From today, brands can access anonymised mobile Internet usage data from all five UK operators.
This is a massive day for the GSMA and its operator members, the culmination of many painful years of collaboration between notoriously slow and mutually suspicious companies.
Why are they doing it? Because the prize of making mobile a truly compelling advertising/marketing medium is too irresistible to ignore.
And that's what this project aims to do.
GSMA Mobile Media Metrics will deliver a 'census-level' solution for mobile media reporting. It takes anonymised mobile Internet usage data from all five UK operators so that media buyers and brands can see which sites are attracting the kind of visitors they want to target.
When this information is combined with the kind of consumer panel intelligence gathered by comScore, it adds up to a pretty robust system of metrics for ad buyers. And at the massively well-attended launch in London today, a succession of brands lined up to testify that they like the mobile channel, but don't invest because of the inability to track campaigns.
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"Mobile always makes it to round one of a campaign plan, but hardly ever to round two," said one of them.
The Mobile Media Metrics service counters this view with aggregated metrics of mobile Internet usage behaviour, enabling analysis of site visitation and engagement metrics, such as page views, time spent on specific sites, and device types and features.
Rob Conway, CEO of the GSMA, said: “The underlying principle of Mobile Media Metrics is to deliver valuable and actionable reporting tools to the media industry, while respecting the privacy of individuals. Access to transparent measurement is essential in establishing mobile as a legitimate advertising medium, and Mobile Media Metrics is a critical element in advancing this process.”
There were even some numbers available based on pre-production data.
The GSMA found that the Top 10 UK Mobile Internet Sites December 2009 were:
(total minutes - 000s)
Facebook.com 2,156,886
Google Sites 395,576
Microsoft Sites 165,725
Orange Sites 138,529
AOL (inc. Bebo) 106,446
Apple Inc. 104,118
Vodafone Group 89,126
BBC Sites 83,614
Flirtomatic 54,503
Yahoo! Sites 48,685
The GSMA and comScore are planning more, deeper MMM products to measure mobile usage of applications, search, reach and frequency, ad tracking, and ad effectiveness, as well as linkage of the MMM database to Kantar Media’s Target Group Index (TGI).
The MMM service will also be expanded to include Wi-Fi traffic through site-centric measurement of publishers’ and ad networks’ sites, using comScore’s Media Metrix 360 solution, for a de-duplicated view of the online and mobile Internet.
