With the explosion in mobile content that will have to be funded or supported by advertisements, the question that arises is: who will be the trusted third party to measure mobile traffic and build trust in the market? Patrick Parodi, the former chairman and global board member of the Mobile Entertainment Forum told a group of advertisers and media buyers at the The Economic Times Mobile Marketing Summit organised by Times Grey Cell in Mumbai this week, “Money follows measurement.” His company, Amobee Systems, provides tools to do just that. Parodi suggested that minutes and kilobits were an inadequate yardstick for advertisers and metrics should center around users’ demographics and habits. “It is intention that should be monetised, rather than attention,” he said. “Advertisers should be paying for performance.”

Because of the personal nature of the handset, the mobile advertising market is potentially bigger than the mobile internet advertisement market, with more impressions than Google on a day-to-day basis, Parodi said. “Operators are at the centre of the system and will determine the success of mobile as a viable media channel.”

Responding to the demand for a census of customer usage data, a thing mobile operators have been resisting, Harit Nagpal, marketing and new business director for Vodafone Essar, countered that the next rupee of ad revenue was as precious to mobile operators as to anyone else. “Nobody has mapped usage behaviour better than us,” he said.  To move away from what he called “machine gun spamming” of users, he revealed that there was a move afoot at Vodafone which would take the lead in analysing and micro-segmenting customers and then presenting different profiles to advertisers. “This way, rather than you approaching me, I would approach you to see which aspect of my prospective customer base matches yours,” he said, presaging the evolution of the mobile phone a form of direct mail.