Teads today made Adelaide's AU score, a prediction of how likely an ad placement is to be noticed and to drive results, available inside Teads Ad Manager worldwide, giving advertisers live reporting on web and connected TV InStream campaigns and an automated floor that removes placements scoring below a level they choose.

In Short

Adelaide is a company that gives every ad slot a score for how likely people are to actually notice an ad placed there. Teads, which sells ads on news sites and TV screens, has now built that score into the software advertisers use to buy from it, so they can see the scores while a campaign runs and tell the system to skip slots that score too low. The announcement gives no prices, no suggested score levels and no test results, so it is not yet clear how much a floor will cost advertisers in reach or what it will gain them.

What changes inside Teads Ad Manager

The announcement, issued from New York, describes an expansion of an existing partnership rather than a new one. According to Teads, which trades on Nasdaq as TEAD and describes itself as an omnichannel outcomes platform, Adelaide's AU metric now sits directly inside Teads Ad Manager, the self-serve and managed buying tool the company abbreviates as TAM. Advertisers can use it to "measure, analyze, and optimize campaigns for media quality in real time across both web and CTV InStream formats."

Two functions make up the release. One is reporting. The other is optimization.

Reporting next to delivery metrics

Activation takes a single click, according to Teads. Once switched on, AU data appears in real time next to the standard delivery figures TAM already reports: viewability, video views and click-through rate. The reporting can be broken down by ad format, by device and by placement.

That placement-level view matters more than it might appear. Viewability records whether an ad had the chance to be seen, using a pixel and time threshold. Click-through rate records an action that most display and video impressions never produce. According to the release, reporting AU alongside those metrics is meant to "connect exposure with quality." Placing all three in the same table lets a buyer see, for instance, whether a placement with strong viewability is also one Adelaide scores highly.

InStream is the Teads term for advertising that runs within streaming video content. In June, Teads described its InStream offering as two formats: InPlay, which runs during video, and InPause, which appears when a viewer pauses. The release does not say which web formats are covered. Nor does it mention HomeScreen, the smart TV launch-screen inventory that has become central to Teads' connected TV business.

Attention Threshold optimization

The second function is the one that changes buying behavior. Teads' Attention Threshold optimization feature can be used to set an AU floor, according to the company, "automatically filtering out low-attention inventory to improve campaign efficiency and performance." Among the benefits listed in the release is the ability to "prioritize placements that are more likely to drive full-funnel business outcomes."

The mechanics are only partly described. The release does not say what range of AU values the floor accepts, whether Teads recommends particular levels for particular campaign goals, or how the floor interacts with pacing and bidding once a campaign is live. It does not say whether the filter acts before a bid is placed or adjusts delivery after impressions have been scored. Neither does it estimate how much reach a given floor removes. That last point is the practical trade-off for any buyer. A floor set high enough to exclude most low-scoring supply also narrows the pool of available impressions, which can push up costs or slow delivery, and Teads has published no figures on either effect.

The release refers to Attention Threshold as an existing Teads feature, without saying when it launched or how many campaigns have used it.

What the executives said

Neala Brown, Global Head of Data, Measurement, and Insights at Teads, framed the release around access. "Our priority is to give advertisers frictionless access to the industry's leading media quality metrics directly within our platform," she said. "By natively embedding Adelaide's AU metrics and automated optimization capabilities into Teads Ad Manager, we are empowering our clients to eliminate media waste and maximize campaign effectiveness across web and CTV inventory at scale."

Marc Guldimann, chief executive and co-founder of Adelaide, focused on the optimization side. "To move the industry forward, media quality measurement must be both accessible and actionable," he said. "This partnership gives Teads advertisers the ability to evaluate media quality in real time and automatically optimize toward higher-AU inventory. By bringing an outcome-trained quality signal directly into optimization, we're helping brands invest in inventory that is more likely to deliver meaningful business results."

No case study, campaign result or performance figure accompanies either statement.

What AU measures, and what it does not

AU, short for Attention Unit, is not a direct observation of whether a particular person looked at a particular ad. According to the release, it "predicts a placement's likelihood of capturing attention and driving outcomes." It is a score attached to a placement, generated before or during delivery, rather than a count of seconds watched.

Adelaide's own materials give more detail on its construction. According to the company's website, AU is a score from 0 to 100, produced by a machine learning model that combines media quality signals such as placement position, ad clutter and screen coverage with full-funnel outcome data. Adelaide says the model also takes in eye-tracking data from TVision and Realeyes. The weighting of those inputs is not published. When Adelaide ranked YouTube first among digital platforms for attention in 2023, PPC Land noted that the exact AU calculation was not public knowledge, and that remains the case.

