• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, February 8, 2010

Through an alliance with The Nielsen Co., mobile ad exchange Mobclix will give mobile advertisers and publishers the ability to target specific audiences based on their lifestyles, buying habits, media preferences and openness to adopting new technologies.

Under the exclusive deal, Mobclix will resell Nielsen's PRIZM and ConneXions audience segmentation systems to mobile ad networks and developers that use its platform to buy and sell mobile advertising. The anonymous Nielsen data will be linked to anonymous user information collected by Mobclix, where more than 20 ad networks bid for placement in the mobile applications of some 6,500 publishers.

Advertisers stand to benefit through more precise targeting of mobile users.

Nielsen struck a similar deal in November with DataLogix to extend PRIZM--which groups U.S. households into 66 discrete categories based on demographic, lifestyle, shopping and media use patterns -- to online media planning and buying. The Connexions product separately tracks peoples' willingness to adopt new consumer technologies at an early stage.

The geo-demographic profiling method behind the Nielsen systems has long been a tool of traditional marketers and agencies to fine-tuning campaigns based on actual behavior. The various audience clusters are assigned marketing-friendly names like "Young Digerati," "Kids and Cul-de-sacs," and "Heart Landers."

In the mobile realm, where audiences are already fragmented by different devices, operating systems and carriers, finding ways to link that data to offline consumer habits and lifestyles could prove especially attractive to mobile advertisers and sites.

Mobclix promises that integrating the Nielsen databases will lead to an increase in CPMs of 20% to 100% for mobile application developers and publishers and improved return-on-investment for advertisers and ad networks.

"This dynamic will be highly attractive to advertisers and very effective for publishers with in-demand audiences such as the finance, utility and shopping categories," said Mobclix co-founder Krishna Subramanian, in a statement.

Started in 2008, Mobclix handles advertising across devices including the iPhone and Android-based handsets. With its foundation in iPhone app analytics, the mobile ad exchange boasts reach across 85% of iPhone and iPod touch devices.