• by Joe Mandese , Yesterday

NASHVILLE – Following years of development and months of beta testing, the Association of National Advertisers' (ANA) cross-media measurement service Aquila will roll out as a commercial product that advertisers can use to empirically measure the reach and frequency of ad campaigns across TV and digital platforms.

The first phase of the rollout will occur within 30 days, incorporating impression-level data from Meta, YouTube and linear TV. The second phase will roll out in the second half of the year, incorporating data from TikTok, Amazon and iHeartRadio.

Aquila, which operates as a for-profit subsidiary of the ANA, uses Comscore for linear TV measurement, and Samba TV for streaming data, but obtains audience impression-level streaming data directly from its digital platform partners.

The digital platform partners – including Amazon, Google, Meta, and now iHeartRadio – contribute their data at no cost to Aquila, and also have been its biggest source of initial funding.

Unlike other audience measurement providers – including Nielsen, Comscore, iSpot, VideoAmp – etc., which vie to function as advertising marketplace “currencies” that media buyers and sellers can use to transact their deals, Aquila was built purely to enable advertisers to measure the actual reach and frequency of their campaigns across TV and streaming media platforms in order to minimize waste such as excess frequency, and improve effectiveness by achieving higher reach or redeploying wasted ad dollars in other more effective ways.

The rollout announcement, which was made during a presentation by Aquila CEO Bill Tucker at the ANA’s annual Media Conference here, has been long-awaited by early supporters of the service, many whom have already been participating in beta tests of the service.

As part of this presentation, Tucker showed case study data from beta tester Uber, showing that it found the brand’s ads were reaching a wider audience than planned, but at less than half the planned frequency, prompting it to take a deeper look at its advertising frequency strategy.

During a case study presentation by Come Near Vice President of Media Angelo Lomonte shared fascinating data bout the cross-media overlap – or lack thereof – of the commercial the organization ran during the Super Bowl (see image below).

While funded primarily by its platform and data partners to date, Aquila disclosed that 27 advertisers have signed on as clients to date -- including the 25 shown below -- with more to come.

According to the ANA's 2024 non-profit tax filing with the Internal Revenue Service, the most recent year which is publicly available, the ANA attributed $8,934,773 to the for-profit syndicated cross-media research unit, or nearly 11% of the ANA's total asset value that year.

The ANA reported $14,432,500 in income for Aquila on total ANA revenue less expenses of -$1,759,885.