That design separates AU from vendors that measure observed gaze. It also explains Guldimann's phrase "outcome-trained quality signal." Because the model is fitted to outcomes as well as to attention data, Adelaide presents AU as a guide to business results, not only to visibility. The company's boilerplate in today's release goes further, describing AU as "proven to predict full-funnel outcomes more accurately than any existing metric." The release does not cite the study behind that claim. The same boilerplate quotes Adweek calling AU "the attention economy's most widely recognized metric."

For buyers used to attention metrics from several providers, the distinction is not academic. A floor built on a predictive placement score filters supply according to a model's view of where attention and results are likely. A floor built on measured eye movement would filter according to what panels actually recorded. Teads now offers both kinds of data inside one platform.

A partnership that began in 2023

Teads and Adelaide have worked together since at least 2023. Teads had already built attention measurement into TAM by then, but with a different vendor. In June 2023, Teads announced that it was the first platform to embed Lumen's attention measurement natively, letting campaigns be tagged for Lumen measurement through an attention button in the interface. According to that announcement, Lumen measurement was already used in 20% of TAM activity at the time.

Adelaide followed in August. On August 17, 2023, the two companies announced high-attention omnichannel private marketplaces covering digital and connected TV inventory, available through Google Display & Video 360, The Trade Desk, Yahoo and Teads Ad Manager. According to Adelaide's announcement at the time, the curated placements carried an average attention score 31% higher than Adelaide's Teads AU benchmarks, and Adelaide had measured AU across more than 9.3 billion Teads impressions, 65 advertiser campaigns, 22 ad formats and more than 20,000 domains. A trade press report on the same announcement gave the impression count as 93 billion.

The threshold idea appeared the following year. In a May 2024 interview with Beet.TV, Brown, then Teads' senior vice president of strategy and insights, described two betas: one with TVision to move connected TV attention measurement from post-campaign reporting to in-flight optimization, and one with Adelaide to let clients plan campaigns against attention thresholds tied to specific brand lift goals. She said Teads had aggregated attention data across campaigns in a meta-analysis to identify KPI-specific thresholds.

Today's announcement moves that work from deal-based packages and betas into the standard buying interface, available in TAM worldwide.

Two attention vendors on one platform

The release does not mention Lumen, which Teads has used for attention measurement in TAM since 2023. On May 6, 2026, Teads brought Lumen's eye-tracking attention measurement to CTV HomeScreen placements worldwide, with exclusive access to Lumen's CTV attention measurement for that placement across the US, EMEA, APAC and LATAM. Teads claimed an average of about 5,300 attentive seconds per thousand impressions for HomeScreen ads, 173% higher than outstream video and 114% higher than YouTube, without published independent validation. It said Lumen measurement for InStream would follow later in the second quarter.

Teads' help center adds detail the May announcement left out. It states that Lumen measurement on CTV HomeScreen carries no additional cost, is available in all markets, and was exclusively available to Teads until September 1, 2026. That exclusive window closed two months before today's release.

The result is a split by format, at least on paper. Lumen covers HomeScreen with gaze-based seconds. Adelaide covers web and CTV InStream with a predictive score. Where both are available on the same inventory, buyers could in principle compare a measured attention figure with a modeled one for the same placement. Teads has not said whether the two can be applied to the same campaign, whether its threshold optimization works with Lumen data as well as AU, or how it would resolve a placement that one vendor rates highly and the other does not.

Pricing is the other unknown. The help center lists Lumen HomeScreen measurement as free of extra charge. Today's release says nothing about whether Adelaide measurement in TAM carries a fee, or who pays it.

Adelaide's run of buying-platform integrations

Teads is the latest in a series of buying platforms to wire AU into the moment of purchase rather than the post-campaign report.

On June 10, 2026, Adelaide brought attention pre-bid targeting to Amazon DSP for display, online video and streaming TV. That integration divided inventory into high, average and low AU tiers, and added an AU Quality Floor that excludes made-for-advertising sites and the bottom 10% of AU-scored placements in one step. No performance test data accompanied that launch either. The Amazon floor is a fixed rule, while the Teads version, as described, lets the advertiser set the level.

Google followed. In July, Google said advertisers would be able to use Adelaide's Attention Units as a signal in DV360 custom bidding from mid-July 2026, through a ready-made algorithm called Maximize Adelaide Attention Unit or as a multiplier inside scripts written by advertisers. The multiplier raises or lowers the computed worth of each impression, which is a softer mechanism than a hard floor.

Rival attention vendors have taken the same route through the supply side. In February 2026, Index Exchange embedded xpln.ai's predictive attention signals into its SSP, letting buyers prioritize high-attention supply or exclude low-attention environments before bidding. xpln.ai says it captures 20 to 25 exposure signals per impression and turns them into a single predictive score.

