Nielsen and Adelaide integrate attention metrics with reach data

Nielsen announced on October 7, 2025, a strategic collaboration with Adelaide that introduces the industry's first unified approach to measuring both audience reach and media attention. Adelaide becomes the latest measurement provider to join Nielsen's Outcomes Marketplace within Nielsen ONE, bringing its omnichannel attention metric AU into the platform's ecosystem.

The partnership addresses a fundamental limitation in advertising measurement. While Nielsen's established reach data tells advertisers how many people see their advertisements, Adelaide's AU metric measures how effectively that media captures attention and drives business outcomes. Through this integration, marketers now have visibility into both dimensions simultaneously.

Nielsen has developed a new set of metrics specifically designed to assess the efficiency of achieving both reach and attention together. By combining Adelaide's AU measurement with Nielsen's reach data, these metrics enable marketers to optimize campaigns during active flight periods by viewing efficiency scores across different ad placements.

Adelaide's AU metric, recognized by Adweek as the attention economy's most widely recognized metric, measures a media placement's ability to capture attention and predict outcomes. The metric analyzes attention patterns to forecast whether engagement will translate into meaningful business results for advertisers. Research demonstrates AU predicts full-funnel outcomes more accurately than existing metrics, helping brands make investment decisions, activate attention data programmatically, and drive performance.

The integration provides advertisers and publishers with a more effective framework for buying and selling media. Marketers can maximize the impact of their advertising investments while validating media performance. Publishers can demonstrate their inventory's quality beyond simple impression counts. Both parties gain access to a holistic view of campaign performance that addresses what Nielsen describes as a pressing industry challenge.

"We're excited to team up with Adelaide to develop a solution that the industry really needs, which is moving beyond reach to deliver a unified, actionable and measurable view of campaign performance," stated Nichole Henderson, SVP of Global Outcomes Product at Nielsen. "This solution offers marketers the trusted, holistic and outcomes-driven insight that they need to succeed in the future."

The collaboration builds on Nielsen's Outcomes Marketplace infrastructure. Launched in July 2025, the Outcomes Marketplace represents an interoperable ecosystem bringing together brand, sales, attention, and conversion metrics within Nielsen ONE for the first time. Realeyes served as the inaugural measurement provider, integrating attention metrics into campaign effectiveness measurement in December 2024.

Adelaide's integration strengthens this marketplace by adding attention-based media quality measurement to Nielsen's currency-grade audience reach data. The addition enables performance comparisons, benchmarking, and deeper insights combining attention metrics with Nielsen's reach information. Marketers gain clear visibility into audience de-duplication as well as overall campaign quality, value, and business impact.

"The industry has long measured how many people an ad reaches, but not how well that media works – or the quality of that reach," explained Marc Guldimann, CEO & Co-founder of Adelaide. "By combining Nielsen's audience data with AU, a proven measure of media quality that predicts outcomes, we're giving the market a simple, outcome-focused way to connect scale with quality and tie media investment decisions more directly to business results."

For advertisers working across fragmented media landscapes, this development provides consolidated measurement infrastructure. Rather than maintaining separate systems for reach tracking and attention analysis, both metrics become available through a single platform. This consolidation reduces operational complexity while improving data accessibility for campaign optimization decisions.

The partnership also addresses measurement challenges that have emerged as audiences fragment across streaming platforms, connected television, digital channels, and traditional linear television. Nielsen's infrastructure processes data across all these environments, while Adelaide's attention metrics operate across digital, linear, streaming, and connected TV platforms. The combined capabilities support comprehensive campaign evaluation regardless of where audiences consume content.

WPP Media's perspective underscores the industry need for this unified approach. "For too long, we've navigated a fragmented landscape, and this solution brings much-needed simplicity and connectivity, helping to unify disparate data points," stated Nicolas Grand, Executive Director, Research & Investment Analytics, WPP Media. "We've consistently advocated for reframing media value beyond traditional CPMs, pushing for greater attention and engagement metrics. This partnership reinforces the direction needed to connect the dots on the bigger picture, and ultimately, deliver superior client outcomes and an enhanced viewer experience."

