The television advertising industry, having spent the better part of three years attempting to move beyond its decades-long reliance on a single measurement currency, has arrived at a familiar destination: a new committee.

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement announced at its annual summit last week that it would form something called the Strong Foundations Implementation Task Force, which will attempt to establish common standards for the various measurement currencies now jostling for position in the marketplace. Among its stated aims, according to Jon Watts, the managing director of CIMM, the task force will develop "a plan for strengthening the current accreditation process" and create "a provider-neutral currency requirements framework."

Sharp-eyed observers of the measurement landscape may note that such efforts already exist — the Media Rating Council has long managed an accreditation process, and the United States Joint Industry Committee was formed in large part to establish baseline requirements for currencies. But given the present state of affairs, those efforts appear to be insufficient. (Or, as one might say in the measurement business, the numbers aren't adding up.)

The difficulty, as expressed by several executives at the summit, is that the major currency providers are not especially eager to be compared directly with one another. Nielsen, which remains the predominant currency despite years of industry grumbling, has little incentive to make such comparisons easy, a point made implicitly by Jamie Power, senior vice president of addressable sales at Disney, who referred to Nielsen as "the baseline."

Meanwhile, agencies are increasingly conducting business with alternative providers. Tim Hill, the chief investment officer at Initiative, the Omnicom-owned media agency, said his company uses VideoAmp "for audience buying for a huge amount of our clients." And CNBC, which is owned by Versant, uses a measurement firm called Cogent.

The resulting confusion was described with some vividness by Mariel Estrada, head of video currency at Omnicom Media Group, who noted that her team now has "what, half-a-second to evaluate that data and, what, one crumb of data."

Mr. Watts, in what may be the most revealing detail of the announcement, said that if the task force fails to make significant progress within 12 to 18 months, it will be disbanded.

One might observe that this is a reasonable approach for any committee. One might also observe that it is a rather poignant thing to have to say out loud.

Original story published in Digiday: "Future of TV Briefing: TV ad industry’s measurement currency frustrations hit (another) boiling point - Digiday", by Tim Peterson