Brand owners have been relying on a patchwork of disparate and often unreliable data sets to build sharper assessments of audience exposure to a campaign message across multiple channels but “the flimsy era is over”, according to Beatgrid co-founder Daniel Tjondronegoro.

“Media agencies are attempting to Frankenstein data from different sources to get a comprehensive view on campaign and audience delivery,” he said. “It’s fraught with issues - the underlying data is often inconsistent, inaccurate and lacking critical demographic information to make better, less wasteful investment allocations.

“Then you have this reliance on modeling and synthetic data which just exacerbates the problem. Many brands still lack a full 360° picture of media effectiveness – it remains elusive, and it doesn’t have to be.”

Companies like Virgin, Kmart, and Velocity Frequent Flyer have found an alternative to stitching compromised data sources together, which Tjondronegoro said “even finance teams accept as sufficiently robust” to signal a campaign is working at a business impact level – or not.

The confusion and complexity that arises from ignoring more accurate single-source data was the “great black hole – marketing teams really don’t know where and by how much their media investment is delivering or being wasted,” according to Tjondronegoro.

He said Beatgrid has built the largest cross-media audience panel in Australia, which accumulated over 60 thousand people who have installed the apps on their mobile phones.

Beatgrid’s apps - 'Media Rewards' and 'Jagger', use proprietary, passive Audio Content Recognition (p-ACR) technology to detect which ads have been seen by whom – every execution is audio encoded to specific channels and screens in a brand’s media schedule, ranging from linear TV, BVOD and subscription streaming services to radio, OOH, and critically the walled gardens of Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, and YouTube.

This single-source panel has been used by progressive local marketing teams to benchmark campaign audience verification to their media schedule along with tracking incremental reach, brand lift and retail footfall attribution, Tjondronegoro said.

“The mobile phone is the most ubiquitous device on Earth, so we turned it into a cross-media meter,” he said. “The mobile phone allows us to measure everything, whether or not it’s in your jeans pocket, whether you’re in the kitchen, walking or you're in the car. Wherever we go, so does the mobile phone – it’s an unintended but important breakthrough in single-source media measurement.”

Outside the fundamentals of more robust audience verification, incremental reach tracking, and brand lift changes in the Beatgrid single-source platform, perhaps the most interesting new capability for brands is Beatgrid’s ability to sidestep the walled gardens’ own data pipes and reporting, particularly around social video and YouTube. If a Beatgrid panellist is in a brand’s target profile, a marketing team can see aggregate behaviour inside the walled gardens – and if the algorithms are serving messages to the right people.

“We know it’s powerful because we measure each individual creative on each channel and that also includes walled gardens,” Tjondronegoro said. “So you can measure if your 30-second spot is working much better than your 60-second version or maybe your 15-second ad. Or you can quickly assess if your 6-second bumpers are a waste of time. We know in some cases, 6-second bumpers work well on one channel but might be a waste of time or ineffective on another channel or mobile device delivery. For those brands that get their teams on the tools, they get quite excited with the possibilities from Beatgrid. It’s delivering a data-led approach with the potential to improve the outcomes for channel mix planning.”

Privacy is the secret weapon behind Beatgrid’s single-source meter apps. Every panellist opts in with full consent. There’s zero reliance on PPI such as IP addresses, or, cookies and absolutely no tracking across the open web, whether it is on a (so-called) 3rd party Data Cleanroom or not. Most advertisers are very uncomfortable with such an approach. 

“Privacy compliance and governance are rapidly driving the market back to single-source panels due to growing confusion around data quality and how it’s collected,” said Tjondronegoro. “With tighter privacy laws already reshaping Europe and several U.S. states, Australia is next. Marketers are facing a perfect storm—stricter privacy rules, data integrity concerns, and the urgent need for accurate cross-media measurement. Single-source panels are at the center of solving these challenges, and those who adapt early will be poised to lead in the future of advertising.”