The Outcomes Marketplace offering provides Nielsen clients with a complete measurement system spanning media quality, creative quality, brand lift, and sales lift. This top-to-bottom visibility enables marketers to understand not just whether campaigns reached audiences, but whether those audiences engaged with content and whether that engagement translated into business outcomes.

Adelaide's addition to the Outcomes Marketplace demonstrates the platform's capacity to integrate multiple measurement providers while maintaining consistent measurement standards. Nielsen positions the marketplace as an interoperable ecosystem rather than a closed system, allowing measurement partners to contribute specialized capabilities that enhance the overall offering.

The collaboration arrives as measurement providers expand attention capabilities across the industry. DoubleVerify introduced social media attention measurement through a Snapchat partnership in June 2025, while Comscore expanded certified deals with Adelaide attention metrics through PubMatic in June 2025. These developments demonstrate coordinated momentum toward attention-based measurement methodologies across the advertising technology sector.

For marketers managing complex cross-channel campaigns, attention metrics provide insights beyond traditional viewability standards. While viewability confirms whether an advertisement was visible on screen, attention measurement assesses whether audiences actually engaged with that content. This distinction matters particularly as advertisers seek to validate spending efficiency across channels with varying attention capture capabilities.

Research has shown significant variations in attention performance across different media channels and platforms. A 2024 Adelaide report analyzing digital media platforms found YouTube dominated attention metrics throughout 2023, while podcast advertisements outperformed most other formats in terms of attention capture. These performance variations underscore why combining attention measurement with reach data provides more complete campaign performance visibility.

The technical implementation enables marketers to access Adelaide's AU metrics through the same Nielsen ONE interface they use for reach measurement. This unified access eliminates the need to aggregate data from multiple platforms or reconcile different measurement methodologies across separate systems. Campaign managers can view both reach and attention metrics simultaneously, facilitating more informed optimization decisions during active campaigns.

Measurement standardization represents another significant benefit of this integration. The advertising industry has historically struggled with fragmented measurement approaches where different providers use incompatible methodologies. By bringing Adelaide's attention metrics into Nielsen's established measurement framework, the collaboration provides consistent standards that work across both reach and attention dimensions.

The partnership extends Nielsen's measurement infrastructure beyond its traditional focus on audience counting. While Nielsen built its reputation on providing accurate audience reach data, the integration with Adelaide acknowledges that reach alone does not fully capture advertising effectiveness. Media quality, attention capture, and outcome prediction all factor into comprehensive campaign assessment.

For publishers, the integration offers tools to demonstrate inventory quality beyond simple impression volumes. Publishers can now show prospective advertisers both the audience scale their inventory delivers and the attention quality those placements generate. This dual-metric approach supports premium pricing strategies based on demonstrated performance rather than reach estimates alone.

The collaboration also addresses the increasing complexity of campaign optimization. Modern advertising campaigns span multiple channels, formats, and platforms, each with different characteristics affecting both reach and attention. Marketers need measurement systems that account for these variations while providing comparable metrics across different environments. The Nielsen-Adelaide integration aims to meet this requirement through standardized measurement accessible across the Nielsen ONE platform.

Industry observers note that attention-based measurement has gained prominence as traditional metrics face limitations. IAB Europe's Virtual Programmatic Day panel in July 2025 revealed attention metrics increasingly influence programmatic advertising decisions, with expanded testing and implementation across the industry. However, measurement standardization remains a challenge as different providers employ varying methodologies.

The Adelaide integration represents Nielsen's strategic response to these market dynamics. Rather than developing proprietary attention measurement internally, Nielsen has created a marketplace model that incorporates specialized measurement providers. This approach leverages the expertise of companies focused specifically on attention metrics while maintaining Nielsen's role as the integrating platform.

For marketing organizations evaluating measurement infrastructure, the collaboration provides a consolidated solution. Rather than maintaining relationships with separate providers for reach measurement and attention analysis, both capabilities become accessible through Nielsen ONE. This consolidation potentially reduces both procurement complexity and technical integration requirements for advertisers seeking comprehensive measurement.

The announcement builds on Nielsen's broader measurement modernization efforts. The company transitioned away from panel-only television ratings in January 2025, implementing Big Data + Panel measurement that combines traditional panel data with information from millions of connected devices. This hybrid approach aims to capture viewing behavior across fragmented platforms more comprehensively than panel-only systems could achieve.

