The French might have cracked it

Interestingly, while Ad Age is reporting on the industry joining forces to understand the combined impact of the various screens, the French might have cracked it.

So I found out reading an article titled 'The French experience – Measuring the audience of a medium beyond its original form' by Laurent Battais, from Médiamétrie in France. The article explains how Médiamétrie has joined forces with the UDA (French advertisers organization) and representatives from the TV, Radio, Press or Internet advertising sales houses brokers, as well as media agencies.
Objectives were to (and I quote): 'to meet the needs:
for measuring the performance of a media brand irrespective of the distribution medium;
for monitoring the consumption of audiovisual content over all of the distribution media;
for enabling advertisers and media agencies to optimise their multimedia investments.'

Whilst the methodology used is obviously pretty complex, the French have approached it very smartly, by not reinventing the wheel, but combining data from existing tools.

So now, we know what the cumulative reach potential is of a radio station A with website B, rather than guessing it.

Is the this holy grail? Obviously not. The methodology has it's limitations. For instance, it is not developed to optimize buying. Also, the deliberate choice was made not to create a common currency across media. A TV GRP is not a radio GRP.

The tool being ready, field has been conducted and data are available. I am eager to find out how this impact our planning and if there are learnings we could benefit from in other markets too.