• by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, October 24, 2012

TV and digital video sway closer to each other each day.

As Nielsen’s online campaign ratings move deeper to becoming the currency for cross-platform measurement and agencies like GroupM push them along , there are other efforts afoot to understand how media planning and consumer habits fare across venues. That includes work from online video measurement firm Visible Measures to track cross-media lift and new insight from Break Media analyzing habits across digital video devices.

For starters, Visible Measure said this week that its new research division, the Center of Excellence for Cross Media Impact , will aim to account for “cross-channel interactions” and to properly attribute brand impact across those channels. As an example, Visible Measures studied the ways in which brands combined social video and Super Bowl TV buys for the 2012 game, concluding that brands that released social videos online prior to the TV commercials garnered nearly seven times more views that those brands that waited until the game to release their videos.

This commingling of viewing and measurement currency is following consumer habits. As an example, a just-released study from Break Media  found that men are opting to watch video on the most readily available device, underscoring the move to device agnosticism. The study found that 80% of men 18 to 49 stream content from free websites, 74% watch the same or more live TV compared to a year ago, 65% pay for content online from sources such as Netflix or Hulu, 74% watch TV on DVRs, 63% stream content on Internet-enabled game consoles, and 62% stream content on a tablet or smartphone.

As consumers mashup up their viewing, measurement needs to happen across venues too.