procedure

Read a fidelity score

Four of the seven are constants. Knowing which saves you a wasted afternoon.

A fidelity score is a published number out of 100. It says how much of your audience definition survived translation into one channel's native targeting vocabulary, and it is not a forecast, not a quality rating and not a prediction of performance. The most useful thing to know when reading one is whether it can move at all: four of the seven channels return the same constant however you describe the audience, and three vary across three discrete values each. Only the geography line moves the fixed four, and it can only cost them: an unmappable city takes fifteen points off every channel. Trying to improve a fixed one by writing more about the audience is wasted effort.
steps
5
roughly
Five minutes
things needed first
2
before you start

What you need first

  • A compiled plan, which the sandbox will produce without credentials
  • Five minutes and a willingness to read the rationale rather than only the number
the procedure

5 steps

Every step carries the thing that goes wrong at it, in its own block. That is the part worth reading.

  1. step 01

    Read the grade before the number

    Grades run person, household, content, geo-cohort and venue, each one step further from an individual. The grade tells you what kind of claim the channel can support; the number tells you how well it did inside that.

    what goes wrong here

    An 85 person-level and a 65 content-level are not comparable on a single scale. They are different claims about different objects.

  2. step 02

    Check whether the score can move

    Audio returns 65, addressable TV 55, DOOH 50 and cinema 40, before the geography penalty. CTV returns 85, 65 or 60; search returns 82, 68 or 45; social returns 62, 48 or 38.

    what goes wrong here

    If a fixed channel scores lower than you want, the answer is to spend less there or not buy it, not to rewrite the audience.

  3. step 03

    Read the rationale

    Every score comes with a written rationale saying what produced it — which segments matched, at what confidence, and what was used as a fallback.

    what goes wrong here

    A CTV plan graded household at 65 rather than person at 85 means segments matched only at low confidence and the plan was flagged for human review rather than promoted. That is a real distinction and it is in the rationale.

  4. step 04

    Look for the geography penalty

    Naming a city the UK geography table cannot map costs fifteen points on every channel, floored at ten, and the rationale names the city.

    what goes wrong here

    This is the most common single cause of an unexpectedly low score across all seven channels at once. If every channel dropped, look here first.

  5. step 05

    Decide what to fund

    Use the scores to decide where the money goes rather than to decide whether the plan is good. A 40 on cinema is not a failure; it is the honest worth of a venue projection, and cinema may still be the right buy for a launch.

    what goes wrong here

    The trap is treating the score as a ranking of channels. It is a ranking of how well each one can express your audience, which is a different question from which one will work.

what you end up with

A clear view of which channels can express your audience well, which cannot and never will, and which would improve with a better brief.

other procedures

What else you might need to do

45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live.

Talk it through

Questions

Is a low fidelity score a reason not to buy a channel?

Not on its own. Cinema scores 40 out of 100 and may still be the right buy for a launch, because a full screen with the lights down has an attention profile nothing else in the plan matches. The score tells you how precisely you are targeting, not how well the channel works. What it should change is the claim you make afterwards: a 40 does not support a statement about reaching a named audience.