Mobile phone advertising gauge arrives

THE KEY to survival for mobile network operators, according to most leading industry gurus, will be mobile phone advertising. So M:Metrics has come up with a way of measuring it called MeterDirect.

On of the chief reasons why mobile phone advertising revenues are regarded as trivial is that the market was worth around a mere $871 million in 2006 compared to $24 billion for the stationary version of the Internet.

The problem is that if you can't measure is efficacy, advertisers are loath to spend loads of wonga on expensive mobile ads. Which is where M:Metrics steps in - especially since Will Hodgman was a former VP with NetRatings.

These days the Nielsen/NetRatings figures are generally recognised as an industry standard for online advertising measurement and M:Metrics clearly hopes to do the same thing for the mobile space.

What the company plans to do is load its software onto handsets running the Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm OS's. It will then track every kind of activity which could be pertinent to collating data for advertising feedback.

So that will include messaging, downloads and text messages as well as bog standard mobile Internet browsing.

The data collected from handsets owned by participants in M:Metrics research programme is collected overnight.

The company will then be in a position to say which are the mobile websites that attract the biggest audiences; which times of day certain websites and applications prove most popular; and give details as to mobile Internet surfers' demographics.

Paul Goode, a senior analyst with M:Metrics, revealed that preliminary results show that the USA is ahead of Europe. Stateside, mobile surfers are happy to go to whatever site they like whilst in Europe, a leading portal like Vodafone Live! is still in the Top Ten most visited mobile sites by country.

Curiously, Goode claimed that there are at least 10,000 significant domains visited by mobile phone users which he believes illustrates the fact that the days of the mobile network walled garden are long over.

If you want to know what mobile surfers are really doing and you happen to be a major advertiser then paying M;Metrics shed-loads of wonga to find out appears to be the only obvious way out right now. µ

L'INQ
M:Metrics