Public evidence on what attention-based optimization delivers remains thin. One of the few documented tests came from EssenceMediacom France, which ran attention-based custom bidding in DV360 for a consumer goods client in July 2024. Against a standard automated bidding control with an identical budget, CPM came in 7.3% lower, CPC 6.6% lower and CPA 7.2% lower over one month. The attention vendor was not named.

Standards, and the outcome question

The integration also arrives a year after the industry agreed on rules for how attention should be measured. On November 12, 2025, the Media Rating Council and IAB finalized attention measurement guidelines covering data signals, visual tracking, physiological and neurological observation, and panel or survey methods. The guidelines set minimum requirements for quality, transparency and comparability without mandating any particular technology. They also state that attention should not be treated or used as a measure of outcomes.

That principle sits awkwardly with the way AU is marketed. Adelaide describes its score as trained on outcomes and as a predictor of them, while the guidelines draw a line between measuring attention and measuring results. The two positions can coexist, since AU is a model that uses attention data to forecast results rather than a claim that attention is itself an outcome. But buyers who set an AU floor are optimizing toward a modeled forecast of performance, not toward a direct measure of it. Today's announcement does not say whether AU has been audited against the MRC and IAB framework.

Standardization was already a sore point before the guidelines. At an IAB Europe panel in July 2025, speakers said attention metrics influence programmatic decisions but standardization remains elusive, with vendors producing scores that cannot be compared directly. A score of 40 from one vendor and 40 seconds from another describe different things.

The underlying problem is not in dispute. TVision said in August that of more than 200 minutes of daily video viewing, only 24 minutes are ad opportunities and viewers are attentive for just nine of them, although the announcement did not state its source period or panel size. If most ad time on a screen goes unwatched, a tool that steers spend toward placements more likely to be watched has an obvious appeal. Whether a model-based floor captures that better than viewability does is the claim the partners have yet to support with published data.

The business backdrop

Measurement and quality claims carry commercial weight for Teads this year. When it reported second-quarter results on August 6, 2026, Teads suspended its full-year guidance after revenue fell 17% to $284.6 million. Connected TV revenue rose 67% and reached 13% of the total, making CTV the strongest part of the business while the direct response and small business segment declined.

Product releases have come quickly since. On October 29, Teads released the next version of Teads Ad Manager, making cross-screen performance buying across CTV InStream, HomeScreen, inRead and Feed generally available to global enterprise clients, and placing AI copilots and MCP connections to Claude, Gemini Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot in a closed beta. Today's Adelaide integration adds a quality control layer to that same buying tool, five days later.

According to the release boilerplate, Teads works directly with more than 10,000 publishers and 20,000 advertisers and employs about 1,700 people in more than 30 countries. The release does not say how many of those advertisers buy through TAM, or how many are expected to switch on AU.

The forward-looking statements single out the integration. They list, as risks, the possibility that the Adelaide integration "may not yield the anticipated commercial benefits, advertiser adoption, or campaign performance optimizations as expected," and "technical and operational challenges related to maintaining real-time AU reporting across web and CTV formats." Teads is due to report third-quarter results on November 5, two days from now.

What the announcement leaves open

Several points are unanswered. Teads has not said whether Adelaide measurement in TAM costs extra. It has not given the AU range a floor can take, any recommended threshold, or the effect of a floor on reach and price. It has not said whether HomeScreen inventory or specific web formats such as inRead are covered, whether Lumen and Adelaide data can run side by side on one campaign, or whether threshold optimization works with Lumen's metric too. There are no test results, no named launch clients and no mention of accreditation.

Will advertisers trade scale for a score whose calculation they cannot inspect? The answer depends on evidence neither company published today.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Teads (Nasdaq: TEAD) and Adelaide, the New York company behind the AU attention score, with statements from Neala Brown, Global Head of Data, Measurement, and Insights at Teads, and Marc Guldimann, chief executive and co-founder of Adelaide.

What: Adelaide's AU metric is now built into Teads Ad Manager. Advertisers can switch it on with one click, see real-time AU data next to viewability, video views and click-through rate with breakdowns by format, device and placement, and use Teads' Attention Threshold optimization to set an AU floor that filters out low-attention inventory. No pricing, floor levels or performance results were published.

When: Announced today, November 3, 2026, and available now. It follows a Teads-Adelaide private marketplace partnership from August 2023 and a threshold beta described in May 2024.

Where: Available globally in Teads Ad Manager, covering web and CTV InStream formats. HomeScreen inventory, where Teads uses Lumen, is not mentioned.

Why: According to Teads, the aim is to give advertisers direct access to media quality data and to cut spending on placements less likely to be noticed. The integration follows similar AU deployments in Amazon DSP and DV360 in 2026, and comes as Teads, which suspended its 2026 guidance in August, prepares to report third-quarter results on November 5.