• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 10, 2009

Following weeks of speculative reporting and industry banter, the Council For Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) officially announced its plans this morning, naming executives from 14 companies - including the major TV networks and big media shops such as WPP's GroupM, Interpublic's Mediabrands, Omnicom's Omnicom Media Group, Havas' MPG, and Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group, and big advertisers like Procter & Gamble and Unilever.

Details of the organization's plans were less specific, other than a statement saying that the effort would "promote innovation and explore new, high quality ways to measure audiences across traditional and new media."

The announcement reaffirmed CIMM's goal of developing so-called "cross-platform" measurement, a system that would measure audience exposure to TV programming appearing on conventional TV, online and mobile platforms, but stopped short of announcing specific plans and processes for doing that.

But a copy of a draft "request for proposal" developed by CIMM and obtained by MediaDailyNews indicated that the group had plans to fund at least two pieces of research when it was first organized last February: One for a pilot study that would "study producing real cross-platform data that reflects exposure of specific video sources on television, the Internet and mobile media;" and a second for a digital set-top data project that would deliver "three to six months of actual STB data, to be used for evaluation (not sales) purposes."

While it's unclear what, if anything has come of those initial projects, it now seems clear that initial reports that CIMM would rollout a new audience measurement service as soon as this fourth-quarter is unlikely.

"We are agnostic as to who will supply us with this data; the field is open, but we need these forward-looking metrics, adequate to the high standards of trading and post-evaluation, within the next 3-5 years," reads the RFP, which was signed by NBC Universal President, Research and Media Development Alan Wurtzel, whom several executives familiar with the effort said has been a driving force behind it.

While current industry audience measurement provider Nielsen Co. was never explicitly mentioned in the document, it does suggest some deep dissatisfaction with the current state of media audience measurement: "As buyers and sellers of advertising-supported media, we are deeply concerned that, despite the efforts of some research suppliers, media measure is not keeping pace with urgent business needs."

The letter added, "We are not only looking for better or more robust versions of current media metrics. We need a clear path toward the results-based metrics that are clearly, and rightfully, being demanded by advertisers. We need metrics that reflect return-on-investment (sales or other appropriate business metrics), and do so accurately and on a sufficiently granular level to follow the fragmented media vehicles that are now emerging. "Opportunity to see" is an important metric, but only the beginning."

Details on the organizational structure of CIMM, what its precise business model are, and how it would operate going forward, also were not disclosed. But similar industry-driven research initiatives are common in oversees markets, and are typically referred tot as Joint Industry Committees, or JICs, something Nielsen executives have previously asserted would violate federal antitrust laws.