Adelaide's participation in the Outcomes Marketplace follows the company's expanding presence across programmatic infrastructure. The attention metrics provider has established partnerships with multiple supply-side platforms, enabling buyers to optimize campaigns using attention data integrated into real-time bidding decisions. These integrations support attention-optimized campaign execution beyond measurement and reporting.

The collaboration creates new opportunities for campaign benchmarking based on combined reach and attention performance. Advertisers can compare how different campaigns, creative approaches, or channel strategies perform across both dimensions. This comparative analysis supports data-driven decision making about media allocation and creative development priorities.

For agencies managing campaigns on behalf of multiple clients, the unified measurement approach provides consistent frameworks applicable across different advertiser accounts. Rather than customizing measurement approaches for each client, agencies can leverage standardized reach and attention metrics available through Nielsen ONE. This consistency potentially improves efficiency in campaign management and reporting workflows.

The integration also addresses measurement challenges specific to streaming and connected television environments. As viewing shifts from traditional linear television to streaming platforms, advertisers need measurement systems adapted to these new consumption patterns. The Nielsen-Adelaide collaboration provides measurement infrastructure designed to work across both legacy and emerging media channels.

Looking forward, Nielsen indicates additional measurement providers will join the Outcomes Marketplace, expanding the platform's analytical capabilities beyond reach and attention to include other performance dimensions. This marketplace model positions Nielsen as an integrating platform rather than the exclusive provider of all measurement types, potentially accelerating the development of comprehensive measurement ecosystems.

The partnership between Nielsen and Adelaide marks a step toward measurement approaches that assess advertising performance across multiple dimensions simultaneously. By combining reach scale with attention quality, the integration aims to provide marketers with more complete visibility into campaign effectiveness than either metric could offer independently.

Timeline

• July 2025 – Nielsen launches Outcomes Marketplace with Realeyes as first measurement provider, integrating brand, sales, attention, and conversion metrics within Nielsen ONE
• December 2024 – Nielsen integrates attention metrics into campaign effectiveness measurement through Realeyes partnership, providing foundation for expanded marketplace
• June 2025 – Comscore expands certified deals with Adelaide attention metrics through PubMatic partnership, demonstrating Adelaide's growing programmatic infrastructure presence
• June 2025 – DoubleVerify debuts social attention measurement with Snapchat partnership, marking first impression-level attention metrics combining platform signals with eye-tracking
• July 2025 – IAB Europe explores attention metrics influence on programmatic decisions during Virtual Programmatic Day panel discussion
• October 7, 2025 – Nielsen and Adelaide announce integration bringing AU attention metric into Outcomes Marketplace with new unified reach and attention measurement capabilities

Summary

Who: Nielsen, a global leader in audience measurement, partnered with Adelaide, a leader in attention-based media quality measurement. Key executives include Nichole Henderson, SVP of Global Outcomes Product at Nielsen, Marc Guldimann, CEO & Co-founder of Adelaide, and Nicolas Grand, Executive Director at WPP Media.

What: A strategic collaboration integrating Adelaide's AU attention metric into Nielsen's Outcomes Marketplace within Nielsen ONE. The partnership introduces the industry's first unified measurement approach combining audience reach data with media attention metrics. Nielsen developed new efficiency metrics that gauge both reach and attention simultaneously, enabling marketers to optimize campaigns by viewing efficiency scores across ad placements.

When: Announced on October 7, 2025, building on Nielsen's Outcomes Marketplace infrastructure launched in July 2025.

Where: The integration operates within Nielsen ONE platform, available to Nielsen clients globally. The measurement capabilities span digital, linear, streaming, and connected television platforms across markets where Nielsen and Adelaide operate.

Why: The partnership addresses a fundamental industry challenge where traditional measurement focused on reach (how many people see ads) without assessing attention (how well that media works). By combining both dimensions, marketers gain holistic campaign performance visibility, enabling more effective media buying and selling while maximizing advertising investment impact. The collaboration provides advertisers, publishers, and agencies with unified measurement infrastructure that reduces complexity while improving optimization capabilities across fragmented media landscapes.