In an industry first, DoubleVerify is partnering with Attain to link attention metrics for digital advertising to real-time sales outcomes. The collaboration comes as a growing interest in attention metrics meets questions about how much it really matters to revenue.

Other attention-tracking firms, including Adelaide Metrics, have conducted publicly reported studies with marketers and agencies such as Coca-Cola Co., Colgate-Palmolive Co. and GroupM, linking metrics to sales and other outcome measures such as brand favorability. The DV-Attain deal looks to go a step further by linking attention to direct consumer purchase data in real time.

Attain collects real-time purchase data from a permission-based panel of 6 million people powered by a financial services app linked to retail loyalty accounts for receipt capture.

In part, the effort aims to fill the gap left by the impending demise of cookies and other personal identifiers that could link digital ad exposures to sales, website visits and other indicators of conversion, said Daniel Slotwiner, senior VP of attention for DoubleVerify.

Earlier this year, DoubleVerify became the first company to receive Media Rating Council accreditation around attention measurement based on audits confirming it reports as promised on the more than 50 attention signals it tracks.

“As an advertiser, closing the loop has become increasingly essential,” said Jay Hubbs, VP of marketing, advertising, analytics, and innovation at Best Western, an early user of the DoubleVerify attention metrics collaboration with Attain, in a statement. “Access to this dataset will significantly enhance our marketing efforts, optimizing current campaigns and informing future media buys.”

“Brand partners are increasingly focusing on attention as a key metric for their campaigns,” said Price Glomski, senior VP of global media and partnerships of media agency PMG. “As this trend evolves, brands require greater clarity on outcomes, specifically whether attention leads to a purchase or sale. The partnership between Attain and DoubleVerify addresses this need.”

DV Authentic Attention scores are only applied to impressions that otherwise meet baseline quality standards for such things as viewability, fraud detection, brand safety and suitability, said Chief Marketing Officer Dan Slivjanovski.

“What we’ve done is aggregated additional [attention] signals into I think relatively intuitive concepts like prominence and how much content an ad is competing with as well as engagement and signals that tell us whether or not a user was present when the ad is displayed,” Slotwiner said. “The focus is identifying the probability that an ad can drive attention, and the rest is left up to the creative and the synergy with the target audience.”

Attain, which works for brands such as Coca-Cola Co., United, Uber, Procter & Gamble Co.’s Pampers and others, posts a running daily transaction count from its panel online. Besides DoubleVerify, Attain data is also integrated with The Trade Desk for programmatic trading, and a person familiar with the matter said further integrations with other measurement players are likely.

Jonah Goodhart, the former co-founder and CEO of DV competitor Moat (now part of Oracle), joined Attain’s board in June, and said he sees the company as filling an increasingly important need for fully consent-based purchase data that can be linked to digital advertising given that digital is by far the biggest segment of ad spending.

“There’s not a single company on earth that advertises, if they’re a for-profit, not trying to generate revenue as a result of their storytelling,” Goodhart said. Assurances that panelist consent to having their purchases tracked were “100% explicit” not “wink, wink implicit” was key to him joining Attain’s board, he said.