By Eric Sylvers
MILAN: Most cellphones come standard with a slew of features that may include a satellite tracker, games, music players and Internet access. But operators, advertisers, device manufacturers and software makers have struggled to come up with reliable data that tell them how the phones and their features are being used.
M:Metrics, based in Seattle, was set to announce Monday what it said is the first service that directly and continuously tracks which services are actually used. Knowing how often and for how long subscribers of many different operators surf the Internet with their phones, which games they play, how many e-mail messages they send and what other features they use could unleash the cellphone's advertising potential, according to industry experts.
"Operators have to generate user profiling that can be highly targeted for the brands, and truly personalized for the consumer," Nick Lane, an analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, wrote in a research note last week. "Until this happens, mobile advertising will remain largely experimental."
The new M:Metrics service, called MeterDirect, will work on phones that run on the Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm operating systems. MeterDirect must be downloaded to a phone before it can send the data back to M:Metrics; the transfer will take place usually at the end of the day. Initially, the service will be available only in the United States and Britain, the company said.
"Once the data comes in, then the hard work really begins as we categorize it and get it into the reports for our clients," said Will Hodgman, chief executive of M:Metrics. "It's absolutely critical to have the data that tells you how the consumer is using the media."
Advertisers are sure to watch the development of MeterDirect and its future competitors closely as they jostle for a piece of the mobile ad market, which is expected to be worth $11.3 billion in 2011, according to a recent report from Informa. It said that mobile advertising was worth less than $1 billion last year, compared with some industry estimates of 24 times that amount for Internet advertising.
While operators have a plethora of data from their subscribers, including their location, how often they make calls, the average length of a call and whether they surf the Internet, Hodgman said the companies often do not release that information to advertisers. Even if the information is shared, the advertiser would have to collect it from each operator in every country, and the criteria used by the operators to measure usage might not be the same, Hodgman said.
MeterDirect will work as a sort of clearinghouse, finding people who are willing to let their cellphone usage be tracked in return for pay and then redistributing the collected data to clients. MeterDirect can track how often Web sites are visited and how much each kind of person visits them; what time of day and which days are most popular for surfing; and which applications - television, video, music or games - are used and for how long.
Until now, advertisers and content providers have relied on surveys for this sort of data. Surveys can gather information from a wide audience but do not directly track what people are actually doing.
M:Metrics already has 150 clients, including mobile phone operators, advertisers and media companies, that subscribe to a survey service called MobiLens. The service collects data on the phone usage of about 40,000 people in the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
A pilot project of MeterDirect showed that the range of Web content people sought from their phones was vaster than expected, said Mark Donovan, senior vice president at M:Metrics. He said that 10,000 Web sites were accessed and that the average Internet session lasted almost 10 minutes.
"That's longer than many people would expect," Donovan said. "This and the other data that we can collect on usage is what advertisers rely on to make their investment decisions. The problem is that until now we haven't had the metrics to measure usage for mobile phones as we do for other media like the Internet."
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