• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 29, 2005

Nearly a year after it began floating the idea of a new industry initiative to tackle vexing issues related to the measurement of media, Madison Avenue today will unveil a new entity to lead that charge, MediaDailyNews has learned.

The groups launching the new entity--the Advertising Research Foundation, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Association of National Advertisers--have gone out of their way to avoid describing it as an organization, group, or even a committee for fear that it might trigger legal challenges by media research suppliers. But the entity, dubbed the Audience Measurement Initiative (AMI), will perform many of the same functions of a so-called joint industry committee, or JIC, conducting annual performance reviews of research suppliers and defining, designing, and commissioning new research and methods.

AMI--which will be officially unveiled today in a speech by Andy Fessel, vice president-strategic insights at Carat's Freestyle Interactive unit, during an Advertising Research Foundation forum this afternoon in New York--is being positioned as part of an autonomous unit, but will likely fall under the aegis of the ARF, which has held a series of meetings that have led to the formation of AMI.

AMI will have its own funding, including "grants" to conduct research, and will have a paid full-time executive director, as well as a board of directors of prominent industry executives

One group likely to have a prominent role in AMI is the Media Rating Council, an organization that was created by the advertising and media industries to serve as a media research watchdog following a Congressional investigation into the TV ratings business during the 1960s.

AMI, of course, follows another series of Congressional investigations surrounding Nielsen Media Research, the powerful supplier of TV audience measurement that has been the catalyst for much of the discussion. The careful language being used to describe the structure of AMI, in some ways, is a recognition of Nielsen's power. When the ARF first proposed exploring a JIC a decade ago, Nielsen executives threatened to sue on antitrust grounds, and the ARF backed down.

This time around, the concept of a new joint industry organization that would conduct important methodological research on audience measurement was first proposed by MRC Executive Director George Ivie, but was quickly embraced by ARF President Bob Barocci.

The launch of AMI also comes as Nielsen has created its own council for funding research improvements. Nielsen's so-called Council for Research Excellence is comprised of various Nielsen clients, but is funded directly by a multimillion-dollar budget from Nielsen. The group has met several times, and is expected to present the findings of those meetings in early October.

But unlike the Nielsen-funded council, which is focused specifically on TV audience measurement, AMI will focus on the measurement of all forms of media.

In fact, given Fessel's background, it's likely that AMI will embrace a lot of new media. Freestyle is in the vanguard of new media, and before joining Freestyle, Fessel was involved in developing systems for measuring media audiences via mobile media technologies. He also was a top research executive at Microsoft, and at online research firm Media Metrix.

In theory, AMI will be media-neutral. Its mission statement reads: "The principle mission of the customer-driven AMI (audience measurement initiative) is to define, develop and promote improved and consistent audience measurement for all media in the U.S. advertising marketplace."

How much material influence AMI might have on the way research companies conduct audience measurement is another question. At least one element of AMI's charter is to conduct annual performance reviews of audience research suppliers--something that sounds more like a role of an accreditation organization like the MRC.