whose inventory and site design take user experience into consideration generate higher rates of attention.

The technology could produce a virtuous cycle in which reader-friendly ad experiences yield the highest attention, making them more valuable to advertisers. Publishers would then be incentivized to prune their pages because the inventory would fetch higher CPMs. 

The solution would serve the interests of all three parties—advertisers, readers and publishers—by aligning their incentives.

“A lot of publishers want to create good experiences for readers and advertisers,” Guldimann said. “This is one step in the direction of helping advertisers create demand around high-quality media placements.”