Smartphones were 58% of U.S. impressions in January

Today, we are releasing our January Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting (SMART)^TM.  We are releasing it a bit later than normal, as we issued our Year in Review SMART earlier in February and didn't want to confuse the year-end stats with January data. That being said, the first 2010 SMART features new insights into breakout campaign destination trends including m-Commerce, Social Media and Site Search and Campaign Effectiveness by Ad Vertical, supplied to us by InsightExpress.  Full highlights are below; and I've attached the full SMART and the image files if you would like to use any of the information.

Highlights from January's SMART:

• The U.S. Mobile Web: Increased to 67M users, according to Nielsen (Dec.)
• Special Section:
  1. InsightExpress conducted a study comparing the performance of advertising on mobile devices using norms developed in online ad testing. Mobile campaigns in the Retail Vertical showed the largest differences in three of the five categories, Aided Awareness, Purchase Intent, and Unaided Awareness.
  2. CPG campaigns indexed high in the Brand Favorability category; followed by auto, according to InsightExpress.
• Engagement & Targeting:
  1. Three new campaign actions were added to January's MYDAS^TM Portfolio Mix: m-Commerce, Social Media and Site Search.
  2. Over the last several months we observed an increase in the number of advertisers directing users to take these actions from either ad creatives, custom landing pages or mobile sites and each represented 20%, 6% and 2% of all campaign actions in January respectively.
  3. Place a Call experienced the largest month over month change with a 16% increase, followed by Application Download with 7%.
  4. Average session times kicked off the year at 4:57 (min:sec) and average page views for the month were 127.
• Devices:
  1. Apple remained the number one device manufacturer with a 36.22% share of impressions in January - the largest percentage share since we starting publishing  SMART in March 2009.
  2. Three new devices entered our Top Ten in January: the Motorola Clutch, Samsung Freeform and the Samsung Messager II.
  3. Two LG devices also entered the Top Fifteen: the LG VX5500 and the LG enV Touch. 
  4. As three of the five new devices to enter our Top 20 had QWERTY keyboards, it is interesting to note, the QWERTY category, within the Device Input Mix, experienced the largest increase, or 16.59%, and represented 37.56% of impressions in January. A very close second within the Device Input Mix was the Touch Screen category with a 36.32% share of impressions.
  5. In the U.S. Smartphone OS Mix, Smartphones represented 58% of our network's U.S. impressions in January - a 20% increase month over month. 
  6. Over 77% of our network's U.S. Smartphone impressions were among the iPhone and RIM OS's.