Nielsen to Track Mobile Media Use from July

Nielsen will launch the first product under its new Nielsen Wireless brand, Mobile Vector, in the US next month. The launch marks a major move by the measurement giant into coverage of mobile media consumption.

Mobile Vector will use information from Nielsen's National People Meter TV sample to segment behaviour and demographics by wireless carrier, and will measure how many people use content services such as mobile Internet and mobile video, as well as the impact this has on established media behavior.

The service will complement the firm's Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2) initiative, which measures TV usage on all TV and video platforms, including personal video devices such as mobile phones. Mobile Vector promises to aid mobile carriers target their advertising campaigns, assist content producers in deciding which distributors to work with, and boost the scope for competitive positioning and differentiation of the mobile media industry more generally.

Nielsen launched its Wireless and Interactive Services to measure video game and mobile phone use in October 2006 (www.mrweb.com/drno/news6051.htm ), but quickly decided to split it into two separate branches: Nielsen Games and Nielsen Wireless, both led by Nielsen Vice President Jeff Herrmann. The group already offers the wireless industry customer segmentation, ringtone sales tracking (Nielsen RingScan), attitudinal and behavioral surveys and mobile polling.

The firm promises to expand Mobile Vector later in the year to include a survey of mobile phone users that will provide information about their consumption of mobile media content, and eventually hopes for a system giving 'a market-wide view of mobile media consumption'. In the words of Herrmann: 'This new mobile measurement service demonstrates Nielsen's continued commitment to follow content wherever consumers take it. Independent measurement of the cross-media behavior of the growing mobile audience will support and accelerate the evolution of mobile media business models.'

By way of background, Nielsen says that in the first quarter of 2007, more than 33 million persons 12 and older used mobile web, and more than 8 million persons 12 and older viewed video on their mobile phone (excluding videos created with a phone's camcorder function). According to the CTIA (the international association for the wireless telecommunications industry), there are more than 230 million wireless subscriptions in the US. Nielsen estimates that at least 25% of 18-34 year-olds used their mobile phone to connect to the Internet in the first quarter of 2007, but that 46% of the mobile video audience is aged 35 plus, and 46% is female.

The Nielsen Company is online at www.nielsen.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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