• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 10, 2011

Moments after ANA chief Bob Liodice announced that the ad industry would soon unveil a new initiative to try and standardize measurement and metrics across digital media platforms, the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence announced a request for proposal to industry researchers for a project to advance digital audience measurement. Coincidence? I think not, but hard to tell from the Council's press release, which says:

"The objective of the project would be to examine how various digital publishers capture and maintain user data, and to understand the role this data can play in supplementing research-panel data to augment audience measurement."

The Council said the project should help assess current data-collection practices as well as "best practices" to "strengthen 'hybrid' (panel-based/server-based) digital audience measurement," but that no confidential or proprietary information is being sought.