Cint today opened self-service outcomes measurement inside Lucid Measurement Study Creator, allowing media owners, ad tech platforms and agencies to configure a single study that tracks shifts in consumer perception and in purchasing while a campaign is still in market. Magnite is the first platform to offer access, for clients running ClearLine or streaming campaigns.

In Short

Cint, a company that runs consumer surveys for advertisers, now lets its partners set up a study on their own that checks two things at once: whether an ad changed how people feel about a brand, and whether it got them to buy. Magnite, which sells ad space on streaming services and websites on behalf of publishers, is the first company whose clients can order these combined studies. You see both answers while the ads are still running, and Cint has added comparison figures by industry, adjustable purchase windows and a test version for traditional TV.

From one dashboard to self-service

The announcement, dated September 28, 2026, concerns two kinds of evidence that advertisers have usually bought separately. Brand lift compares survey answers from people who saw a campaign with answers from a control group who did not, capturing measures such as awareness, ad recall and purchase intent. Sales lift runs the same comparison on purchases. According to Cint, the two have historically been handled through separate providers, datasets and reporting workflows, which has made it difficult to trace how a change in perception turns into business results.

Cint first put both signals into Lucid Measurement on June 17, 2026. That release combined an exposed and control survey design with card transaction data from Affinity Solutions in a single in-flight dashboard, opened as a beta in the United States, and named Big Happy, Cognitiv, Roblox, Teads, TripleLift, LG Ads and WunderKIND Ads as early partners. What changes now is who can switch the capability on, and how quickly. Media owners, ad tech platforms and agencies can build combined brand and sales studies through Study Creator "in minutes and on their own timelines", according to Cint.

Self-service brand studies have been Cint's route into partner platforms for most of this year. When Basis wired Lucid Measurement into its omnichannel platform on June 16, the integration generated measurement tags automatically and delivered daily readings once response thresholds were met; that announcement recorded 88 percent of advertisers on Cint's platform cutting study launch from days to minutes. Today's change extends the same model to the combined product, although Cint does not say how long a combined study took to set up before today, so the claim of minutes has no published baseline.

"Brand advertising has always played an important role in driving business growth, but marketers are under increasing pressure to show how changes in consumer perception ultimately connect to the bottom line," said Laura Manning, SVP of Measurement at Cint. "By bringing outcomes measurement into Study Creator, we're making that connection easier to access and faster to act on. Our partners can launch studies in minutes, see brand and sales lift together while campaigns are still running, and turn those insights into a clearer story about the impact of their media investments."

Magnite is the first platform

According to Cint, Magnite, which it describes as the largest independent sell-side advertising company, is the first platform to enable access to the offering. Clients running Magnite ClearLine or streaming campaigns can combine Cint's sales lift measurement with Lucid's brand lift measurement within one study. The wording separates two brands under a single owner: Cint bought Lucid, the research technology company co-founded by Brett Schnittlich, in 2021.

Magnite operates a supply-side platform, the software publishers use to sell inventory to buyers, and ClearLine is the product through which buyers reach that inventory directly. The company rebuilt ClearLine on October 1, 2025 to combine curation and activation on the same infrastructure as SpringServe, its video ad server. Since then the tool has accumulated data layers. On September 9, 2026, Magnite opened its self-serve ClearLine Activate tool to 27 named data, clean room and publisher partners, removing the need for buyers to request new deal IDs for approved audiences. That list spanned data onboarding, third-party data, clean rooms and publishers. It named no outcome measurement provider. Nineteen days later, outcome measurement has been attached to ClearLine and streaming campaigns.

Streaming is where Magnite's commercial weight sits. The company's second-quarter results on August 5, 2026 put connected television contribution ex-TAC at $97.1 million, up 36 percent year over year and equal to 51 percent of the company's total.

The release contains no statement from Magnite. Nor does it say whether the combined studies are priced into ClearLine deals or billed separately by Cint, whether Magnite's publisher clients can commission them as well as buyers, or which inventory types fall inside the phrase "ClearLine or streaming campaigns."

Four purchase metrics and three benchmark sets

Other additions accompany self-service access. According to Cint, new overall and industry-specific sales lift benchmarks allow users to contextualise four measures: sales lift, conversion rate lift, average order value lift and purchase frequency lift. The benchmarks are initially available across Retail, Telecom and Technology, and QSR, the industry shorthand for quick-service restaurants. The punctuation suggests three benchmark sets, with telecom and technology grouped together, although the release does not state the number.

