The news: The Coca-Cola Company, Top Line Marketing, and ad measurement firm Kantar are pitching a new measurement framework, Universal Media Measurement (UMM) to help marketers compare the effectiveness of paid, owned, earned, and shared media on a single scale, per MarTech.

• The group has been working on the tool for over seven years, and it’s being applied by Coca-Cola’s marketers in more than 20 countries. 
• The tool’s announcement at last month’s World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) forum indicates positioning for wider industry adoption.

The background: Marketers struggle to compare a personal recommendation (earned), a TV ad (paid), a blog post (owned), and a viral tweet (shared) because each lives in a different data silo with its own success metrics.

UMM integrates tools like marketing mix modeling (MMM) and quality of message to eliminate the chaos of conflicting data sources and different metrics for TV, social, packaging, sponsorships, and retail media across borders, per The Drum.

Why it’s worth watching: Less than a third (32%) of marketers around the world “measure media spending holistically across digital and traditional channels,” per Nielsen. In addition 1 in 3 US senior decision-makers say conflicting data sources are the second-largest barrier to confidence in marketing measurement, second only to reliability concerns, per Haus.

UMM attempts to solve fragmented data sources by creating a common currency. The long-term value is its transferable benefits: insights, audiences, and creative learnings that can move seamlessly from one media type to another without losing effectiveness.

Implications for brands: Today’s fragmented marketing channel landscape opens the door for brands to consider new measurement standards designed around unification.

If UMM is capable of standardizing metrics across countries, product lines, and regions, it can become a valuable add-on to existing and proven measurement models or inspire brands and marketers to build their own unified measurement tools.