Adelaide today said its AU Ecosystem, the program through which publishers, ad platforms and measurement firms sell or use its attention-based media quality score, has reached 100 partners, after four video curation companies - Pixability, Sightly, Silverpush and Cadent VuePlanner - joined as the first members of a new category for curated connected TV and online video inventory.

In Short

Adelaide sells a score, called AU, that estimates how likely an ad spot is to be noticed and to lead to a sale or other result. Four companies that hand-pick YouTube channels and streaming video for advertisers will now grade their picks with that score, which Adelaide says takes its partner program to 100 members. Brands buying video get a common yardstick for comparing a curated package with an ordinary purchase, but the yardstick is Adelaide's own model, and no prices or test results came with the news. Adelaide's own partner counts have also moved in ways it has not explained, so 100 is best read as a program milestone rather than a full tally of every company using AU.

A fifth category, built for video

The announcement, issued from New York today, adds video curators as the fifth partner category in the AU Ecosystem, the program built around Adelaide's Attention Unit score. The other four, according to Adelaide, are publishers and media owners, programmatic platforms, creative measurement partners and outcome measurement partners. The expansion, the company says, is meant to help curators and their advertising clients "assess, validate, and improve the quality of curated inventory" across connected TV and online video.

The pitch rests on a gap Adelaide sees in how curation works. Video curators pick channels, individual videos and content environments using contextual, audience and brand suitability signals. According to the release, those signals "guide placement decisions but don't necessarily indicate a placement's relative quality compared to other opportunities." AU is presented as the missing piece: "an independent, outcome-trained media quality measure that lets advertisers benchmark curated inventory against standard buys and evaluate it alongside other media investments."

There is also an in-flight role. Where data at the level of a channel or a piece of content is available, Adelaide says curators can refine inclusion lists and shift spend toward higher-scoring environments while campaigns are running. The release does not say how often scores update, what share of curated inventory can be scored at channel or video level, or how much spend curators expect to move as a result.

Marc Guldimann, Adelaide's chief executive and co-founder, told PPC Land the curators will use AU "for curation, guarantees and measurement." The release itself does not describe any guarantee terms for video.

What each curator says it will do

The four companies do not use AU in the same way, according to the descriptions in the release.

Pixability

Pixability pairs AU with Pixie, its agentic AI platform for YouTube curation and optimization, to "identify high-attention creator channels and evaluate the quality of paid and sponsored inventory," according to the release. That last phrase covers both ads bought on YouTube and creator sponsorships, a distinction the release does not expand on.

Pixie is just over a year old. Pixability, based in Boston, launched it on September 9, 2025, describing it as a tool for curating YouTube channels for advertising and creator campaigns using more than 1,200 proprietary and partner signals. At launch, the company claimed Pixie delivered 8.6 times the relevant reach of a standard inclusion list and built campaigns up to 60 times faster, without independent verification. A month later, on October 6, 2025, YouTube named Pixability among the four inaugural members of its activation partners program, alongside Channel Factory, MiQ Digital and Zefr. None of those three appears among today's curators.

Sightly

Sightly combines AU with "real-time contextual, audience, and cultural intelligence" from its Brand Mentality platform, according to the release, "to examine how media platforms, content environments, and cultural relevance influence attention and campaign effectiveness."

The company's YouTube work goes back years. In January 2019, Sightly and Horizon Media reported a brand safety pass rate of over 99% in a beta of IAS's YouTube brand safety and suitability measurement, with Sightly describing itself as the first third-party Google partner to use it. Sightly is not quoted in today's release.

Silverpush

Silverpush "adds AU measurement to its AI-powered contextual video campaigns, identifying higher-attention tactics at the video level to inform optimization," according to the release. Of the four descriptions, it is the only one framed around comparing tactics rather than selecting inventory.

Cadent VuePlanner

Cadent VuePlanner "applies AU to curated YouTube inventory, adding an independent quality signal to its curation within Cadent's broader Total Video offering," according to the release.

VuePlanner has been part of Cadent for less than a year. Cadent acquired the New York company on December 9, 2025, according to Advanced Television, which described VuePlanner as a YouTube planning, optimization and measurement specialist and one of seven companies in YouTube's measurement program. Financial terms were not disclosed. Two weeks before the deal, on November 25, 2025, VuePlanner integrated creative scoring from Sundogs into its CreativeVue suite, measuring more than 150 ad attributes to forecast results before launch. Sundogs has since joined Adelaide's ecosystem too, as one of its creative partners. Cadent is not quoted in the release.

What the executives said

Guldimann framed the milestone as evidence of adoption. "When we launched the AU Ecosystem, our goal was to make AU actionable across the campaign lifecycle by giving advertisers one place to find trusted partners for planning, buying, measurement, and optimization," he said. "Reaching 100 partners shows that AU is gaining traction as a standard. Video curators are a natural next step, given their role in determining where video budgets go. AU helps them make better buying decisions for clients and substantiate the quality of media delivered."

