AudienceProject & xpln.ai launch attentive reach tool

AudienceProject has partnered with xpln.ai to offer cross-media attentive reach measurement to advertisers and agencies in nine European markets.

The partnership combines AudienceProject's cross-media measurement with xpln.ai's attention data to produce what the companies describe as deduplicated attentive reach. The metric is designed to show how many people reached by a campaign also engaged with the ad across different channels.

AudienceProject's existing work focuses on deduplicated reach and frequency, helping advertisers and agencies assess how many people saw a campaign and how often across media platforms without double-counting audiences. Xpln.ai measures attentive impressions and attention rates, adding a layer intended to indicate engagement rather than exposure alone.

The new measurement will be delivered through dedicated studies and is available in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.

The move reflects growing demand for cross-platform measurement as media buying becomes more fragmented across television, social media, online video and other digital channels. Brands and agencies are seeking metrics that go beyond basic reach figures as they try to judge the effectiveness of spending across a widening range of media environments.

Attention-based measures have gained prominence in advertising research in recent years, with media buyers and sellers debating whether they offer a better guide to campaign quality than impressions or viewability alone. By combining reach with attention, the partnership aims to place engagement alongside scale in campaign reporting.

Émilie Carcassonne, Managing Director, France and Spain at AudienceProject, said the addition of attention data builds on a core planning metric already widely used across the industry.

"Deduplicated reach and frequency are the foundation of how advertisers and agencies plan and optimize campaigns across channels, and that foundation has never been more important in a fragmented media landscape. Our partnership with xpln.ai builds on it. By adding attention data to our independent cross-media measurement, we can show advertisers not only how many people in their target group they reached and how often, but also how many of them actually engaged. That extra layer gives advertisers and agencies the confidence to invest where their campaigns work hardest," said Émilie Carcassonne, Managing Director, France and Spain at AudienceProject.

AudienceProject positions itself as an independent cross-media measurement provider serving advertisers, media owners and other parts of the advertising market. Its platform focuses on measuring audiences across channels on a deduplicated basis, an area that has become more complex as privacy restrictions and platform fragmentation have reduced visibility across digital campaigns.

Xpln.ai, which describes itself as an attention intelligence platform, measures attention across environments including YouTube, social media, connected television and the open web. Its approach combines eye-tracking data, contextual signals, predictive models and creative analysis to estimate how audiences engage with advertising.

Attention metric

The joint offer gives agencies and advertisers another way to compare performance across channels that traditionally rely on different reporting standards. Cross-media planning has often involved reconciling separate metrics from broadcasters, digital platforms and publishers, and the companies are seeking to add an engagement measure to that process.

Fabien Magalon, CEO and Co-Founder at xpln.ai, said the combined measure is intended to shift the emphasis from exposure alone to audience response.

"Reach tells advertisers how many people were exposed to their campaign. Attention tells them how many of those people engaged. By combining AudienceProject's deduplicated reach with xpln.ai's attention rates, we are giving advertisers and agencies a quality-driven metric that looks beyond ad exposure and evaluates true audience engagement across channels," said Fabien Magalon, CEO and Co-Founder at xpln.ai.

The initial rollout covers nine European markets, giving both companies a regional base for the product among media buyers handling multinational campaigns. Canada and Mexico are also identified as later markets for the service.

For advertisers operating across several countries and platforms, the appeal of a single cross-media measure lies in comparing a campaign's breadth with the level of audience engagement it generates. The metric is designed to show how many people reached by a campaign actually engaged with the ad.