New Trend of Multi-Platform Measurements

The rapid rise of mobile media has altered the landscape where brands engage with consumers. Smartphones, tablets and other connected devices have democratized access, creating a setting where brands are continuously connecting with consumers.

But as brands invest in new media, they’re faced with the challenge of measuring its effectiveness and proving a return of investments. Much of the first half of the last decade was spent researching how to measure digital advertising effectiveness. The primary metric used during this period was the click-through-rate (CTR), which overall remained very low and diminished digital’s effectiveness as an advertising channel.

Nowadays, many advertisers are building full-scale multi-platform campaigns. These campaigns aim to reach consumers across multiple channels and touch-points.  It’s a combination of these efforts that drives consumer persuasion through the purchasing funnel: through awareness, consideration, purchase intent, conversion (i.e. purchase) and loyalty. The “ideal” campaign reaches the consumer with the optimum attributes to drive conversions.

Brand marketers are also realizing that a holistic understanding of media exposure is needed to correctly analyze the impact to different components of the entire marketing mix. The notion of attribution tries to identify the causal analysis tying in a combination of media and campaigns to specific behavior patterns. 

Attribution remains a significant issue for brand managers and agencies. With an explosion of platforms, channels and media types, it has become very difficult to understand which set of touch-points had the greatest impact on purchase behavior. For example of a customer and advertising exposures to the brand Lipton and subsequent purchase behavior, this user sees 5 online impressions, 3 smartphone impressions and 1 tablet impression during a 30-day period and spends $12 on Lipton Tea during that period. Multi-platform measurements should be able to help marketers quantify the relative sales impact of an impression from each respective channel and use that information to help them optimize their marketing mix. 

Apparently, this new vision has already been embedded in many analytic companies' development strategies. For example, the Internet digital media analytic company comScore, has already put this strategy into its next generation's product development.

Now, the coming question is very obvious, is this new vision approachable?
If so, how should people formulate a strategy to measure this "impression"? This could be some detailed problems related with product development.

References:
http://www.comscore.com/Products/Audience_Analytics/Media_Metrix_Multi-Platform
http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2013/3/comScore_Announces_US_Launch_of_Media_Metrix_Multi-Platform