• by Jack Feuer , August 25, 2009

Thirteen years ago, the doc looked at the MRI of my right knee and began to giggle. After two decades of soccer, 15 years of skiing and seven years of competitive running, every ligament just said, "screw it" and stopped working.

So what if I couldn't move laterally? It wasn't like I was trying out for the Lakers. So I used a smorgasbord of techniques to cope. Avoided side-to-side motion. Stuck to treadmills rather than sidewalks. Self-medicated happily. And ate like a Neanderthal.

Happy days.

Then two weeks ago, I moved the kid and the skinny soon-to-be-fiancée from Woodland Hills to Santa Cruz, slipped on the sidewalk, and all knee hell broke loose.

Now I can't walk without grimacing or drive without agony. I can't sit more than two minutes without hot pokers shooting up my legs or sleep more than a half-hour before I wake up whimpering in pain.

And I realize this is how it must feel to be a Nielsen client.

When I was at the cocktail napkin formerly known as Adweek, I worked for Nielsen. The company wasn't bad to the reporters and editors, at least not to my recollection. But I've been writing about and drinking with media buyers and sellers for a long time, and I have borne witness to the ratings tyrant's unique blend of benign contempt, disingenuous behavior and oily self-satisfaction.

So it's gratifying to see buyers and sellers band together for yet another run at busting the Nielsen monolith. Oh, sure, this new threat to the metrics evil empire comes from other evil empires, including the Burbank Rat and Rupert's House of Horrors. But the enemy of my enemy and all that.

I'm also heartened that two of the three largest advertisers -- Procter & Gamble and AT&T -- are involved. The media companies will dissemble, the agencies will waffle, but these two can bring some serious heat.

And isn't it distressingly predictable that the media agency holding companies smart enough to join this fellowship of the ratings are GroupM and Starcom MediaVest? To my friends at the other media shops: This is what we in the trade press mean when we use the term "thought leadership," darlings. Not that we don't love your talk, but it couldn't hurt if you also walked the walk once in a while -- like those two do every day.

Look, integration is a bitch, and the communications industry has never cracked the code. But as critical as the idea is in planning, staffing, offerings and organizational structure, it's even more vital to what Sensei Gotlieb would call "investment."

Digital technology isn't going to wait for buyers to catch up. Sooner or later, somebody is going to have to come up with some standard for measuring every channel, in the aggregate, in a way everybody agrees is effective and affordable.

Right now, that need is being met via smorgasbords of different metrics suppliers, aggregations and techniques. But that won't do in the long run. A cane helps a little, but if you want a ratings revolution, you can't just limp along.

You need a whole new knee.