The four measures are arithmetically linked. In a transaction panel, the sales recorded for a group of people can be broken into three multiplied components: the share of the group that bought at all, the number of purchases each buyer made, and the average value of each purchase. Comparing each component between exposed and control groups indicates which lever a campaign moved. A campaign that recruits new buyers shows up in conversion rate. One that brings existing customers back more often shows up in purchase frequency, and one that trades customers up to larger baskets shows up in average order value. Sales lift is the combined effect.

Cint has not published its formulas. It is not clear whether conversion is counted per card, per person or per household, or whether order value is averaged across transactions or across buyers. Both choices change the numbers a study reports.

A benchmark is only as informative as the base behind it, and Cint has not disclosed how many studies feed each set, over what period they were collected, in which countries, or whether the norms are adjusted for campaign size or spend. Other vendors have published more. When Brand Metrics' partnership with Refinery89 was disclosed on September 14, 2026, brand lift results were set against more than 60,000 campaigns across 122 industry categories and more than 35 countries. Those are survey norms rather than purchase norms, but the disclosure shows what a published comparison base can look like.

Attribution windows become a study setting

According to Cint, customers can now customise the post-campaign purchase attribution window used in their studies, extending or shortening the period in which purchases are attributed to campaign exposure "based on relevant buying cycles." The default window and the permitted range are not stated.

The setting matters more in a lift study than its name suggests. In platform reporting, lookback window and conversion window settings decide how much credit an ad receives for a later purchase, with no comparison group involved. In an exposed and control design, the window instead fixes how long purchases are counted for both groups. Lengthening it collects more purchases on each side, including the baseline purchases that would have happened without any advertising at all.

The consequences run in both directions. If a campaign's effect arrives quickly and fades, a longer window adds mostly baseline activity, which can shrink the relative lift and widen statistical uncertainty. If the effect is delayed, as it tends to be with a mobile contract or a new laptop, a short window cuts it off before it appears. A burger and a broadband contract sit at opposite ends of that range, and Cint's own benchmark categories span both.

Customisation also raises a comparability question the release does not address. If one study counts purchases for two weeks and another for two months, their results are not directly comparable, and it is not clear whether the new benchmarks are calculated on a fixed window or adjusted to match whichever window a customer selects.

Platforms have been moving the same controls in different directions this year. Meta stopped returning 7-day and 28-day view-through attribution windows in its Ads Insights API on January 12, 2026. Google Analytics went the other way on August 11, 2026, when it replaced its fixed three-day engaged-view window with any whole number of days from 1 to 30 and made click-through windows adjustable from 1 to 90 days.

Linear TV enters beta

Linear TV is now available in beta testing as a measurable channel for outcomes studies, according to Cint, which says the addition expands the product's cross-platform measurement capabilities. The release gives no further detail. It does not say how exposure to a scheduled broadcast is identified, which households or panels supply that information, or whether linear studies carry both the survey and the transaction readings or only one of them.

Those are not minor points. Streaming and digital impressions are delivered by ad servers that log each delivery, which is what makes assembling exposed and control groups workable. A linear broadcast reaches every set tuned to the channel with no delivery record per household, so exposure has to be inferred afterwards, typically from set-top box returns, smart TV content recognition data or panels. Each source covers a different slice of the audience and carries its own biases, and the method chosen determines who can be placed in a control group.

Magnite has been widening its own linear footprint. AMC Global Media brought its linear networks into programmatic buying through ClearLine on April 15, 2026, alongside its FAST channels and the AMC+ streaming service, and Magnite and ITN expanded their partnership on September 10, 2026 to add agentic capabilities to local linear buying, with full integration set for the fourth quarter. The release does not say whether the linear beta is available through the Magnite integration.

What the release leaves out

The data behind the sales signal

The June release named Affinity Solutions as the source of the transaction data behind the sales reading. Today's release names no data partner. It is therefore not stated whether Affinity still supplies the purchase data, whether other sources have been added, or how linear exposure is matched to purchases. Affinity's card data has turned up elsewhere this summer: StackAdapt connected media exposure to the same company's transactions on July 30, 2026, citing coverage of more than 150 million cards and $4 trillion in consumer spend. Card data records card purchases. Cash transactions, and purchases on cards outside a panel, do not appear.

Where it works

The June version opened only in the United States, and today's release gives no geography. Cint's claim of survey access to consumers in more than 130 countries concerns respondents, not transaction coverage. Nor is it stated whether outcomes measurement itself has left beta; only linear TV carries the label.

Price and thresholds

Pricing, minimum spend, minimum impression counts and sample thresholds are not disclosed. Some competitors publish them. LoopMe's brand lift studies, available inside The Trade Desk's Measurement Marketplace from September 2, 2026, are feasible from one million impressions across more than 35 markets and 17 languages. Google's Display & Video 360 documentation indicates that strong campaigns start producing readable brand lift results at roughly 2,000 responses per metric, a reminder that an in-flight reading taken before a study reaches its sample can swing.

