Cell Life

Amol Sharma wrote an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121030196400479989.html?mod=rss_media_and_marketing&apl=y&r=529113) on the tools being used to measure the impact of Mobile Advertising and Application Usage. Mobile measurement firms M:Metrics, Nielsen and comScore are working on technology to electronically measure the mobile ad views and mobile application usage. So far these firms have relied on customer surveys to determine what applications and ads are being seen by mobile users - this has led to very imperfect scoring patterns for mobile campaign impact measurement. The issue is that mobile ad views and data usage statistics is in the domain of carriers networks and IT systems and the carriers are highly reluctant to share this information with mobile measurement firms or advertisers in fear of impinging on customer privacy, mobile spamming and customer dissatisfaction.

The traditional method of recording customer patterns are opt-in surveys which are highly subjective and depend on customer desire to share accurate data on their usage and preferences. The more sophisticated method involves electronic monitoring software running on phones or digging into the usage logs which carriers control. The monitoring software has to deal with a zillion phone styles and operating systems and needs carrier support which is always a dicey job.

Nobody has forgotten the spam and consumer privacy issues in the online world and the last thing carriers and consumers want is the same set of problems in the mobile space. But advertisers would like accurate measurements of customer usage patterns to see the return on ad-dollars. So we have the classic consumer privacy problem here.

What might make mobile advertising appealing to consumers such that they cozy up to the idea of information sharing ? Perhaps free services to go with advertising or high degree of ad personalization - all of these techniques require prospecting usage logs and customer data which carriers control and determining customer preferences and mobile web usage patterns.

Amol’s article mentions that more likely than not, customer surveys and electronic monitoring will co-exist even after another decade.

MT