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Trying to juggle a marketing campaign across disparate media is a complicated exercise. Measuring the success of a such a campaign also requires a good deal of skill. Here are a few resources for making cross-media measurement work for your campaign:

Dynmic Logic, a research company owned by WPP, has published a comprehensive (and highly technical) white paper on cross-media measurement. It argues that, “For campaigns with an online component, integrated cross-media (ICM) research is currently the best of breed for evaluating the relative contribution of media towards branding impact. It extends beyond the limitations of other cross-media methods by allowing for the cost-efficient capture of respondents who have been exposed to Internet ads. In addition, it provides an innovative platform to compare the singular and complementary effects of each medium.”

The Media Measurement Integration Taskforce is funded by the World Association of Newspapers and has a bias toward print, but it offers a good collection of resources and tools for tracking audiences across different media.

It says, “The development of a combined metric will better reflect the readership of newspapers in today’s multimedia world, compared with print-only and Web-only metrics.”

Marketing Evolution has produced a white paper looking at current cross-media measurement best practice.  As Marketing Evolution CEO and the paper’s author Rex Briggs writes: “The new medium necessitates a new approach to an old problem”. Briggs is also the author of current business best-seller What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds.

As discussed in our most recent podcast, cross-media marketing is complicated but rewarding.

Here are a few examples of successful use of cross-media:

• Millward Brown and Dynamic Logic: They produced cross-media campaigns for the Jeep Compass, Forbes Sybase, ESPN Olevia in the US. Their advice?

1. Keep a consistent look and feel across media, but use online messages sequentially in addition to offline counterparts
2. Online advertising (including broadband video) is highly effective among the lowest TV viewing quintile over extended time periods.

• The Royal Mail (the British postal service) has created a web resource full of examples and tips on putting together cross-media campaigns. No surprises – all of the examples include direct mail as one of the media!

• Cross Media 1:1 Marketing:  blog from VDP Complete with news and information on cross-media marketing including tips, events, white papers and case studies.

• MediaPost Magazines publish case studies on cross-media from companies including Nike, Visa and Coke.

Integration of marketing across channels makes sense - Fatter funnels mean more marketing buzz.

There’s plenty of talk at the moment about how traditional advertising and marketing is being killed off by the Internet.

For example, Eric Clemons, a professor at a prominent US business school, has written a touchstone piece for the TechCrunch website proclaiming that the social, interactive, search-based nature of the Internet is shattering all forms of advertising – ironically, including Internet advertising itself. His treatise has touched a nerve with the industry, with nearly 700 comments posted at last count either furiously attacking or passionately defending his position.

I think the article raises a lot of good points about the trust issues consumers have with advertising and marketing. But I think it’s a stretch to say advertising will disappear. However, it will definitely have to change. Marketers need to take a broader view of how their brand messages are distributed. Integration across different media, including interactive, is the key.

This isn’t a brand new idea. Originally called integrated marketing communications (IMC) or 360-degree marketing, it’s now called cross-media or trans-media. Call it what you will, it’s a good opportunity to effectively get your message out to a variety of potential customers.

Australian cross-media specialist Christy Dena, director of Universe Creation 101 and a lecturer and researcher at The University of Sydney, spoke to me for our most recent HotHouse podcast, and she says that although the concept of cross-media has been around since the 1980s, the difference now is that the skill set of both the people creating cross-media campaigns and the audiences who consume them has changed.

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Simon van Wyk talks to Australian cross-media specialist Christy Dena director of Universe Creation 101 and a lecturer and researcher at The University of Sydney about the evolution of 360-degree marketing in the digital era.

Christy says, “I’m passionate about all types of creative practice, especially those that traverse media platforms.” She talks to Simon about marketing across a range of media and bringing them all together for best effect. Listen to the podcast below.

 

 Christy Dena podcast [29:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We’ve developed a new widget for Warner Music Australia and their new dance compilation NEON. The HotHouse widget solution lets clients create, distribute, track and monetise widgets through the social web.

This widget is supporting the launch of NEON Essential Volume 1 - Mixed by TV Rock & Chardy. It enables people to listen to the tracks, find out the latest tour dates, watch the NEON video and download a free mix. Fans can also embed and distribute the widget across any one of 80 social networking platforms including MySpace, Twitter, iGoogle and Facebook. View it here:

I’m a great fan of cartoonist Hugh MacLeod and his website GapingVoid.com. One of his better known cartoon’s in marketing circles is one of my favourites -  it plays back to Simon’s much buzzed about rant the other day Why Interactive agencies need to stop being advertising agencies:

Social researcher Dina Mehta is at the forefront of technology trend research, particularly corporate use of conversational and social media. She has an acerbic quote from French author Guy de Maupassant on the home page of her blog:

“Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It’s the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?”

She is a strong believer in the value of anecdotal evidence in marketing research:

“When I meet more traditional marketers, they tell me they are really Web 2.0 savvy and transferred their attention to metrics like clickthrough, cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, lead generation, opt-in, churn rate etc. While these fulfil one need, I do not believe they really aid either an evaluative or predictive model for success. The social media space is different, and in understanding this, I’m hoping clients will value the stories and conversations more.”

In terms of measuring social media ROI, she recommends companies look at the parameters of:

• Participation
• Engagement
• Influence
• Imagination
• Energy
• Loyalty or stickiness

She diagrams it as follows:

Like so many marketing measurement techniques, Mehta says that there are no industry standard measures to use. Organizations need to develop their own benchmarks “along parameters that are important to them and against a set of goals” so they can track effectiveness of their social media campaigns over time.”

Read more from Dina Mehta on this topic here.

Paul Smith, who has been called the Twitchhiker, made it all the way from England to New Zealand in less then 30 days without purchasing a single ticket. He did via the kindness of social media strangers on Twitter. Read the full article at the Daily Mail UK here.