Mobile ad exchange Mobclix announced that it would add Nielsen PRIZM and Nielsen ConneXions audience segmentation data and capabilities into the Mobclix mobile exchange. According to the release, what this enables is the following:

By bringing traditional marketing techniques to mobile advertising through Mobclix Complete, ad network partners will now enable mobile advertisers to reach over 150 unique audience segments resulting in improved conversions over legacy mobile solutions. Mobile application developers and publishers will reap the benefits of 20-100 percent CPMs higher than the market . . .

Under the terms of this agreement, Mobclix will be able to resell PRIZM and ConneXions to mobile ad networks and publishers. The anonymous user data from both PRIZM and ConneXions will then be mapped and applied to Mobclix's open marketplace platform for buying and selling mobile ad inventory. Coupled with the reach of top mobile application publishers, advertisers will benefit from this comprehensive and insightful data to help find, discover, determine, learn and better market to their audiences.

These data and capabilities move beyond simple demographics into "lifestyle" segments. 1020 Placecast uses the PRIZM data as well in its mobile targeting. 

The caveat that must be stated here is that for audience slicing and dicing to be meaningful you need massive reach, which is why allowing reselling/redistribution of these capabilities is significant. The issue of providing greater mobile reach is what makes mobile exchanges and marketplaces important. 

These Nielsen data and targeting capabilities were basically created for direct mail targeting across the US by Zip and household. However, in a mobile context, if you're looking for "hipsters" (or single moms or whatever) in a certain geography (e.g., Tribeca, New York), you start to slice the audiences too thin for most large agencies and marketers today. (The objectives of LBS or SMS marketing would be different.) Brands and agencies complain today about not being able to get enough reach with mobile in general, without adding in 150 more ways to slice up audiences. 

The fact that these data/segments were tied originally to households is paradoxical somewhat because mobile users are mostly on the go (the iPad will be a bit different). You wouldn't necessarily know who mobile users are/were except by their location and expressed behavior or "needs" (e.g., search queries). Some marketers, for example, have targeted iPhone or BlackBerry users as a proxy for certain demographic characteristics in the past.

Carriers also have this type of data about their customers and I suspect that they'll make much more of it available to marketers soon. JumpTap accesses carrier demographic information for some of its ad targeting. However, there are potential privacy issues and concerns that will be the subject of debate; but that's a much longer discussion. 

This slicing of audiences begins to be meaningful once they become larger (as they are becoming) and perhaps once you've got cross-platform buying between online and mobile, as Mobclix is starting to do with AOL's Advertising.com and Tribal Fusion-Greystripe. Then you can have an agency make a demographically targeted buy across online and mobile simultaneously. That's when this will start to shine potentially. 

There's also the branding and direct response divide; though digital obiously bridges that somewhat. A "brand" ad can have DR elements (e.g., sign up to receive alerts; find the nearest dealer, etc). The cross-platform scenario I'm describing is more likely a big brand play (with DR elements as suggested) than one aimed at getting people to take specific action now (i.e., an LBS promotion). However, a movie studio targeting a specific audience for a film could use this system quite effectively as one example.

The capabilities that these data and targeting capabilities represent are somewhat ahead of the market in my view. The market will eventually catch up but it's not yet this sophisticated.