The Daily Mail is using Sovrn’s Signal Vitals to cut through the noise of outdated metrics, focusing on attention, transparency and actionable insights to improve inventory value.
Digital media’s current flight to quality comes after years of advertisers chasing cheap reach.
Publishers are under more pressure to demonstrate their media quality as curated deals replace the open auction. So they’re looking for new ways to optimize their inventory and inject those media quality signals into the bidstream.
“We’re in a new era,” said Jeremy Gan, EVP of advertising at the Daily Mail. “We have an explosion of data right now, whether it’s through pre-bid, on-site analytics or other sources. The question is: How do we act against it?”
To meet this challenge, the SSP Sovrn developed Signal Vitals, an analytics dashboard that gives publishers insights into how buyers value their digital real estate. The product emerged from conversations with publishers like the Daily Mail that were eager to move beyond traditional metrics like viewability and surface the deeper signals driving advertising performance.
Signal Vitals closes a gap in the current ad tech ecosystem: the lack of transparency publishers have into how inventory is evaluated and activated. By providing benchmarking data and detailed analytics, the platform aims to help publishers make more strategic decisions about their ad placement, content ratio and overall inventory quality.
According to Peter Cunha, Managing Director at Sovrn, the dashboard goes beyond reporting, offering publishers a look at how factors like ad clutter, viewability and attention metrics can impact their revenue streams.
Rethinking Inventory Health in a Down Market
With the programmatic marketplace shifting toward curated deals, Signal Vitals gives publishers a road map for being included in these deals.
“The open auction is effectively being replaced by curation,” said Cunha. “A big chunk of supply-side inventory now has curation applied to it, and publishers need to understand why that’s happening—and how to make themselves eligible for it.”
Gan expanded on that idea, noting that current market conditions have lowered advertisers’ resistance to change in how they buy and measure media – which spells opportunity for publishers.
Because the open auction is in decline, publishers can push for the media quality measurement changes they’ve wanted for years, Gan said. “It’s not just about taking ads off the page; it’s about building a new performance baseline and asking what metrics matter now.”
That includes reevaluating everything from viewability and bid rate to attention metrics and carbon emissions.
Internally, Gan’s team refers to this market transformation as “premiumisation,” which, he said, is a tongue-in-cheek way of admitting that older methods weren’t always optimal, but now there’s a focused effort to improve.
“We need modern metrics,” he said. “We need to talk about the health of your inventory, not just how many ads you serve.”
A/B Testing the Value of Attention
For the Daily Mail, Gan asserts that attention metrics have become a major focus for assessing media health and ad effectiveness.
While advertisers have long recognized attention as a powerful performance indicator, Sovrn’s Cunha noted that the industry has been slow to adopt attention metrics due to cost and complexity on both the buy and sell sides.
“The opportunity to make decisions around attention has always been there; it’s just been cost-prohibitive,” he said.
But with advertisers placing a greater emphasis on media health and quality, Cunha sees attention becoming “the new commodity,” replacing traditional signals like viewability and click-through rate.
While attention may be vying to replace viewability, Gan emphasized that viewability is not optional in today’s market. “Viewability is table stakes,” he said.“If you don’t hit certain benchmarks, you’re not going to get the CPMs you want, not even in PMPs.”
However, Gan added, improving attention is much more important for publishers to improve yield. “We’ve run A/B tests,” he said. “If attention drops, CPMs can drop by half. But when you improve it, you see real gains.”
And after years of industry inaction on attention metrics, Gan said, the tide is finally turning.
“Buyers are asking more questions about attention,” he said. “The conversation is no longer about whether it matters but about how we measure it, and how reliably it reflects performance.”
Because Signal Vitals gives the Daily Mail transparency into how attention impacts performance, Gan and his team can more easily surface those insights for buyers, he said.
The challenge now is for everyone in the programmatic marketplace to take action and trust “modern metrics that actually reflect outcomes, not just vanity numbers,” Gan said. “If we do that, it’s a win for everyone across the ecosystem.”