TORONTO – Internet marketing research company comScore is bringing its mobile measurement service to Canada, the company said Wednesday.
Known as MobiLens, the service offers insights into mobile consumers’ demographics, behaviours, and device attributes and capabilities, in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the mobile market.
"MobiLens provides valuable and actionable reporting capabilities, essential for establishing mobile as a legitimate advertising medium”, said vice-president Bryan Segal, in the announcement. “Advertisers, publishers, advertising agencies, and mobile carriers alike can now gain visibility into Canada’s mobile audience and optimize their sales and marketing strategies for this rapidly developing market."
Canada marks the eighth individual market now reported in MobiLens, along with the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan.
“With the growth of mobile from a consumer perspective, and an advertising platform, we are very excited to see the first on-going syndicated measurement of the mobile market established," said Michael Becker, managing director of North America for the Mobile Marketing Association, in response to comScore’s announcement. "The availability of on-going data should only help raise the profile and investment in this important and growing media."
comScore also offered up some recent research on the Canadian marketplace, noting that mobile subscribers in Canada exhibited “strong usage” of mobile media on their devices in March 2011:
– 64.5% of mobile subscribers aged 13 and above sent a text message that month, while 48.9% took photos, and 40.6% used an application on their mobile device;
– Accessing of news/information was conducted by 35.2% of the mobile audience, while social networking sites or blogs were used by 25.4%. Accessing work or personal email represented 29.7% of the total mobile audience;
– Canada’s smart phone penetration reached 32.8% in March, marginally higher than that of the U.S. (32.2%). The U.K. led all reportable markets in smart phone penetration at 40.8%, followed by Spain (40.2%) and Italy (38.3%);
– 6.6 million Canadians owned smart phones in March, representing one-third of the total mobile audience. RIM was the leading mobile smartphone operating system with a 42.0% share of Canadian smart phone subscribers, followed by Apple with a 31.0% share, Google with 12.2%, Symbian with a 6.4% percent share and Microsoft with a 5.1% share.
