Fragmentation has long been an issue in the digital sphere, and becomes increasingly prevalent as the number of connected devices we use continues to rise.

The average home, depending on which statistics you follow, has between 4.5 and 5.5 devices in constant use, whether that’s mobile phones, tablets, games consoles, connected TVs or computers – or multiples of all, the result is a huge amount of disparity and confusion for advertisers.

It’s a problem which John Lewis’s head of brand marketing, Lloyd Page, is well aware of.

The retailer is the first to get on board with Specific Media’s newly launched Householding technology platform which clusters all connected devices in any given home allowing advertisers to aggregate its buys into a single plan.

Page told new media age earlier, “We know that people are consuming more than one screen at a time and this technology and product allows us to be clever with how we target people and deliver messages across multiple devices, which will enhance the campaign delivery and ensure we are in the environments where our customers now are on a daily basis.”

The industry has been crying out for a way of measuring across multiple devices so this is a really exciting move. It has the potential to let advertisers build a much better picture of households, what their interests are and what type of advertising they best respond to.

It’s obviously early days, but it’ll be really interesting to see what brands can learn from this collective data and what impact it will have going forward.