Leak two: you bought the channels separately
This is the big one, and it is the least discussed, because no single line on your media plan is responsible for it.
Most brands buy print as one activity and digital as another. Different budgets, often different agencies, certainly different meetings. Each is negotiated on its own merits. The blended effect, the thing that actually determines what the campaign returns, never gets engineered by anyone, because it is nobody’s job.
The cost of that is measurable. Peter Field’s IPA Databank work puts the effectiveness uplift from a multi-platform approach at 61% against single-platform activity. Not 6%. Sixty-one.
Out-of-home shows the same pattern from the other direction. The IPA Databank analysis covering 2014 to 2024 found OOH lifts search results by 129% and amplifies brand fame by 89%. JCDecaux’s eye-tracking study with Lumen found that exposure to an OOH campaign led people to pay 52% more attention to the same brand’s mobile ads afterwards. And Route’s 2025 data puts OOH reach at 97% of the UK, weekly.
Connected channels
What out-of-home does for the rest of the plan
Read those numbers again with a procurement hat on. That is not a channel competing with your digital spend. That is a channel that raises the return on your digital spend, and almost nobody is buying it that way.
One caution against over-correcting: the IPA’s own work suggests roughly three advertising media is the most effective number for driving hard business effects. This is not an argument for buying everything. It is an argument for properly connecting a few things.
The print-to-digital crossover, in numbers
Here is the mechanism we use, and the reason we keep both divisions under one roof. Substantial print commitment with a publishing house unlocks digital inventory on that publisher’s own sites — homepage banners, digital advertorials — frequently as added value against the print buy rather than as a separate line item.
The illustration below shows the same budget handled both ways. The figures are illustrative, not a client result — the point is the structure, not the specific numbers.
| Element | Bought separately | Bought as one negotiation |
|---|---|---|
| Print element | £40,000, at or near rate card | £40,000, negotiated below rate card |
| Digital element | £20,000 into an open exchange | Publisher-direct inventory, partly added value against the print commitment |
| Reaching the publisher | ~51% of the digital spend, per the ISBA industry average | Effectively all of it — no exchange sits in the chain |
| Environment | Domains you cannot name in advance | The same title the print ran in |
| What you end up with | Two campaigns that happen to coincide | One campaign, one message, measured together |
On a £20,000 programmatic line, the industry average means roughly £9,800 of it never reaches the publication at all. It is absorbed by the chain in between. Buying that same inventory directly, on the back of a print commitment, is where blended CPM comes from, not through clever bidding, but by removing intermediaries and using one budget to leverage the other.
Illustrative
Where a £20,000 digital line goes
Bought separately, through an open exchange
Bought as one negotiation, publisher-direct
- Reaches the publication
- Absorbed by the chain in between
Bought separately, roughly £10,200 of a £20,000 programmatic line reaches the publication and £9,800 is absorbed by the chain in between. Bought as one negotiation, publisher-direct, effectively all of it reaches the publication.
The secondary benefit matters just as much. Because it is one negotiation, it is one creative idea, one message and one set of numbers. Message drift between a print execution and a digital campaign that were briefed separately is a real and underrated cost.
More on how we structure this on our media buying page, and on print media buying across national and regional press.
Even an integrated plan collapses if half your investment is eaten by tech intermediaries before an ad even renders.
In Part 3, we look inside the programmatic supply chain and provide the five questions you need to ask your agency.
Sources
Every figure in this article is linked to its origin. Where a trade body published the research, we have named the analyst behind it.
| Figure used | Source |
|---|---|
| 51% of spend reaching publishers; unknown delta and match rates | ISBA / PwC Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study II, January 2023 |
| 61% multi-platform uplift, 88% profit growth uplift, 1.5x trust | Peter Field’s IPA Databank analysis, published by Newsworks |
| OOH search lift 129%, brand fame 89%, mobile attention 52%, 97% weekly reach | Peter Field’s IPA Databank analysis and Route 2025, published by Outsmart |
| Optimal channel count | IPA, on how channel mix impacts effectiveness |
A note on two of these. The ISBA figures come from 2022 fieldwork, still the most recent UK study of its kind, which is part of the point.
