CANNES – Progress is being made on measuring cross-platform audience engagement and proving that advertising campaigns on those platforms are working. But the CEO of Carat USA thinks figuring out which creative messaging works best within a given platform should be happening faster.

Doug Ray, in an interview with Beet.TV, ticks off his priorities thusly: finding a common currency for cross-platform viewing and then proving actual business results from campaigns. “We’re doing modeling work to be able to understand ROI, volume contribution of moving that money, which is actually allowing clients to see that value and unlock more money to flow more freely across platforms,” Ray says.

Calling creative a “huge, huge issue,” Ray says that one piece of ad content from one platform does not necessarily translate into effective messaging on another platform.

“We need to be helping our clients solve that, because it’s not something that’s being solved as easily or as quickly as we’d like it to be solved,” Ray says.

He considers companies like Facebook and Google powerful entities that advertisers must deal with, because like other media agencies, Carat’s clients “have huge businesses that require scale in order to order to move their product. We have to be solving the challenges away from Google and Facebook and avoiding some of the challenges those walled gardens may have created.”

This video was recorded at Cannes Lions 2016 at a Beet.TV leadership summit on advanced television and advertising hosted by Carat.  For more segments from the session, please visit this page.