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By Levi Shapiro

It doesn't take a vivid imagination to predict what the No. 1 topic will be after the November election: the weak economy and how to improve return on investments. While a slow-down in advertising spending represents an unprecedented opportunity to migrate ad dollars to the mobile space, that will not happen until standardized measurement systems are in place. For example, last month Chrysler's CMO Deborah Meyer announced 30 percent of the embattled car-company's ad-spend will move to digital. Unfortunately, it was also reported spending for "experimental" platforms, including mobile, would be cut in half. Mobile advertising desperately needs a unified measurement standard to help brands, agencies and publishers quantify ROI.

History suggests the process is slow. Although the first TV commercial aired July 1, 1941 (a 10-second billboard with voice-over for Bulova during a baseball game), it was 10 more years before the A.C. Nielsen Company's Audimeter became the industry's recognized standard for television audience measurement.

For their part, agencies are frustrated. "What is most glaringly absent is a mobile equivalent of persistent cookie tracking," said Dr. Yaakov Kimelfeld, senior vice president and director of Analytics at Mediavest. "Without unified tracking, mobile campaigns are destined to exist in some parallel world." He also said he believes online criteria, like click-throughs and downloads, "play only a marginal role in decisions to increase mobile budgets. The metrics that matter vary in each case, depending on the campaign."

Ben Ezrick, a senior strategist of digital innovation at Ogilvy Interactive, notes the degree of internal analysis and manpower required for each mobile campaign. "Currently we have to aggregate data from multiple sources. It is literally twice the work."

Lacking a shared industry measurement system, publishers of downloadable applications provide their own metrics. "Certain things, you have to develop yourself," said Treemo CEO Brent Brookler. "At this point, I won't rely 100 percent on someone else's metrics."

Similarly, TapaTap is a mobile social gaming community that monetizes through subscriptions. "The key challenge with third parties has consistently been measuring unique visitors," TapaTap President Andy Riedel said. "We track it ourselves. This is not overly difficult but time consuming."

So what are the options for publishers and agencies? Pricing models range from free to "free-mium" to subscription. Solutions measure downloadable applications, mobile web or both. Finally, depending on the vendor, the focus may be on publishers, agencies or carriers.

Bango brings extensive carrier insights and relationships from nine years as a mobile billing vendor. The service is oriented toward publishers and free, up to a certain traffic threshold. Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango, said he feels Bango's data set is more comprehensive because of contributory data from select, but un-named, carrier partners.

Mobile ad-buy network AdMob also offers a free mobile web product. Jason Spero, vice president of marketing, explains, "this is a free product to encourage large publishers and advertisers to make more ad-buys."

Amethon takes a carrier-centric approach. Founder and CEO Michael Stone brings 15 years of carrier-sales experience from Ericsson. The company is already partnering with a major Australian network operator. "Carriers want to understand what their mobile broadband data usage looks like." These are extensive server-side implementations, analyzing the TCP IP traffic in real time and using that to build an analytics picture.

Mobilytics is a free service for the first 45 days, followed by monthly subscription. CEO Greg Harris said he wants publishers and developers "to see the parts of your site or application that are being used, how they are being used and then plan your product and resources accordingly."

Pinch Media is free but only measures downloadables on the iPhone. This includes unique visitors (through hardware ID), number of sessions, length of usage, user break-outs, geo-location, application version, device used, bounce metrics, frequency distribution and other publisher-centric metrics.

Flurry is a free tool for downloadable mobile applications on iPhone, Android, and Java (representing over 1,200 handsets). Flurry's revenue model is to apply these analytics toward selling a portion of your inventory to agencies, brands and ad-networks. "Everyone gains from better behavioral, technical and advertising information," said Simon Khalaf, Flurry's CEO.

Other than Google analytics, the 800-pound gorilla in online measurement, there is Omniture, a company projecting $300 million annual revenue, 4,700 customers and 95 percent customer retention. Omniture recently launched Site Catalyst to integrate mobile and online web measurement. "Site Catalyst is meant to bring the same insights for both the mobile and fixed channels," said Matt Langie, senior director of web analytics products for Omniture. The solution is comprehensive but too expensive for many independent publishers.

It is not clear yet which solution will emerge as the "industry standard." What is certain is the need for a shared standard for measuring and articulating mobile audience. Until then, brands and agencies will spend their money elsewhere.