The media explosion and the fragmentation of audiences is the hardest current and future challenge for media research. New tools will be needed to support the decision-making in the process of media selection. This paper proposes a practical perspective on how media research can deal with the problems of the media explosion by integrating and complementing the already existing media surveys. In most markets today we have TV panels, readership, radio and poster surveys, to name just the most important, as stand-alone approaches with divergent information for target group definitions. Planning of multimedia campaigns currently relies on a medium-by-medium procedure. For the integration of the existing surveys in a multimedia planning system, two additional surveys are required tu close the missing link: a multimedia survey, which establishes the usage of media categories, and a target group core survey, which is needed to collect consumer behaviour for target group definition. The target group core survey serves as a source from which the same target group data are spread via data fusions to the multimedia survey and to all relevant single-medium surveys. This framework would support a fully integrated planning of multimedia campaigns from budgeting across media categories to optimisation within media categories. The effectiveness of multimedia campaigns has to be controlled by linking investments in media categories with outcome indicators like sales or advertising awareness measures. For this purpose market modelling techniques are appropriate. They can be used to estimate the isolated effects of individual media categories. The results are used to fine-tune the allocation of media budgets to media categories, either on the run or in the next planning period.
