The initiative will combine ComScore’s data on PCs, mobiles and TV set-top boxes with the TV and radio measurement capabilities of Arbitron’s Portable People Meter (PPM) technology.

Broadcaster ESPN will collaborate on the design of the initiative as a charter client. Ed Erhardt, ESPN’s president of global customer marketing and sales, said: “The real value to this project from a media buying perspective is that the way consumers are using media will now be reflected in the way advertisers can invest in media. Making the measurement more complete makes the advertising more effective, which is a win for all parties involved.”

The broadcaster has also been cited as the driving force behind the initiative, according to Arbitron’s EVP of product innovation Manish Bhatia: “ESPN initiated this effort and helped bring Arbitron and ComScore together with the goal of advancing cross-platform research from a special project to a standing industry-wide practice. This solution blends the depth of insights that comes from census-based data with the unduplicated persons-level information across platforms that comes from a single-source panel – it’s an ideal marriage of the available data sources.”

ComScore and Arbitron said that the goal of the project is produce common metrics across all platforms at the scale and granularity required by both content providers and advertisers, and to demonstrate the audience reach and duplication of each media platform.