As the Mobile Marketing Association yesterday introduced a new Global Measurement Committee, The Nielsen Company announced a new measurement product for wireless content--Mobile Vector--and released
estimates for U.S. mobile Web and mobile video use in the first quarter of 2007.
Mobile Vector, to launch in July, will use information culled from Nielsen's National People
Meter TV sample to report on media behavior and audience demographics segmented by wireless carrier. Later this year, Nielsen said, Mobile Vector will expand to include a survey of mobile phone users.
Mobile Vector is the first product from the newly formed Nielsen Wireless service--which along with Nielsen Games has just been formed from the eight-month-old, and now defunct, Nielsen Wireless
and Interactive Services. Jeff Herrmann, who was vice president of the latter, now holds the same title for both new units.
"We want to determine how mobile users are different from other
consumers--are they time-shifters, what types of content they prefer," Herrmann explained.
In addition to working with its People Meter sample, Nielsen Wireless will also work in tandem with such
existing Nielsen services as the Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement initiative, customer segmentation, Nielsen RingScan sales tracking, attitudinal and behavioral surveys, and mobile polling.
Nielsen Wireless plans to evaluate the size of today's mobile market--reportedly made up of some 230 million consumers--and determine how various offerings and technologies impact "traditional"
cell-phone use now and in the future.
Metrics--including total minutes, total sessions and total page views for online media--are all considered key measurement factors for marketers considering
the mobile space.
"We're trying to help wireless carriers develop more efficient ad campaigns, and help the media industry better understand behaviors," said Herrmann.
Nielsen has segmented
its 10,000-household national TV ratings panel by wireless carrier, and is in the process of identifying the Web sites and mobile video outlets those panelists use.
The research company already
knows that at least 7% of 18- to-34-year-olds viewed mobile video programming (excluding videos created by a phone's camcorder) in the first quarter of 2007, while at least 25% used their mobile
phones to connect to the Internet. The mobile video audience actually skews older and male, Nielsen reported, with 46% age 35 or older, and 54% male.
Overall, Nielsen Wireless said that more 8
million people ages 12 and up viewed mobile videos during the first quarter of 2007, with more than 33 million using mobile Internet connections.
In other demographic results, Nielsen Wireless
said that more than half (55%) of primary users of video-enabled mobile phones live in households with total incomes of $75,000 or more.
Nielsen Wireless has also found significant differences in
TV services received and viewing habits among subscribers to different wireless carriers. People in Sprint households, for example, are 30% more likely than people in T-mobile households to have a DBS
system, Nielsen said, and people in Verizon households 26% more likely than the typical American to have digital cable service. Those Verizon household members also watched the season finale of
"American Idol" more than those in Sprint or AT&T households--with higher ratings of 11% and 7%, respectively.
For primary users of video-enabled mobile phones across the entire season of
"American Idol," however, Sprint subscribers were the heaviest viewers.
Nielsen Wireless said such research into how mobile Web and video impacting established media behavior will be one of its
main missions. "Independent measurement of the cross-media behavior of the growing mobile audience will support and accelerate the evolution of mobile media business models," said Herrmann. His
comment was echoed by Courtney Jane Acuff, director of Publicis Group's denuo, in a statement also released by Nielsen: "Understanding the consumer value proposition of mobile marketing can only come
from understanding user behavior."
On the client side, The Coca-Cola Company is chairing the MMA's new measurement committee in North America. According to Tom Daly, group manager, strategy and
planning, Global Interactive Marketing: "The Coca-Cola Company is committed to mobile as a viable channel to our consumer, and measurement will help us ensure the investment is allocated in the right
place."
The MMA said the measurement committee will create a framework for the measurement of mobile marketing campaigns across all channels such as mobile video and multimedia services.
In
other related news, dotMobi, the consortium behind the .mobi domain address created for mobile phones, expressed its support for the MMA's newly revised Mobile Advertising Guidelines. dotMobi is backed by such major industry players as Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, T-Mobile and
Vodafone.