Walled gardens like Google (YouTube), Meta, and Amazon are now essential platforms for digital video advertising, but marketers face a growing challenge – they can’t see the full picture. Campaigns may be delivering reach, but advertisers are increasingly unsure if they’re reaching new consumers or simply hitting the same individuals repeatedly. The core issue? Cross-platform frequency – how many times someone sees an ad across different channels. Without transparency, brands are left blind, unable to track how often users are seeing their ads across YouTube, CTV, and social media, leaving them exposed to wasted media spend and reduced effectiveness.

Frequency without insight: A costly gamble

Frequency matters, but not all impressions are created equal. Too few exposures and your message gets lost in the digital noise; too many, and consumers grow tired, potentially building negative associations with your brand. Worse, digital impressions on mobile and desktop don’t carry the same weight as impressions delivered via TV or CTV, where audiences are more engaged. TV ads deliver a higher emotional impact, creating stronger connections and driving better brand recall and purchase intent than ads passively viewed on a smartphone or laptop.

Research from Beatgrid reinforces this. Its latest analysis of over 20 cross-media campaigns in Australia found that a frequency of 7-9 exposures delivers optimal results for purchase consideration (5.87 per cent lift) and purchase intent (3.82 per cent lift), while aided awareness peaks at 9 exposures with a 6.89 per cent lift. Lower frequencies of 1-3 exposures may still create some lift but fall short of the impact achieved by higher frequencies, especially when trying to drive deeper brand engagement and decision-making. The right frequency balance, particularly around 7-9 exposures, creates a significant difference in how consumers perceive and act on your brand.

Walled gardens provide frequency data within their ecosystems, but they don’t offer insights into how often someone sees your ad across their platforms. Treating all impressions equally, without understanding their weight, leads to inefficient campaigns. You may be oversaturating audiences on lower-impact platforms while missing higher-quality exposures on CTV or TV, where higher frequencies deliver significantly better outcomes. Without cross-platform measurement, you risk underutilising the potential of high-impact screens and over-relying on less effective digital impressions.

The real costs of overexposure

Unchecked cross-platform frequency creates ad fatigue and results in wasted budget. Overexposure –repeating the same message to the same users across different platforms – leads to reduced effectiveness, while untapped audiences remain unseen. If brands can’t control cross-platform frequency, competitors who better optimise their media spend will capture new audiences, while brands with fragmented data overspend on overexposed ones.

Clean rooms: Helpful, but not enough

Data clean rooms have emerged as a partial solution, offering brands the ability to match their data with platform data from Google and Meta while preserving privacy. Clean rooms provide some transparency into campaign performance within a platform, but they don’t solve the full problem of cross-platform frequency. You may see how often your ad was shown within Facebook or YouTube, but without a holistic view across platforms, you’re still at risk of overexposing key audiences or missing potential reach on other channels.

Single-source measurement: The full picture

The answer to these challenges lies in single-source measurement solutions. These innovative tools cut through walled gardens by offering de-duplicated data that provides full visibility of cross-platform reach and frequency. With single-source measurement, advertisers gain a comprehensive view of how often users are exposed to ads across all channels—whether on YouTube, CTV, or social media.

This kind of transparency is what separates high-performance campaigns from underperforming ones. Single-source measurement allows marketers to know exactly when ads are hitting the right frequency for awareness, consideration, and conversion, without crossing into overexposure. More importantly, it shows where your incremental reach is coming from, empowering you to in-flight optimise your media spend. Brands that fail to adopt this level of transparency risk falling behind, as competitors using these tools are already capturing incremental growth and delivering more effective campaigns.

Unlocking success: How cross-platform measurement empowers advertisers in a fragmented media world

As platforms tighten control over data, cross-platform measurement is becoming essential to maintaining competitiveness. Clean rooms can offer a potential although extremely capped step forward, but they won’t solve the problem. Brands that want to take their advertising to the next level will only be able to do it with a single-source measurement that will break down data silos and gain the complete 360-degree view needed to make data-driven decisions that maximise campaign effectiveness.

The advertising landscape is evolving rapidly. Brands relying on traditional methods that use data fusions and modeling and hoping walled garden data will suffice are risking their competitive edge. It is clear that marketers who fail to act now to address cross-platform frequency for brand lift optimisation will not only miss the chance to maximise their media budgets but also fall behind competitors already leveraging next-gen measurement tools like Beatgrid’s.

This is no longer a “nice-to-have” – it’s a necessity. The future belongs to those who see the whole picture. Become one of the brands to thrive in today’s fragmented media world.

For those who are not still ready…Why not? Don’t be left counting the cost of missed media and business opportunities.

Get the full picture at beatgrid.co