• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, April 30, 2008

Arbitron's Portable People Meter will be at the center of a new cross-media measurement project for BBM Canada, which wants to provide single-source measurement for both TV and radio.

BBM is a not-for-profit, industry-supported organization responsible for TV and radio ratings in Canada. The new ratings service, scheduled to go commercial in the second half of 2009, will be used as the currency for ad sales by radio and TV broadcasters.

The news comes roughly four years after BBM selected Arbitron's PPM for TV measurement in Montreal and Quebec. This decision effectively takes PPM measurement of TV national in Canada. Over its history, BBM has worked with a number of media research firms, including Nielsen Media Research and Telmar.

Arbitron's joint project with TNS Media Research is the first large-scale deployment of PPM for TV ratings in North America, outside the test run in two Canadian cities. In the United States, Arbitron tried to partner with Nielsen for TV measurement based on PPM data, but was spurned by Nielsen in favor of various in-house solutions.

Arbitron and Nielsen had a separate partnership, called Project Apollo, that attempted to correlate ad exposure with purchase decisions by panel members in the Houston area. However, Arbitron's PPM was used only for measuring exposure to radio advertising in this project, with Nielsen providing the TV data. The project ended in February.

Arbitron has also promoted PPM for measurement of exposure to TV outside the home in the U.S.