Aquila, established last yr by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), offered its first major progress report during a session on the ARF’s annual AudienceXScience conference on March 26. The entity looks to provide a “holy grail” to marketers which have long wished for a correct cross-media measurement solution, said Aquila President and COO Tina Daniels.
“The opaqueness of the walled gardens is arguably amongst probably the most insidious problem that we now have,” Daniels said. “A bunch of solutions have popped up to create a workaround for this issue, but let’s be honest, most of those solutions have added complexity, not simplicity, to marketers’ lives.”
Aquila goals to offer marketers normalized total impressions and deduplicated cross-platform reach and frequency data. The group has the widespread industry support needed to solve measurement problems attributable to media fragmentation, with buy-in from advertiser partners, solutions providers, trade groups and major ad platforms. The ANA, a trade group, represents brand marketers.
Aquila brings together census-level impression data from Meta, Google, Amazon and TikTok, which it combines with television data that might be provided by latest partner Comscore, Daniels announced throughout the panel. From there, Kantar will map the info to train a virtual ID model that may create the duplication evaluation and produce the platform’s de-duplicated region frequency reports. Accenture is using the World Federation of Advertisers’ open-source Halo code to construct the Aquila platform and the Media Rating Council is guiding the method to be certain that it is in-built a way that satisfies its accreditation standards.
“We really need to be sure that this platform is being built with agency needs in mind. We want this data to flow into their processes and their tools very naturally,” Daniels said. “We expect that one of the crucial powerful use cases might be feeding directly into [media mix modeling] models. We know that the more granular an MMM model is, the simpler it is for marketers.”
Progress report
While Aquila is a data-first platform, it will even be calibrated by a single-source, person-level panel that Kantar is creating. The panel already includes 2,000 homes, almost halfway to the goal of 5,000 homes representing about 8,000 people. Meanwhile, the privacy-preserving virtual ID model that undergirds the platform is entering its alpha phase in April, with marketer trials using real data expected in Q3.
Those marketer trials will discover and solve more concrete use cases for Aquila. For example, a marketer trying to reach 15 million specific consumers in a cross-channel campaign that features TV can’t at all times be certain in the event that they’re reaching 5 million consumers thrice, 3 million consumers five times or 1 million consumers 15 times. Aquila’s solution is designed to make clear those insights.
In addition to a technical roadmap, Aquila has firmed up its marketing strategy. For legal reasons, the entity is a for-profit business inside the nonprofit ANA, but it intends to run as a break-even business with a low price for marketers. As Aquila gets into general availability in 2026, it plans to add other publishers, channels and media industry representatives, but doesn’t intend to develop into a measurement currency.
“I’m going to say that very declaratively: There are lot of great currencies on the market; that just isn’t our ambition,” Daniels said. “We’re not out to disrupt other measurement firms.”
Unilever’s expectations for Aquila, agencies
Aquila seeks to be an addition, not a substitute, to the toolkits already utilized by major marketers. Unilever, for instance, wants to leverage a mixture of first-party tools, platform tools and third-party tools like Aquila, explained Adam Frazier, head of U.S. consumer data strategy for the CPG giant.
“Third-party tools are really critical in our industry as an important referee. No one needs to be grading their very own homework,” Frazier said at the tip of Daniels’ presentation.
For all the info that marketers like Unilever are able to collect and analyze, cross-media management hasn’t been solved due to complexity and inconsistency, a difficulty Aquila hopes to solve. But solving for reach and frequency just isn’t the tip of Unilever’s journey, either.
“We have to challenge the concept … reach and frequency is an important issue. That’s probably not the case. My KPI just isn’t reach and frequency: our KPI at Unilever is about competitive growth, and we would like to understand what tactics drive that growth,” Frazier said.
The assumption that reducing extra frequency will make campaigns more efficient — in an environment where the Unilevers of the world are “competing against upstarts which have never heard of frequency capping of their lives,” as Frazier put it — could possibly be unsuitable, making the info that Aquila provides much more necessary for testing and measuring. In addition, much of the work that Aquila does might be utilized not only by brands, but in addition agencies that operate as extensions of the brand, working together to achieve outcomes.
“We would expect our agency to be on this data, all over the place it potentially shows up,” said Frazier, adding that the work will extend to analytics, performance and planning teams as Unilever tries to speed up campaign optimization and improve budget allocation.
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