CIMM wants a peek behind Apple’s ‘walled garden’

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), a group of media owners, agencies and advertisers, complain in a recent white paper on cross-platform ad effectiveness measurement that acknowledged holes in US media usage data “are becoming even more significant with the boom in wireless media usage”.

Apple – whose iPhone accounts for 25% of all smartphone sales and whose iPad 2 is expected to account for 83% of all US tablet sales this year – has to date “not allowed panel-based companies to meter usage of their various devices”.

Report authors Michele Madansky and Kathryn Koegel argue that understanding Apple device usage is “critical to understanding how the mobile media revolution will impact all of media usage”.

“An organisation like CIMM,” they write, “can use its collective influence to encourage Apple to become a more integrated piece of the media ecosystem rather than its own walled garden.”

Or, failing that, “Google is the other research alliance to pursue”. Google’s mobile and tablet operating systems could be a viable workaround in the integration of device usage data, according to the report (available here).