David George, chief executive of Pixability, focused on scale. "YouTube's scale is a significant opportunity for marketers, but only if they can find and target the right creator content," he said. "Pixie, Pixability's agentic curation solution, now layers in Adelaide's attention and outcome-probability data, so brands can curate YouTube content at scale based on what's most likely to capture attention and drive results."

Blaise Lucey, vice president of global marketing at Silverpush, described AU as a second opinion on his company's own targeting. "Our video-level contextual intelligence helps identify opportunities that broader targeting approaches can overlook," he said. "AU adds an outcome-trained quality signal, allowing us to pinpoint which strategies offer stronger attention potential and apply those findings while campaigns are live."

None of the three statements includes a campaign result.

From nearly 50 publishers to 100 partners

The ecosystem is younger than the metric. According to Adelaide, more than 125 DSPs, SSPs, ad networks, publishers and other partners were already using AU data after the company launched a program called AU Everywhere in 2023. The AU Ecosystem came later, as a narrower marketplace in which members sell or package products built on the score.

Adelaide unveiled it on May 22, 2025, with nearly 50 publishers across five channels, according to the company. Its launch materials said 42 publishers, including Condé Nast, Hearst and The New York Times, offered free AU measurement on campaigns; more than 15 publishers, including The Wall Street Journal and Spotify, plus five SSPs, were in market with high-AU inventory packages; and The Wall Street Journal had run six attention-guaranteed test campaigns during the 2024 presidential election. A publisher announcement in June 2025 described the same group as 40 premium publishers.

The count then climbed in steps:

  • On October 23, 2025, Adelaide opened a dedicated website for the program, with 54 partners participating.
  • On October 31, 2025, Uber Advertising launched a custom AU model built with Adelaide and Kantar, and became the first platform to join through the program.
  • On July 8, 2026, Adelaide added creative measurement partners, launching with Adverteyes (formerly Realeyes), CreativeX, DAIVID, Ipsos, Neurons, Sundogs and System1.
  • On October 14, 2026, it added outcome measurement partners, launching with Cint, Dynata, MX8 Labs and Upwave, and said the ecosystem spanned 87 companies.

Today's figure is 100. The arithmetic does not fully close. The four curators take October's 87 to 91, by PPC Land's calculation, which leaves nine members whose arrival the release does not account for. Adelaide's July announcement also said the ecosystem included more than 70 sell-side members and over 50 buy-side partners activating AU, a combined figure above 120 that is hard to square with the 87 reported three months later. The two numbers may count different things, but Adelaide has not published how it counts members, and the partner directory on its portal requires sign-in.

Who is in the first 100

The release names only the four curators. Guldimann told PPC Land that the first 100 partners include The Trade Desk, Amazon Ads, Yahoo DSP, Magnite, PubMatic and Index Exchange on the programmatic side, and The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Disney among publishers.

Several of those relationships have been public for some time. Teads and Adelaide's high-attention private marketplaces have been available through The Trade Desk and Yahoo since August 2023. In June 2025, Comscore, Adelaide and PubMatic added AU to Comscore-certified deal IDs across PubMatic's SSP. On June 10, 2026, Adelaide brought AU pre-bid segments to Amazon DSP for display, online video and streaming TV, along with a quality floor that excludes made-for-advertising sites and the bottom 10% of scored placements. And only yesterday, Teads let advertisers set an AU floor inside Teads Ad Manager for web and CTV InStream campaigns.

The guarantee model that Guldimann mentions for curators also has a precedent in video. On January 27, 2026, Vevo launched "Attention Guaranteed" with Adelaide, promising a minimum attention score for brand campaigns. Adelaide's research found Vevo's YouTube CTV inventory scored 28% above average benchmarks.

The list Guldimann gave is a sample, not a roster. It does not include Google, even though Google made AU a signal in DV360 custom bidding from mid-July 2026. Whether DV360 counts as an ecosystem partner, or whether Adelaide treats bidding integrations differently from members, is not stated.

Why YouTube is where curation and quality collide

In the release, two of the four curators, Pixability and Cadent VuePlanner, apply AU specifically to YouTube, and Sightly's work on the platform dates back to at least 2019. YouTube's breadth is both its appeal and its problem for buyers.

In March 2026, Scott Konopasek, a former media director at Noble People who now works on YouTube curation, described campaigns that reached 500,000 channels and upward of 3 million individual videos, with placement missing the mark 30% to 50% of the time. He argued that curation on YouTube is more about exclusion than inclusion, since three of the four YouTube campaign types he described allow only exclusion targeting. Curators sell the work of narrowing that inventory. What they have lacked, in Adelaide's telling, is an outside measure to show that the narrower set is better rather than merely smaller.

Curation is also crowded on the open web and CTV, though there the term usually refers to packaging supply into deals rather than picking channels. Magnite combined curation and activation in its ClearLine platform in October 2025. Google said on October 22, 2026, that the DV360 Marketplace now offers Gemini-curated media bundles with single-click activation. And an OpenX report found that supply-side targeting reached 51% of US CTV deal spend in 2025, up from 9% in 2022. As more spend flows through packages assembled by someone other than the buyer, the question of how to check the contents grows more pressing.

