A Helpful Flowchart for Talking About Cross-Platform Advertising

By Tom Eaton, SVP, Programmatic & TV Solutions

Advertising today is complicated. In a world where consumers interact with content horizontally, across devices and platforms and publishers, there is a seemingly endless number of choices for every campaign. And as new technologies enter the market, the conversation is constantly shifting. Especially the conversation about cross-platform advertising (or is it cross-screen? or cross-media?).

How do advertisers go about choosing which platforms to run their campaigns with? Do they leave it up to their programmatic technology? Do they continue to painstakingly manage each buy across every platform? Is there a perfect balance between linear TV and digital and mobile and streaming?  And how do they even begin to understand how their ads are working, across so many platforms that are potentially reaching the same consumers multiple times?

There are different strategies and technologies and partners to answer the never-ending streams of questions asked by advertisers. There are also different ways to define cross-platform vs cross-media vs cross-screen… depending on which part of the industry you represent, and which products/services you sell or use.

At NCS we have had plenty of conversations with clients on this very topic. We may not all agree on the answers, but one thing we do all agree on is that advertisers today need to reach consumers with useful and relevant campaigns, wherever they consume content. And we can’t forget… measuring the results holistically to understand how different platforms work together to contribute to sales.

To simplify the conversation, we’ve created this flowchart.