MMA: Nielsen to track mobile data usage

<b>LOS ANGELES--</b>Nielsen, the company that measures consumer patterns across all media, this week said it will launch a new wireless measurement service that will track wireless Internet, video and content consumption among the country’s millions of wireless subscribers, just as it tracks watching patterns on TV.

Nielsen will roll the program, called Nielsen Wireless, out in phases, starting next month with a service called Mobile Vector, which draws upon existing day from its TV tracking products. Using info from its People Meter tracking, it will provide carriers with detailed demographic information on their subscribers including examples of what kind of media their customers consume apart from the mobile phone. Nielsen said carriers can use this information to determine what content to target at their customers and to which kind of advertising campaigns they would amenable. Later this year, Nielsen will augment that data with its own polling program, which will specifically track what kind of mobile data services subscribers are using.

“The value of an entertainment medium is directly proportional to how well it is measured,” Nielsen vice president and head of wireless Jeff Herrmann in a statement. “Reliable and accurate measurement of mobile consumers will enable advertisers to properly evaluate the mobile marketing opportunity. 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.”

While Nielsen is a huge name in media tracking, it is emerging into the mobile field on heels of several other companies that track mobile consumer and business behavior. Both Telephia and M:Metrics have been running polls, tracking services and other wireless behavior analysis programs for years. Nielsen, however, appears to approaching the wireless industry from the opposite direction. Instead of starting with consumers’ mobile content consumption and mobile behavior patterns, Nielsen is starting with their general media consumption practices and using that information as a means to determine what their still nascent wireless data consumption might be. It is also linking tracking from all of its products. Herrmann, for instance, said Nielsen would include Mobile Vector in its Anywhere Anytime Media Measurement Initiative, which can track how much a TV program is viewed across all platforms, whether traditional or digital.