Cross-media advertising is no longer a buzzword. It’s fast becoming the gold standard for brands chasing both real-world outcomes and long-term brand equity, especially in a world without cookies, with shrinking budgets and a fractured media environment.
That’s the view of On Device CEO and co-founder Alistair Hill, who sat down with B&T at the Cairns Crocodiles conference to reflect on the latest trends in brand lift measurement.
“Over the past six months, one of the most significant shifts we’ve seen is a broader and more consistent adoption of cross-media measurement,” Hill said, citing a 26 per cent year-on-year increase in Q1 2025 alone.
“This reflects the ongoing fragmentation of the media landscape, as brands and agencies continue to seek a unified, holistic view of media effectiveness to optimise their advertising strategies”.
But the big shift isn’t just more brands joining the measurement party, it’s what they’re measuring. According to Hill, brand lift studies are now being tied directly to tangible business outcomes.
“For example, we recently worked with a leading UK mobile network provider, giffgaff, who through our OOH brand lift study tracked a 3 per cent increase in online visitation following their campaign. This kind of direct connection between consumer attitudes and consumer actions is helping brands better understand the business impact of their media investments”.
One of the most celebrated examples of this shift is Volkswagen’s YourWagen campaign. “It’s more important than ever to understand the performance of each individual channel and apply those learnings to continuously optimise,” said Hill, quoting Sarah Cox-Thornley, head of marketing at Volkswagen passenger cars.
“What made this campaign so effective was the integration of advanced cross-media brand lift measurement into the wider measurement strategy at a time when MMM wasn’t active.
“Brand lift therefore was critical in giving the team a granular understanding of how the campaign was working in a more timely manner, which proved fundamental to future planning. Doing brand lift well is hard and partnerships like this with great clients like PHD and fantastic brands like VW are really exciting. The industry is increasingly recognising the role that brand lift can play in building more effective, insight-led plans”.
With MMM (Marketing Mix Modelling) unavailable at the time, brand lift filled a critical measurement gap. Hill detailed how the campaign leveraged social, DOOH, BVOD and TV, each with distinct but complementary objectives.
“The channels worked well individually, but it was in their combination that demonstrated its ability to reinforce itself across the entire day, fitting into consumers’ lives wherever they may be and successfully refreshing memory structures”.
This is the “brand lift multiplier effect” in action, where cross-media campaigns outperform single-channel efforts by not just increasing frequency, but by layering message exposure in different contexts. “It’s called cognitive reinforcement,” Hill previously explained when he spoke to B&T last year. “We’ve demonstrated a 4x increase in effectiveness with cross-media campaigns compared to single-media approaches”.
Yet challenges remain. As cookies disappear and economic pressures grow, CMOs are under more pressure than ever to prove ROI. “It’s never been more important to be accountable for brand advertising investments,” Hill said. “Delivering this accountability independently with a robust methodology is crucial.”
That’s where brand lift studies come in, not just as diagnostic tools but as strategic levers. “The technological advancements seen in brand lift studies now demonstrate its ability to play a critical part within the wider measurement toolkit,” Hill said. “It’s cost effective, privacy safe and for brands that deploy brand lift as an always-on solution, we see it playing a fundamental role in creating more effective media plans, maximising ROI and delivering faster growth”.
So what’s the one thing Hill wishes every CMO understood? That brand lift is no longer just a nice-to-have metric. It’s the connective tissue between creative resonance and commercial return.
