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The New Frontier: Media Quality as a Performance Engine
For years, advertisers have treated media quality signals such as viewability, brand safety and attention, primarily as protective measures. While essential, these indicators have largely functioned as passive safeguards rather than active drivers of performance.
That limitation is becoming increasingly apparent. Performance teams continue to rely on proxies: delivery metrics, clicks, or delayed studies which fail to reflect what truly drives sales. Without a real-time connection to actual purchase data, optimisation slows, budgets become less efficient, and pressure to deliver stronger return on ad spend intensifies.
What advertisers now need is a closed-loop system that identifies which media quality conditions drive better outcomes and actively optimises towards them while campaigns are live.
Turning Media Signals into Sales Signals
In an industry-first collaboration, IAS and Mastercard are transforming media quality into a true performance engine.
By combining IAS’s proprietary intelligence across media quality, attention and format with Mastercard’s aggregated and anonymised spend insights, advertisers can automatically direct investment towards impressions proven to drive incremental sales — in real time, while campaigns are in flight.
An Outcomes-Driven Optimisation Loop
- In-Flight Sales Optimisation: Programmatic investment is dynamically steered towards media quality signals associated with stronger incremental sales outcomes, using Mastercard-enriched IAS pre-bid segments.
- Always-On Sales Measurement: IAS quality signals are continuously connected with Mastercard spend insights, enabling ongoing validation of which media environments are truly driving performance.
Together, these capabilities create a continuous, dynamic feedback loop, transforming media quality from a reporting metric into a measurable performance lever.
Proven Impact at Scale
Early testing highlights the tangible impact of aligning 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 incremental spend impact per 1,000 impressions for campaigns optimising towards ≥70% media quality
Note: These early results are based on initial tests with leading telecommunications and retail brands. Results may vary and are not indicative of future performance.
Built for Privacy, Designed for Precision
This collaboration is grounded in a strong commitment to consumer privacy. All optimisation is conducted using broad, geo-level insights without personal identifiers. IAS’s media quality signals are matched exclusively with Mastercard’s aggregated and anonymised spending data.
A New Standard for Media Performance
Advertisers no longer need to choose between brand protection and measurable outcomes — they can achieve both simultaneously. Together, IAS and Mastercard are setting a new benchmark for performance-driven media:
- In-flight optimisation tied directly to real sales outcomes
- AI-powered pre-bid activation
- Closed-loop measurement based on purchase insights
- Privacy-first design
- Continuous, dynamic performance improvement
Get Started
IAS Sales Outcomes, powered by Mastercard, will be available for US campaigns from Q2 2026. To learn more, contact your IAS representative.
