It’s now sorting-out time for the "alt measurement movement.”

Over the past few years, we’ve been inundated with noise, claims and hyperbole around TV ad measurement from would-be claimants to Nielsen’s multidecade position of dominance overseeing the industry’s ratings in the U.S.

That wasn’t a surprise. Challenges to Nielsen’s methodology and limited scale had been known for years, and fixes were taking way, way too long.

So, it was especially nice to see this in a social media post yesterday from Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao: "Congratulations to Comscore, Inc. on receiving MRC accreditation for their total household rating and average audience estimates in national and local TV time-based grid reports. The more accredited data there is in the marketplace the better it is for everyone -- buyers, sellers, viewers and all of us devoted to the science of audience measurement.”

You can read more about it here.

As anyone who has worked in our industry well knows, for media measurement to be effective, it not only needs to be accurate, but it needs to be independent, transparent, unbiased and accredited. The Media Rating Council is the organization that Congress created decades ago to manage accreditation after a number of scandals were uncovered relating to media owners fraudulently inflating their numbers.

Thus, Karthik Rao’s note to Comscore is not just a nice gesture from a measurement rival, the company with the most to lose as more TV measurement providers are accredited, but it is an important acknowledgement that everyone in our industry needs to play by the same rules if we are going to keep a healthy and growing marketplace.

The bar is now set for the rest of the “alt measurement movement.” It’s time to get your MRC certification. We will all benefit from everyone offering TV ad currency solutions being held to the same standards, the gold standard of the MRC.

Well done, Comscore and team! Well played, Karthik and Nielsen!