Both Nielsen Co. and ComScore Inc. have expanded their measurement capabilities to the third screen — Nielsen with the launch of its Mobile @Plan and ComScore with its $44.3 million acquisition of M:Metrics Inc.
Mobile @Plan is an extension of Nielsen’s @Plan for profiling online audiences and is intended to provide marketers with lifestyle and demographic information on the users of popular mobile Web sites. Information gleaned from Mobile @Plan will be leveraged in Nielsen’s TotalWeb service, which combines data from mobile and online for more complete audience measurement. M:Metrics’ move to ComScore holdings accomplishes much the same thing, adding data on mobile phone usage, mobile Internet behavior and mobile ad tracking to the company’s existing data on Web audiences.
“It’s a very logical extension of the @Plan brand with Nielsen online to take that and extend it to the mobile screen,” explained Nic Covey, director of insights for Nielsen Mobile. “For marketers, Mobile @Plan will allow a new precision when targeting mobile media audiences. It will allow media planners to look at mobile Web in the same way they have been looking at PC-based Web for a number of years.”
Both companies cited the growing popularity of Web-enabled phones as a main reason for the focus on mobile.
“Mobile media and mobile advertising have been a long time coming in the US and they are now reaching a point of meaningful scale where it matters to audiences and having good metrics is important for marketers trying to reach these consumers,” Tolman Geffs, who advised M:Metrics in the acquisition and is managing director of The Jordan, Edmiston Group Inc., said in a conference call.
