The Case for Cross-Media Measurement

Today’s consumers switch between devices and streaming services with a seamless fluidity that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. A media experience might start on a tablet during a commute, continue on a smartphone during a lunchbreak, and conclude on a Smart TV back at home – all in the course of a single day.

As the media landscape grows increasingly fragmented, brands and agencies need a unified, platform-agnostic view of their media investment that is accurate and actionable across all touchpoints. Cross-media measurement provides this holistic perspective, enabling marketers to:

• Have a unified view of campaign performance across all channels and devices.
• Remove duplicated audiences, providing true reach and frequency metrics.
• Go beyond individual performance silos to discover cross-channel synergies.
• Make apples-to-apples comparison between platforms to optimise channel mix and maximize ROI.
• Make precise media budget allocation and optimise message delivery and frequency.
• Leverage privacy-by-design techniques to maintain precision while respecting data ethics.
• Incrementally measure the entire media experience with brand and performance metrics.

While cross-media measurement might have once been a sophisticated bonus to marketers, in today’s media landscape it is non-negotiable. Without robust cross-media measurement, brands and agencies are forced to make decisions with incomplete or siloed data, risking inefficiencies in spend and missed opportunities for impact. Cross-measurement across TV, digital, social, and audio is a game changer that connects media exposure to business outcomes, enabling marketers to make smarter, faster and more effective decisions.

• Media Fragmentation: As audiences hop between streaming services, social apps, smartphones, and traditional TV, data is dispersed across devices and platforms. This behaviour makes it difficult to aggregate and harmonise datasets for a complete customer journey view.
• Measurement Silos: Each media channel or publisher may use different metrics and methodologies, complicating efforts to create standard KPIs and eliminate duplicated audiences. The results in incomplete reach analysis and inaccurate frequency counts.
• Signal Loss: The deprecation of third-party cookies and personal identifier signals significantly restricts tracking across platforms and devices, exacerbating cross-channel attribution challenges.
• Walled Gardens: Many dominant platforms control their own user data, restricting third-party measurement, visibility and comparability. This closed approach means advertisers often must piece together performance data from separate silos, creating blind spots in their view of overall impact. Additionally, a conflict of interest arises for retailers and platforms that offer both advertisement and measurement services, supporting the need for independent, third-party solutions.
• Lack of standardised metrics and methodologies: In the absence of a single cross-channel currency for comparing exposure and outcomes, each medium defines success differently. This inconsistency leaves marketers unable to reliably allocate budget or gauge incrementality across the full media experience. It also makes it hard to link ad exposure to business outcomes in a unified way.
• Regulatory Pressures: Tightening privacy regulations limit how media data can be collected, shared, and connected across ecosystems. As new channels and ad formats continue to emerge, these challenges are expected to grow in complexity.

1. Industry Collaborations

Origin (from ISBA, the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers) and Halo (the US counterpart to Origin) work to build more comprehensive cross-media measurement foundations. Through membership of Origin and Halo, Havas Media Network contributes to the development of industry standards that follow the North Star principles for cross-media measurement proposed by the WFA (World Federation of Advertisers). Through these collaborations, Havas Media Network has access to independent, foundational data for cross-media measurement that is both privacy compliant and durable.

2. In-house Approaches

• People Measurement: Recognising that no single vendor solution provides a full picture of reach, Havas Media Network developed People Measurement, a custom, end-to-end measurement system. People Measurement yields deduplicated reach and frequency data by matching exposures to anonymised individuals across all channels. It then links that exposure to key outcomes – from brand health metrics to business results – in a single unified report. Importantly, this solution is “source-unified and third-party verified,” giving advertisers an independent view of total campaign impact.
• Havas Videometer: Havas Media Network developed Videometer based on WFA North Star principles. Videometer is a deterministic and probabilistic tool that delivers total reach, gross rating point (GRPs) and attention distribution per user across media platforms and publishers.

3. Partnering with Third-Party Market Solutions

Unlocking the value of cross-media measurement for clients requires collaborations that are tailored to individual measurement goals and brand and business objectives.

One third-party, independent cross-media measurement solution that Havas Media Network leverages is The Audience Project. This software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is connected to walled gardens with pixel integration to ad servers. The Audience Project bolsters in-house approaches with visualisation dashboards that provide reporting of real time insights as well as incrementality figures and cost efficiencies.

• Providing clients of a single “source of truth” for their campaigns, so that every unit of media spend can be tracked, optimised, and tied back to real outcomes.
• Elevating measurement and analytics as a key pillar of media experiences by delivering accurate and actionable insights.
• Maintaining a leadership role in transforming advertising effectiveness for clients worldwide by driving better ROI for clients today and pushing the industry toward the next generation of data-driven, people-centric media planning.

Want to know how cross-media measurement can deliver against your business’ objectives?

Contact new.biz@havasmn.com to get the conversation started!