SMI, Australia’s first independent, real time advertising revenue index has launched.

The brain-child of Sue Fennessy and Jane Schulze, media and sponsorship expert and publisher, editor and media writer respectively, SMI has struck individual agreements with each of Australia’s major media agencies to provide their advertising revenue data.

The media buying firms include Carat, GroupM (MediaCom, Mindshare, Mediaedge:cia and MAXUS), Ikon Communications, Initiative, Mitchell Communication Group, Universal McCann, OMD, PHD, Starcom MediaVest and ZenithOptimedia.

“SMI has evolved out of a genuine desire to revitalize the media industry. As we emerge from the current economic cycle, media stocks and the advertising market will recover, albeit with a greater mix of media fighting for the advertiser and investor dollar,” said Fennessy, SMI co-founder.

The system will use advertising revenue data collected monthly to provide an independent benchmark demonstrating aggregated demand across all media.

The data will cover all mainstream media, Google search revenue, subscription TV channel revenue data, digital free-to-air data, the top 50 online publishers revenue and will be the exclusive source of mobile telephony data.

Subscribers will be able to sorta the data in a variety of macro to micro styles, by: media owner network, media type, sub-type, market, market type, TV station, digital media vehicle, newspaper, magazine etc.

SMI will use a subscription model. BCC AdSystems will collect and rationalize the data and SMI will deliver it aggregated to subscribers complete with deep dive analysis.

“Over the past 15 years, I was constantly writing about an opaque industry – reporting on billions of dollars in a market that was lacking hard data. Arguably this lack of clarity exacerbated the recent decline in media share values,” said Schulze, SMI co-founder.