• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, May 29, 2008

The Nielsen Co. today launches a new service extending its @Plan online audience profiling system to the mobile realm. Mobile @Plan is aimed at helping marketers reach their target audiences on handheld devices by supplying lifestyle and demographic information for 200 top mobile Web sites.

With 48 million U.S. wireless subscribers accessing the Internet over their phones, the mobile Web represents a significant new consumer platform for marketers to tap into, according to Nielsen.

Launched 10 years ago, the @Plan service encompasses more than a thousand points of information including leisure activities, life events, media usage and purchases across categories such as travel, auto and finance.

Through Mobile @Plan, travel marketers, for example, would now be able to learn that 43% of mobile Web users have vacationed by air in the last 90 days and that American Airlines is their favorite airline. And visitors to the mobile sites of automotive properties such as Edmunds and Car and Driver are more than twice as likely to have traveled to vacation in the last 90 days.

"Every website has a unique audience profile with users of certain lifestyles and interests," said Jesse Goranson, SVP Mobile Media for Nielsen Mobile, in a statement. "Mobile @Plan identifies those differences on a site by site basis."

By using @Plan and Mobile @Plan together, Nielsen said clients can also compare PC-based and wireless Internet audiences to more effectively target consumers across both media formats. Such a comparison in the travel category would show that 13% of mobile Web users flew internationally in the last 90 days, while only 7% of their wired counterparts did so.

Indeed, the extension of @Plan to cover mobile data reflects Nielsen's broader efforts to provide integrated audience measurement across media. Earlier this month, the company announced TotalWeb, a service combining data from Nielsen Mobile and Nielsen Online, to show the unduplicated audiences for more than 200 PC-based and mobile sites.

The competition Nielsen faces to dominate digital measurement was underscored Tuesday by rival comScore's $44.3 million acquisition of mobile media tracking firm M:Metrics. The move parallels Nielsen's acquisition of consumer mobile research firm Telephia.

"We've been integrating mobile data with online and TV data since August of last year and we'll continue to do even more of that," said Nicholas Covey, director of Insights for Nielsen Mobile. "Beyond that, our ability to connect mobile consumption to other consumer behavior, such as retail purchases, will help us to continue leading in the mobile measurement space."