With a fast-growing smartphone market, improved connection speeds and more advantageous data plans available - combined with an appetite for more engaging content - there's every reason to believe that mobile video will be a powerful channel for advertisers.

As a child, I vividly remember coloring a local grocery store bag as part of a contest to win circus tickets. Such a simple marketing tool engrained the circus in my mind for the rest of my life. However, times have clearly changed and marketing entertainment is no longer as simple as handing out paper bags to color. Family entertainment companies must now employ a much broader set of marketing tools and tactics to sell tickets or, as we in the business like to say, "get bottoms in seats!"

Nielsen recently announced their latest product, Twitter TV Ratings, as a way of measuring television success and viral-ness. Why? Because where and when people watch TV along with how they engage with that content is swiftly changing.

Before I started my own PR company, in the days when I still had to perfect my resume, buy the perfect interview suit, and meet a public relations executive for an interview in an office with fluorescent lighting (shudder), there were certain things I knew to be true.

Is it any surprise that almost 50% of adults (according to Mintel 2012), now say they would prefer to watch movies at home? Aside from the weightlessness feeling many may have had from seeing "Gravity," the experience of going to the movies is probably the exact opposite of how we want to be entertained.

I bet if you could see the office windows at Twitter for its M&A and business development team, you would see the proverbial midnight oil burning bright. Twitter's M&A and business development team has been cranking away at ensuring the service has the superior marketplace solution for connecting TV and second-screen audiences.

In the wake of Rockstar Games' massive $800-million-in-one-day success with Grand Theft Auto V, the power of video advertising is more apparent than ever. As entertainment marketers double down on digital video, the need for independent measurement, hard data and a new perspective on the definition of key performance indicators is paramount. When driving consumer awareness of a new game, movie, or TV title, there are many important data points worth monitoring, but some are more important than others. I've outlined three of the most important metrics that no video marketer should ever go without.