From channels to journeys: Why cross-media measurement matters more than ever
Article 9 of 10 in series: The Great Reach Reset
Marketing is experienced as one journey, but is still measured in silos.
Recently, Lily Tong, Director, Measurement at Amazon Ads, shared a Digiday article about how brands are measuring value across the entire customer journey. I find the concept genuinely interesting because it highlights one of the biggest tensions in modern marketing.
Consumers experience brands through a continuous flow of touchpoints. Measurement, however, is still largely fragmented, and today’s customer journey spans TV, streaming, social platforms, retail media, search, chat, and many other digital environments. Consumers switch between them effortlessly, often multiple times before making a decision. Yet the way we measure marketing still reflects the structures of the past, where channels were planned, bought and evaluated separately.
Each platform reports its own results. Each channel has its own metrics and optimisation logic. But very few marketers actually get a clear picture of how everything works together through an omnichannel lens.
Over the past decade, digital advertising promised unprecedented precision. Attribution models were designed to assign value to each interaction along the path to conversion, creating the impression that marketing performance could be measured almost perfectly, but the reality of today’s media landscape is far more complex.
Privacy changes have made it harder to track individuals across platforms. Large digital ecosystems operate within their own data environments. At the same time, the number of consumer touchpoints continues to grow rapidly. The result is a paradox: marketers have more data and more dashboards than ever before, yet often less clarity about what actually drives growth.
More data, less clarity: Why fragmented measurement is holding marketers back
This is why the conversation around customer journey measurement is so important. It recognises something marketers have always intuitively understood: marketing rarely works in isolation.
A TV campaign may create initial awareness. Social media may reinforce relevance and keep the brand top of mind. Online video may deepen engagement. Retail media or search may capture the final moment of purchase. Each touchpoint contributes something different, and its real value often lies in how they reinforce one another.
When these channels are measured separately, their combined impact becomes difficult to see. And when marketers cannot see the combined effect, they risk optimising individual channels instead of overall marketing effectiveness.
Understanding how channels work together is now the key to real growth
Cross-media measurement is an attempt to address exactly this challenge. The goal is not simply to collect more data, but to create a unified understanding of how different media channels contribute to business outcomes. Instead of asking which channel performed best, marketers can begin asking a more meaningful question: which combination of media drives the strongest results?
This shift may sound subtle, but it fundamentally changes how marketing decisions are made. When brands understand how channels work together, they can allocate budgets more intelligently, focusing less on isolated metrics and more on incremental impact.
Towards omnichannel measurement
Ultimately, measurement frameworks need to reflect how consumers actually experience media. People do not think in channels. They simply encounter brands in different moments throughout their day – on the TV, on their phone, while shopping online, or while scrolling through social feeds.
If measurement does not reflect that reality, the decisions built on top of it will always be incomplete, and the conversation Lily highlighted is a useful reminder that the industry is increasingly aware of this challenge. The next step is to build measurement approaches that truly match the complexity of modern media consumption.
My prediction is that within five years, the industry will move beyond channel metrics entirely and focus on one thing: how the full media ecosystem drives incremental reach and revenue growth.
Because when the customer journey is connected, measurement needs to be omnichannel.
This article is 9 of 10 in our series: The Great Reach Reset
About this article series
In a fragmented media landscape, reach is no longer a simple KPI - it is a strategic growth lever. In this article series, AudienceProject explores why advertisers are not failing at reach, but at measuring it properly, and why incremental, deduplicated cross-media reach has become essential to driving penetration, controlling frequency, and unlocking sustainable growth.
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