Mobile ad exchange Mobclix teams with Nielsen to sharpen ad targeting

Mobile advertising is one of the hottest fields we report on at VentureBeat. Gartner analysts expect it to be a $7.4 billion market by the end of 2014. Not as big as Google’s $20 billion-ish ad economy, but a viable space for which media planners will design and place ads.
For ad buyers, it’s a big deal that Mobclix will soon be hooked up to Nielsen’s ad targeting data. PRIZM is a tool that segments markets by lifestyle and consumer behavior. ConneXions slots consumers into 53 different demographic categories. Under the terms of this agreement, Mobclix will be able to resell PRIZM and ConneXions to mobile ad networks and publishers.
By hooking Nielsen’s data for reselling within Mobclix’ system, it will be possible to serve different ads to 150 different audience segments of consumers on their phones, or maybe their iPads. In San Francisco, ad buyers will be able to target Mission hipsters and Marina yuppies separately.
I haven’t been able to get more technical details on how this will work, but at this point the two companies are still at the announcement stage, rather than having a working implementation to show me.
“The need to have precise marketing within mobile marketing strategies has become critical for survival,” Mobclix co-founder Krishna Subramanian said in a prepared statement. “The enhanced precision enables advertisers and ad networks to produce greater advertising ROI and gives mobile publishers higher CPMs from premium ad buys.”
All of this is great, but I’m compelled to retell a story a Web 2.0 marketing guy told me in a bar: Many tech people operate under the presumption that because online ads can be targeted and measured very meticulously, ad buyers will give up their TV ads and billboards to buy AdSense keywords instead.
No, my drinking buddy said. Ad buyers will still buy TV, radio and print because they know those work, and they know pretty much what to expect from ads placed in those media. Online advertising, by contrast, is something they’re still figuring out. Don’t expect that a single technological improvement will drive everyone onto the Internet. Better targeting is definitely a must, but mobile advertising will need to produce recognizable, repeatable results better than 30-second spots during prime time if it’s to pull the tall dollars away from TV. If you find yourself burning to tell me prime time is dead, you’ve been reading too many blogs.