What launched
Adelaide, the attention measurement firm, has released a free Media Quality Calculator that lets advertisers upload a site or app list and receive an AU scorecard by email. The company says no spend data is required, and results are meant to arrive within minutes.
Co-founder Zach Kubin promoted the tool on LinkedIn in late August 2026. He framed the purpose bluntly, writing that the tool “shows brands how much low-AU media is hiding in their plans.”
How the report works
The calculator asks for a work email, then a single-column CSV of domains or app bundle IDs. The PDF output compares the list against Adelaide benchmarks. The report covers:
- The list’s average AU score versus Adelaide benchmarks
- The share of domains falling below those benchmarks
- AU variation across Display, OLV and CTV
- The biggest optimization opportunity in the list
Lists must contain at least 200 rows and no more than 100,000. The file spec explicitly excludes channel, placement and performance data, which makes this a domain-level count rather than an impression-weighted analysis.
The fine print media buyers should read
Coverage is limited to the US, UK and Canada. Lists containing domains from other regions may return limited or less actionable results, and Adelaide points those advertisers toward its sales team.
The gap between the report and the upload is worth clarifying. The tool promises channel-level insight, but the file cannot include a channel field. Adelaide must infer channel from the identifier, and it has not explained how. Meanwhile, a standard DSP delivery report contains the exact columns the file spec appears to reject, so ask whether you need to reduce it to a domain column before uploading.
The promotional materials also carry a prominent $27 billion annual low-quality programmatic inventory figure, but no source, methodology, geography or year is attached. The wording shifts between “waste” and “spend,” which are different claims.
Why this matters for growth and media teams
For digital marketers and performance teams, the calculator lowers the barrier to a first attention-quality read. What used to require a tagged campaign and a commercial conversation can start with an email address and a CSV.
The catch is that AU is a proprietary predictive score, and the benchmark is controlled by the vendor selling the fix. Use the report as a screening layer, not a neutral audit. Ask what happens to ungraded domains, how long uploaded lists are retained, and what the comparison baseline includes.
That said, attention signals are moving into activation through Amazon DSP, Google DV360, InMobi and other platforms. A pre-campaign diagnostic becomes more useful when the same metric is available as a pre-bid filter.
Practical move: run the free calculator on a known-good inclusion list and a suspected-low delivery list before testing any paid AU optimization. If the tool cannot separate those two lists, treat its output accordingly.
Source: PPC Land
