On Device Manifesto - Embrace Media Fragmentation

Back in 2001, our CEO Alistair Hill wrote a dissertation with the snappy title of  “What advertising research methods are used to create the best results for Internet advertising and will this have an effect on the way they are bought?”.

The dissertation wasn’t great, but the conclusion became the problem he wanted to solve when he started On Device. The problem:

To evaluate brand campaigns you need a way to reliably measure and compare advertising's impact on consumer attitudes, whatever the media channel.

To maximise advertising effectiveness, you need accurate Brand Lift measurement. This is harder than it sounds. Here we've broken down our approach into seven essential principles. We call it our Measurement Manifesto and we hope it provides food for thought.

Embrace media fragmentation

Gone are the days of buying a spot in X-factor and putting your feet up. Media fragmentation means, to reach the mass-market, plans now require a bewildering level of complexity. As the IPA put it, it’s “increasingly complex to effectively engage with consumers and optimise media spend accordingly.”

Being able to compare apples with apples is vital to being able to understand campaign performance in this fragmented world. Measurement needs to work across and between media, and especially behind Meta and TikTok’s walled gardens. You can’t optimise your media spend if you’re letting media owners mark their own homework. So, you need measurement which is single-source, cross-media, independent and consistent.

*IPA’s Making Sense: The Commercial Media Landscape 2023