With consumers engaging with content across more channels than ever before, optimizing spend is critical to ensure you’re reaching your audience where they are. Yet a significant hurdle remains: the fragmented nature of media investments and the resulting measurement challenges. This fragmentation makes it harder to get a unified view of return on investment (ROI), leaving many advertisers struggling to understand the true impact of their campaigns.
Effective cross-media ad strategies can help marketers navigate today’s dynamic advertising landscape. But these strategies must be underpinned by data that looks holistically at how your ad dollars are being invested across channels and what ad creatives are making a difference to create actionable insights and outcomes for your business.
The challenges of cross channel data
In Nielsen’s 2025 Annual Marketing Report, we found that marketers looking to calculate the ROI of their cross-media campaigns report a laundry list of challenges. While globally marketers found stakeholder alignment to be the biggest hurdle, it was followed closely by struggles with the amount and incomparability of data.
The sheer volume of platforms and devices consumers engage with daily are at the root of these challenges. From traditional television and radio to digital giants like social media, search engines and streaming services, audiences are scattered across a vast and diverse media ecosystem. Each platform often comes with its own unique metrics and reporting tools, creating silos of data that rarely speak to each other.
This disjointed approach makes it difficult to be seen and heard in the right places by the right people for your brand, leading to inefficient resource allocation and missed opportunities. Without a comprehensive understanding of how different media touchpoints interact and influence consumer behavior, marketers are left guessing, rather than strategically investing.
Breaking down data silos with advertising intelligence
This is where advertising intelligence can break down barriers. Nielsen’s Ad Intel solution provides a holistic view of the advertising landscape, with robust reporting across every major media type including TV, connected TV (CTV), digital, social, audio, print, out of home and cinema.
With this holistic view, marketers can get a clearer understanding of where to invest their ad dollars across the market and how to reach audiences, moving beyond individual channel metrics toward overall campaign performance. A unified perspective is crucial for identifying which media combinations—and creatives—are truly driving engagement and conversions, enabling more informed decision-making, and ultimately, higher ROI.
The power of CTV in your media mix
As audiences continue to shift toward streaming content, CTV has emerged as a powerful advertising channel and a key player in this evolving landscape. Not surprisingly, marketers are shifting spend accordingly. However, simply adding CTV to the mix isn’t enough; its impact needs to be meticulously measured and integrated into the broader cross-media strategy.
To help marketers better understand how budgets are being allocated across media, we recently added measurement across more than 20 individual platforms totalling 95% coverage of the U.S. CTV ad market to Nielsen Ad Intel. This provides transparency for marketers to uncover where and how brands are investing in CTV and which platforms are capturing the most ad spend. When CTV data is integrated with insights from other media channels, consistent and comparable analysis can help marketers develop data-based strategies that drive outcomes.
Consider a real-world scenario: A brand launches a new product with a campaign spanning linear TV, social media and CTV. With integrated ad spend data, they could analyze messaging strategy and creative positioning across each platform by viewing actual creatives with placement information to see what is working in the market. This level of granular insight allows for dynamic adjustments to the media mix, optimizing spend for maximum impact.
Maximizing impact with cross-media ad strategies
Cross-media ad strategies that drive outcomes aren’t just about data collection; they depend on intelligent data utilization. That involves analysing spending trends across your industry, optimizing campaigns in real-time based on performance data, and ultimately, building a robust feedback loop to continuously refine your advertising strategy. This iterative process allows marketers to move from reactive adjustments to proactive optimization, ensuring every dollar spent is working its hardest.
Ultimately, the path to overcoming the fragmented media investment challenge and developing winning strategies lies in leveraging comprehensive cross-platform media intelligence. By bringing together data from all channels into a single, cohesive framework, marketers can gain an unparalleled understanding of their audience, optimize their media mix with precision, and confidently demonstrate the true value of their advertising efforts. This integrated approach is no longer a luxury but a necessity for any brand looking to thrive in the complex, multi-screen world of modern advertising.
Learn more about how Nielsen’s advertising intelligence data can help shape your cross-media ad strategies.