How the control group is built

Neither the June material nor today's release describes whether the control group is formed by randomly withholding the campaign, as in a holdout study, or by matching unexposed people after the fact. The difference decides how much causal weight a lift figure can bear, and an IAB report criticised non-equivalent control groups in online brand surveys as long ago as 2010.

A distribution pattern five months in the making

Today's arrangement is the latest step in a sequence. On May 14, 2026, illumin embedded Cint brand lift into its programmatic campaign setup, with the companies saying study launch time fell by up to 90 percent. Basis followed on June 16, and the combined outcomes dashboard arrived a day later.

The company then left public markets. The last day of trading in Cint shares on Nasdaq Stockholm was August 7, 2026, and on August 24 Cint said its take-private by a consortium led by Triton Partners had completed at SEK 5.60 per share, a price valuing the company at approximately SEK 1,989 million. Outcome measurement was one of three areas in which the company said it would accelerate investment, without giving an amount. On September 1, Cint opened a Model Context Protocol server in beta with Potloc, which said it had configured a 20-market consumer banking study on the Cint Exchange in one automated pass.

The logic is distribution: a programmatic buying tool, an omnichannel platform, an AI agent protocol and now a sell-side platform, each placing Cint's measurement where media is traded. Rivals are taking similar routes. LoopMe went into The Trade Desk, while Upwave opened a closed beta of Predictive Brand Lift on September 9, 2026, estimating campaign effects from modelling rather than fresh surveys. Brand lift vendors now compete less on methodology than on where a study is booked and how fast its reading arrives.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For agencies, the release promises one report where two were previously reconciled by hand. Cint says agencies can show clients how cross-platform investments influence both consumer attitudes and downstream behaviour "without having to reconcile separate measurement reports." That removes a recurring manual task. It also brings configurable choices, among them the attribution window, the benchmark set and the channel mix, that shape the figure a client eventually sees.

For sellers, the positioning is explicit. According to Cint, the expanded capabilities give media owners and ad tech platforms "another way to demonstrate the business impact of brand campaigns." Demonstrating value is an ordinary commercial aim, but it creates a question of selection. The measurement vendor is independent of the seller, yet the party choosing which campaigns to study, which window to apply and which results to circulate may be the party that sold the inventory. A far larger version of the same question arose when Nielsen agreed to buy DoubleVerify on August 6, 2026, placing audience currency and verification under one owner. Here the link is contractual rather than corporate.

Industry standards point, for now, in another direction. When IAB Europe released draft Version 2 of its in-store retail media measurement standards on September 17, 2026, open for comment until October 23, its release listed "removing sales lift and brand sales lift metrics" among the changes. Vendors are packaging those same metrics for self-service use at the same time as one standards body steps back from defining them, at least for in-store media.

Timing cuts both ways. A combined reading can move budget before a flight ends, which is the point of the product, yet an early reading rests on partial samples and a purchase window that has not closed. How often in-flight figures hold once a study completes is something no vendor in this category has published. Self-service makes combined studies cheaper to run; how comparable they are will depend on details Cint has not yet released.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Cint, the research and media measurement company that owns Lucid, and Magnite, the sell-side advertising company that is the first platform to offer the new capability. Laura Manning, SVP of Measurement at Cint, is the only named spokesperson. Media owners, ad tech platforms and agencies are the intended users.

What: Self-service outcomes measurement inside Lucid Measurement Study Creator, allowing partners to configure studies that combine brand lift and sales lift in a single view while campaigns run. Alongside it, Cint added linear TV as a beta channel, overall and industry-specific benchmarks for sales lift, conversion rate lift, average order value lift and purchase frequency lift across Retail, Telecom and Technology, and QSR, and a customisable post-campaign purchase attribution window. Magnite clients running ClearLine or streaming campaigns can combine the two measurements in one study.

When: The release is dated September 28, 2026. It builds on the in-flight outcomes product Cint placed in Lucid Measurement on June 17, 2026, and follows the completion of Cint's take-private on August 24, 2026.

Where: Inside Lucid Measurement's Study Creator and, through Magnite, within ClearLine and streaming campaigns. The release does not state a geography; the June version opened only in the United States.

Why: Advertisers have typically bought perception and purchase measurement from separate providers on separate timelines, leaving agencies to reconcile two reports after campaigns end. Cint is placing a combined reading inside the platforms where media is traded, a distribution strategy it has pursued since May. The release leaves open the transaction data source, pricing, sample thresholds, benchmark bases and the method for identifying linear exposure, details that decide how far results produced through seller-side access can be compared and relied upon.