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Share on XThe New Frontier: Media Quality as a Performance Engine
For years, advertisers have treated media quality signals—viewability, brand safety, and attention—primarily as protection. While essential, these indicators have historically operated as passive safeguards rather than active drivers of performance.
That gap is becoming increasingly limiting. Performance teams still rely on proxies: delivery metrics, clicks, or lagged studies, that fail to reflect what is actually driving sales. Without a live connection to real purchase insights, optimization slows, budgets drift, and pressure to deliver ROAS intensifies.
What advertisers need now is a closed-loop system that identifies which media quality conditions drive stronger outcomes and actively optimizes toward them in-flight.
Turning Media Signals Into Sales Signals
In an industry-first partnership, IAS and Mastercard have come together to turn media quality into a performance engine.
By combining IAS’s proprietary intelligence across Media Quality, Attention, and Media Format with Mastercard’s aggregated and anonymized spend insights, advertisers can automatically steer investment toward impressions proven to drive incremental sales while campaigns are live.
An Outcomes Driven Optimization Loop
- In-Flight Sales Optimization: Direct programmatic investment toward media quality signals associated with stronger incremental sales outcomes using Mastercard-enriched IAS pre-bid segments.
- Always-On Sales Measurement: Continuously connect IAS quality signals with Mastercard spend insights to validate which media conditions are driving performance.
- Together, these capabilities create a continuous and dynamic feedback loop that transforms media quality from a reporting metric into a measurable performance lever.
Proven Impact at Scale
Early testing results demonstrate the power of optimizing media quality signals with real purchase insights:
- +246% higher sales lift for impressions with stronger Quality Attention™ scores
- +133% improvement in sales lift and projected ROI for high-quality impressions
- Up to 9x in incremental spend impact per 1000 impressions for campaigns optimizing toward ≥70% media quality.
Built for Privacy, Designed for Precision
The collaboration is built on a strong commitment to consumer privacy. All optimization happens using broad, geo‑level insights without personal identifiers. IAS’s quality signals are matched only to Mastercard’s aggregated, anonymized spending patterns.
A New Standard for Media Performance
Advertisers no longer have to choose between brand protection and measurable outcomes – they can achieve both simultaneously. Together, IAS and Mastercard are establishing a new standard for performance-driven media:
- In-flight optimization tied to real sales outcomes
- AI-powered pre-bid activation
- Closed-loop measurement grounded in purchase insights
- Privacy-first design
- Continuous, dynamic performance improvement
Get Started
IAS Sales Outcomes solution, powered by Mastercard, will be available for U.S. campaigns starting Q2 2026. Connect with your IAS account representative to learn more.
