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Welcome to the Age of Quality.

The key takeaways from Inventory Talks 2025 — Picnic's inaugural event on what quality really means, and how the industry is moving from vanity metrics to measurable outcomes.

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0% of buyers name quality the #1 barrier to programmatic investment.

0% of impressions are truly seen, despite ~70% viewability.

0% correlation between attentive seconds and incremental profit.

0× higher brand lift on high-quality PIQ environments.

From the founder

“The industry doesn't have a time problem. It has a quality problem.”

For too long, advertising has rewarded quantity over quality — click-through, viewability, endless reach charts that don't reflect real impact. Inventory Talks 2025 brought publishers, researchers and tech partners together to treat quality as a shared responsibility, and to propose Inventory Intelligence as a new industry category: where measurement, ethics, relevance and quality data raise the bar for what “good” looks like.

Matthew Goldhill CEO & Founder, Picnic

Inventory Talks 2025

In the room.

Publishers, researchers and tech partners — one morning, one shared question: what does quality actually mean?

Inside the guide

Six talks, one shift.

01 Enshittification & the Age of Quality Matthew Goldhill, Picnic — how bad incentives let the open web decay, and the case for Inventory Intelligence as a new industry category.

02 Attention to Outcomes Shazia Ginai, Lumen — why only 30% of impressions are truly seen, and the 98% link between attentive seconds and profit.

03 Buy Quality, Deliver Relevance Thomas Ives, RAAS Lab — the Outcomes Ladder, and why contextual relevance is becoming the new standard.

04 Is CTR Dead? The future of measurement A rapid-fire debate with OMG, TeamX, Spark Foundry and Goodstuff on what metrics really matter in 2025.

05 Premium Ad Experiences Erika Cellai, Financial Times — the three pillars (storytelling, integrity, contextual relevance) that earn attention and trust.

06 Smart Supply, Stronger Outcomes Joseph Worswick & Jim Michaels, OpenX — the performance payoff to quality curation, proven in a global retail case study.

Watch the highlights

Inventory Talks 2025,
in ninety seconds.

This year's event explored the future of digital advertising through the lens of quality — from tackling enshittification and digital decay to redefining how we measure outcomes and design for premium ad experiences.

The outcomes ladder

Quality. Attention. Relevance.

Three forces that turn an impression into a result. Each builds on the one before — and together they define what good looks like in 2025.

Buy quality

It starts with where advertising shows up. Poor environments destroy trust and attention before a creative gets a chance.

34% rank quality the #1 barrier to programmatic investment.

Earn attention

Quality makes an ad seeable; attention proves it was seen — and seen ads are the ones that drive memory and recall.

98% correlation between attentive seconds and incremental profit.

Deliver relevance

When creative, context and intent align, display drives outcomes across the funnel — the more relevant, the better it performs.

0–100 the scale RAAS Lab uses to score an ad's relevance to its content.

Real
outcomes

Make every
impression count.

The Age of Quality distils Inventory Talks 2025 into practical next steps — how to reframe success, audit your supply, plan for relevance and build a higher-quality media strategy.

Download the guide