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First came the proliferation of TV channels with the introduction of cable. Then came the Internet with informational websites, ad banners and increasingly video segments with video ads. Now with mobile phones, we have a nascent platform that delivers content and advertising in ways that we are only beginning to understand. In today’s Digital Age, consumers enjoy a number of ways to access content at different times, in different settings and with different expectations for each platform; in addition, each platform offers different mechanisms for ad avoidance. The result is that consumers have more control than ever over exposure to advertising messages and react in more complicated ways to the ads they do see. With the increased choice offered to consumers, the job of advertisers has gotten dramatically more complex. Answers to questions about where and how ads are seen affect campaign planning, creative strategy and the mix of the media buy. At the root of this very complicated set of behaviors is a question that is easy to ask but hard to answer:

• In a world of multiple platforms, how do you use one versus another?
  Past studies have contributed thinking on this question but have typically suffered from one of several problems. Data sets have represented behavior at the household rather than individual level; data from disparate sources has needed to be fused to get a full picture of the behavior under evaluation; or studies have needed to rely on artificially observed or self-reported behavior to determine media, or worse, ad exposure. Selfreports can suffer from unreliability; artificially constructed observation sessions might bias behavior and are limited to short periods of time.
  

This report draws on data gathered by the IMMI system from a panel of 3000 members in six major DMAs: New York, Chicago, Houston, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami and a subset test of 100 panelists of 3-screen media tracking and was presented at the ARF Conference in New York City on April 1, 2009.

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