Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 16, 2026) - Vertical Impression (VI), the company behind the largest real-world, creative-level attention dataset in out-of-home (OOH) advertising and Adelaide, the global standard for attention-based media quality, today announced a partnership that brings out-of-home attention data into an omnichannel media-quality standard.
Vertical Impression - the creator of the largest real-world attention dataset in out-of-home advertising built over the past decade from more than 9,000 elevator screens across North America - will be integrating its federally funded technology into Adelaide AU, the leader in attention-based media quality measurement. VI's technology will be woven into Adelaide's AU platform, the first omnichannel media quality metric that increases transparency for media buyers.
"In most media, an impression doesn't mean anyone looked," said Nicolette Leonardis, President & Co-Founder, Vertical Impression. "We built Vertical Impression to measure the moment a real person actually does - attention, frame by frame, no bots and no skips. That moment of real attention is what the brain encodes and later recalls. Now that signal lives inside Adelaide's standard because in the battle for attention, it's not just about being seen - it's about being remembered."
Through this partnership, VI will supply Adelaide with its attention dataset to calibrate and continuously improve AU's measurement of OOH placement quality. By adding these robust vision-based attention signals alongside Adelaide's existing eye-tracking, exposure and outcome signals, the partnership will strengthen OOH measurement broadly.
"Out of home is a valuable part of the media mix, but its quality has been notoriously hard to quantify and compare," said Marc Guldimann, CEO & Co-Founder, Adelaide. "Vertical Impression has built the technology to capture OOH attention data at scale, and bringing that data into our AU model will help advertisers measure OOH with the same confidence and rigor they expect across other channels. That means a clearer view of OOH's contribution to outcomes and better-informed media investment decisions."
VI has spent more than a decade securely collecting granular attention data across elevator and lobby environments at scale. Its measurement platform captures attention at millisecond precision, frame by frame, using a 2.5-second threshold that research has shown to predict brand recall and downstream purchase behaviour. Tied to specific placements, formats, and time windows, the dataset offers a direct view into what captures attention in OOH environments. VI grounds its measurement in real-world attention signals - a direct view of attention rather than an inferred one and VI's AI and vision intelligence platform measures attention by analyzing 132 anonymous facial reference points in fractions of a second, with all processing handled in the cloud.
Complementing this is Adelaide's AU metric, an omnichannel media quality score that predicts a placement's likelihood of capturing attention and driving outcomes. Built on attention research, exposure signals, and full-funnel outcome data, AU gives advertisers a consistent 0-100 score to evaluate media quality across channels - from digital and TV to OOH and digital out-of-home (DOOH). Adelaide's AU methodology was independently validated by MediaSense in 2025 and found to be transparent, reproducible, and reliably correlated with campaign performance across multiple KPIs and channels.
The announcement comes as OOH investment continues to grow. According to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), U.S. OOH revenue reached a record $9.46 billion in 2025, extending the industry's growth to 19 consecutive quarters, with DOOH up 10.5% year over year. As brands increase OOH spend, the need for consistent, comparable measurement has become more urgent. This partnership helps bring OOH into the same cross-channel quality framework advertisers already use to assess digital, TV, and other channels.
Through this partnership, advertisers will now be able to measure and activate AU across VI inventory, from setting minimum AU thresholds during planning to transacting on guaranteed attention deals and incorporating VI screens into cross-channel campaigns. For brands already using AU, the partnership extends the same measurement playbook to OOH without requiring new tools, frameworks, or processes.
In addition to this announcement, Vertical Impression's AI and vision intelligence platform recently received federal government backing supporting its global expansion. The Adelaide partnership advances that mandate by bringing VI's attention dataset into a global cross-channel measurement framework.
"Attention is becoming the common language of modern media measurement, and this partnership helps bring out-of-home into that ecosystem in a way the industry hasn't seen before," said Fouad El-Masri, Co-Founder & CEO, Vertical Impression. "We've spent years building AVA to understand attention inside real physical environments at scale. Integrating that intelligence into AU creates a bridge between the physical and digital media worlds - and gives advertisers a far more comparable way to evaluate quality, outcomes, and performance across channels."
Adelaide and Vertical Impression will debut the partnership at DPAA Canada on June 17, with AU measurement expansion across VI's network throughout 2026.
About Adelaide
Adelaide is the leader in attention-based media quality measurement. Our mission is to bring increased transparency and fairness to advertising by supplying the market with a precise, omnichannel media quality metric connected to business outcomes. Adweek has called Adelaide's AU "the attention economy's most widely recognised metric." Proven to predict full-funnel outcomes more accurately than any existing metric, AU helps the world's largest brands make smarter investment decisions, activate attention data programmatically, and drive better performance. Adelaide is named after the global epicentre of evidence-based marketing in southern Australia and is headquartered in New York City. For more information, visit adelaidemetrics.com.
About Vertical Impression
Vertical Impression operates the largest real-world attention dataset in out-of-home advertising, built from more than 9,000 elevator screens across Canada, the United States, and Puerto Rico, spanning residential, commercial office, hospital, retail, hospitality, and campus environments. With government-backed growth ahead, every screen is a live signal of real human attention. VI's proprietary platform delivers campaign-level, privacy-safe attention analytics at millisecond precision across elevator and lobby environments: physical spaces where every signal is human, dwell times are high, and there's no algorithmic curation, no skip button, and no bot traffic. Vertical Impression is headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta.
Learn more at verticalimpression.com.
MEDIA CONTACT - VERTICAL IMPRESSION
Nicolette Leonardis, President & Co-Founder
nleonardis@verticalimpression.com
MEDIA CONTACT - ADELAIDE
Kaitlin Nizolek, VP, Marketing
kaitlin@adelaidemetrics.com
To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/301345
Source: Vertical Impression
