This paper was commissioned by the CIMM to address a growing gap in the market: the absence of a clear, shared framework for understanding how placement-level characteristics (i.e., non-user-specific attributes of the advertising environment) influence marketing effectiveness. While the industry has made significant advances in audience targeting and attribution, the role of placement-level conditions – such as prominence, context, and exposure environment – remains inconsistently defined, measured, and applied.
The paper examines whether these placement-level characteristics can be treated as reliable, empirical inputs into effectiveness enabling more consistent valuation of impressions, particularly as identity-based signals become less reliable across open-web and programmatic environments. The study argues that Media Quality (MQ) must evolve from a secondary optimization variable into a form of market infrastructure: a set of measurable, transactable signals that enable the market to distinguish, value, and price differences in advertising opportunity.
