• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, June 8, 2015

The shift Madison Avenue is making toward audience-targeting -- i.e., decoupling audiences from specific media and reaching them wherever and whenever, at least in theory -- is perhaps best seen and explained through the lens of mobile.

Mobile devices (more specifically in this case, smartphones) have become an extension of self. Two years ago, a Mobile Consumer Habits Study conducted by Harris Interactive for Jumio found that 72% of adults keep their smartphones within five feet most of the time. (And if you need more proof of the phone’s importance, one in five 18- to-34-year-olds have sex and use their smartphones at the same time, the study found. (I wonder if this number would decrease if smartphones didn't have a camera. I digress...)

Two years is an eternity in this industry, so those numbers have undoubtedly shifted since then. But if I had to guess, that shift has been of the upward variety.

With this in mind, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) recently released a “guidance report” on location-based mobile audience targeting. The thinking: Smartphone data, put in context by location data, paints one of the most accurate pictures on consumers that marketers can muster.

My phone is in my pocket, and yours likely is too -- meaning anywhere we go, any message we send, any post we post and when we do all of this builds our profile. It’s not perfect -- not even close -- but the potential is unmistakable, and it's what's stressed in the MMA report.

And some of that potential has been tapped. The MMA report highlights three companies that ran location-based audience targeting campaigns with varying degrees of success: Denny’s, Goodwill and Walmart. The full report can be found here.

As the MMA notes in its report, mobile audience data is “no longer just a tool for ‘in the moment’ targeting.” 

For example, Foursquare has struck a partnership with cross-device programmatic ad platform Drawbridge to make better use of its mobile data. Drawbridge will extrapolate audiences from Foursquare's first-party mobile data, which can then be targeted across devices. And that’s not the only example of this, nor is it the biggest. Verizon’s acquisition of AOL takes that cake.

Again, mobile data is not perfect. A recent Thinknear report found that 54% of location-targeted mobile ads were off by more than half a mile. But there’s reason to believe it’s improving. comScore, for example, a leader in the media measurement space, upped its mobile offering just last week.

It’s not a wild shot in the dark to say that we could be seeing indicators of where things are headed: Hefty mobile-based audience segments being used as the catalyst for cross-device campaigns carried out via programmatic.

There’s plenty of conjecture here, and perhaps I’m linking things that have no connecting threads, but enough pieces do seem to be falling into place to suggest that mobile audience data is just beginning to climb the ladder of importance. (And if the MMA report is any indication, I’m not alone here.)