The claim that no rival has anything like it

Guldimann made a sweeping claim alongside the announcement. "No other measurement vendor, even the existing verification companies, have anything like the AU Ecosystem," he told PPC Land.

The claim concerns the partner program, not attention measurement as such. Both of the largest verification companies sell attention products. DoubleVerify launched DV Authentic Attention for Social with Snap in June 2025, combining its exposure data with Lumen eye-tracking. IAS sells Quality Attention, which Stellantis and Publicis Media ran across more than 13 billion impressions in 19 countries, according to a case study published in June 2026. What those vendors do not market is a directory in which publishers, platforms, curators and research firms list products built on their score and take introduction requests from advertisers. Whether that makes the AU Ecosystem unique, or simply differently packaged, depends on how far one stretches the word "anything."

Ownership adds a complication. When Cadent bought VuePlanner in December 2025, Advanced Television described it as a portfolio company of the private equity firm Novacap. Novacap agreed to buy IAS for about $1.9 billion in September 2025 and, according to IAS, completed the deal on December 23, 2025. One of today's curators therefore shares an owner with one of the verification companies Guldimann's remark referred to. On the other side, Nielsen, which added AU to its Outcomes Marketplace in October 2025, agreed in August 2026 to acquire DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion, a deal expected to close by the first quarter of 2027. Adelaide's partners and its verification rivals increasingly sit under the same owners, or soon will.

Quality, outcomes and who checks whom

The release describes AU as "independent" and "outcome-trained." Both words carry weight.

On outcomes, the industry's own rules urge caution. When the Media Rating Council and IAB finalized attention measurement guidelines on November 12, 2025, they stated that attention should not be used as a measure of outcomes. Adelaide's position is that AU is a model trained on outcome data that forecasts results, not a claim that attention is a result. The release's boilerplate goes further, describing AU as "proven to predict full-funnel outcomes more accurately than any existing metric," without citing the study behind it. It also quotes Adweek calling AU "the attention economy's most widely recognized metric." The release does not say whether AU has been audited against the MRC and IAB framework.

On independence, AU is independent of the curators in the sense that Adelaide does not sell video inventory. But the curators are joining a commercial program, and the release does not say who pays for AU measurement on curated campaigns, whether curators pay to be listed, or whether advertisers can see AU results for curated buys that score poorly. The value of a benchmark against "standard buys" depends on those details. A curator that publishes only its strongest comparisons would be doing marketing, not measurement.

Is there a case for a shared score anyway? Agencies and brands that buy curated YouTube packages have had little beyond the curator's own reporting to judge them by, and a common score, even an imperfect one, makes comparison possible across vendors. Adelaide's free Media Quality Calculator, which grades lists of 200 or more domains against AU benchmarks, points the same way: the company wants AU to be the yardstick that buyers bring to every negotiation.

What the announcement leaves open

The release gives no pricing for AU measurement on curated video and no indication of who bears the cost. It offers no test results, benchmarks or case studies for any of the four curators. It does not describe the guarantee terms Guldimann mentioned, the share of curated inventory that can be scored at channel or video level, or how often scores refresh during a campaign. Sightly and Cadent VuePlanner are not quoted. The release does not name the other 96 partners, explain how members are counted, or account for the nine members added since October 14 beyond the four curators.

Adelaide has turned a metric into a marketplace in about 18 months. Whether advertisers treat the AU score on a curated video package as proof of quality, or as one more vendor claim to check, depends on data the company has yet to publish.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Adelaide, the New York company behind the AU attention-based media quality score, and four video curation companies: Pixability, Sightly, Silverpush and Cadent VuePlanner. Statements came from Marc Guldimann, Adelaide's chief executive and co-founder; David George, chief executive of Pixability; and Blaise Lucey, vice president of global marketing at Silverpush.

What: The four curators joined the AU Ecosystem as the first members of a new video curation category, which Adelaide says brings the program to 100 partners. They will use AU to score curated YouTube, connected TV and online video inventory, benchmark it against standard buys and adjust inclusion lists during campaigns. Guldimann said the first 100 partners include The Trade Desk, Amazon Ads, Yahoo DSP, Magnite, PubMatic, Index Exchange, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Disney. No pricing, test results or full member list were published.

When: Announced today. The AU Ecosystem launched on May 22, 2025, with nearly 50 publishers, reached 54 partners in October 2025 and 87 in October 2026.

Where: Announced from New York. Partners are listed on Adelaide's AU Ecosystem portal, where advertisers can request introductions. The curators work mainly on YouTube and across connected TV and online video.

Why: According to Adelaide, the contextual, audience and brand suitability signals curators use to pick placements do not show how those placements compare in quality with other options, and AU is meant to fill that gap. For Adelaide, the curators extend AU into decisions about where video budgets go, a step that follows integrations with Amazon DSP, DV360 and Teads, at a time when the largest verification firms are changing hands.