The Measurement Dilemma: Why Advertisers Must Solve Cross-Platform Fragmentation Now

The convergence of traditional linear TV, streaming platforms, and digital media has clearly created a new era of complexity for advertisers. The meteoric rise of streaming hasn’t entirely replaced linear television. Still, it has dramatically expanded the playing field when it comes to measuring and optimizing channel spends and individual network or publisher performance, making it clear that reliance on legacy metrics alone is no longer enough.

Whether you're 16 or 60, today’s consumer has highly fragmented media habits. Successful brands have to face the formidable challenge of delivering campaigns across multiple platforms and, most importantly, accurately measuring the impact of their spend.

The stakes are particularly high for medium-sized brands. Unlike larger brands with vast budgets to absorb inefficiencies, mid-tier advertisers must be agile, strategic and data-driven to ensure they get the most juice out of their media spend. This makes advanced measurement capabilities a necessity.

The days of relying solely on traditional TV measurement and the dashboards of individual platforms for digital channels seem very distant.

The proliferation of video, beyond the traditional 30-second hero TV creative, and the diversification of viewing habits are forcing marketers and media agencies to provide measurement solutions that can align linear, CTV, OTT, YouTube, and all the other key video platforms.

That leads us to the “killer question” for today’s CMO or vice president of marketing: With this level of splintered viewership, how do you accurately measure campaign performance across all channels? Metrics like gross rating points (GRPs) may have once provided clear benchmarks for reach and frequency, but in a cross-platform world, they fall short. Today, the only credible solution for measuring return on investment is to leverage advanced analytics and first-party data to stitch together insights across linear TV, streaming, and digital channels.

This is fertile ground for measurement-based ad tech companies. While artificial intelligence brings exciting advancements to creative and other parts of our industry, the most important advancements will be around measurement, providing real analytics and insights into campaign performance.

The advancements in automatic content recognition (ACR) and digital IDs are already unlocking opportunities for advertisers to map exposure across screens. Brands can now understand whether the same viewer saw their advertisement on live TV, streamed content on a smart TV, or interacted with a related ad on their mobile device. This holistic view of behavior enables more effective allocation of media spend, improving reach without inflating frequency.

Additionally, the ability to measure at the individual level, beyond cookies, browsers and devices, is critical. This opens the door to much richer incrementality, A/B testing and, ultimately, better attribution methodologies where you can bring together both deterministic attribution alongside tools like media mix models.

The emergence of alternative measurement platforms is challenging Nielsen’s historical dominance in TV measurement and intensifying competition across the industry. Ad tech players like Videoamp, Measured, and Zeta are offering innovative, audience-centric measurement solutions. At the same time, large holding companies are investing — and now merging — billions of dollars in ad tech to deliver a cross-channel view of performance for their brands. This heightened level of competition is also pushing traditional measurement giants like Nielsen and ComScore to drive their own innovation and investment in products that can integrate data and offer more actionable insights for advertisers.

Like many things in life, however, the proliferation of tools has brought added complexity. Brands must now navigate disparate methodologies and varying degrees of transparency. This is where the right media partner makes all the difference. Medium-sized brands need media partners capable of cutting through the noise, synthesizing cross-platform insights, and leveraging the best tools to deliver measurable results. Most importantly, they need answers to the questions that matter most: Did the campaign drive incremental sales? Did it increase brand affinity? Which platform generated the strongest ROI?

I’m particularly focused on this challenge: how medium-sized brands navigate this new world of cross-channel campaigns and measurement matters because, for them, every dollar spent must deliver an outsized impact. It’s also the new key for scale. The next wave of unicorn companies is going to have a very different growth strategy compared to Dollar Shave Club, 23andMe, and Wix. Leaning on broad awareness strategies or relying on one to two channels to drive growth is no longer an option. The viability of scaling for the next set of unicorn brands will be defined by their ability to find a media partner that integrates advanced, cross-platform measurement tools. These tools not only provide them with a clearer understanding of campaign performance but also unlock opportunities to connect with their existing audience more effectively and expand their reach across a myriad of media channels.

For brands ready to compete in this fragmented media world, embracing cross-platform measurement isn’t an option; it’s the only path to survival.

Mark Zamuner is the president of Juice Media, a data-driven omnichannel media activation platform he founded in 2020 and was acquired by Altice USA in 2022.