Millennial Media has released its April Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting, or SMART, which has a heavy brand focus.

The Millennial Media SMART offers a view of key metrics observed via Millennial Media's ad networks. This monthly program, launched last month, details insights about the U.S. mobile advertising market by focusing on reach, targeting, impressions and handset information.

"We launched SMART to help brand advertisers make more informed decisions and offer a rationale to switch more of their budget to the mobile channel," said Paul Palmieri, president/CEO of Millennial Media, Baltimore, MD. "From a reach perspective, mobile has the scale brands need to shift mobile more into the mix.

"Mobile advertising is more effective than online advertising," he said. "Based on targeting, the cost for to engage one consumer on their handset is a practical, usable tool for brands to drive decision about mobile campaign spend."

Millennial Media, the largest mobile advertising networks company in the U.S., offers both full-service and self-service options designed to various marketing objectives.

Millennial Media offers the MBrand network for targeted audiences across premium content and Decktrade for large-scale performance campaigns.

Millennial Media's April SMART data was compiled from actual campaign and network traffic.

Millennial Media's SMART changes the dialogue from publisher-focused industry-sizing metrics such as number of impressions to advertiser- and media-relevant metrics, including reach and engagement.

The company's reach, campaign analysis and CPEU calculation methodology -- Cost Per Engaged User -- can be found within the April SMART.

Additionally, SMART provides analysis and recommendations for advertisers looking to better understand and excel in the mobile advertising market.

The mobile marketing space continued its pace of strong month-over-month growth, as mobile campaigns increasingly comprised an essential role in holistic advertising campaigns, according to Millennial Media.

Audience targeting campaign activity far outpaced demographic targeting by nearly four times in April, which translated to major increases in purchase intent for key age groups, according to SMART.

Additionally, the complexity of mobile ad campaigns showed significant lift in the number of consumers being driven to an established and persistent mobile destination.

InsightExpress works closely with ad networks to measure the impact brands are having on their targeted consumer.

This month's SMART mirrors the firm's own research in finding that ad networks and brands have seen great success in targeting campaigns towards all demographics.

This is particularly true for 18-24 year old digital natives whose purchase intent can be influenced significantly by mobile campaigns, according to Insight-Express.

Among the most salient highlights from Millennial Media's April SMART include the fact that 54 percent of campaigns used frequency capping, up from 42 percent in March.

Millennial Media now reaches approximately 31.8 million or 56 percent of U.S. Mobile Internet users, or 57.3 million users according to Nielsen's March Mobile Report Standard Metrics.

The average number of ad requests per page view was 1.08.

Forty-six percent of post-click actions leveraged device application functionality, such as the accessing the App Store, watching video or placing a call, while 56 percent used mobile Web-based browser interaction.

Stronger adoption of behavioral targeting shifted campaign activity from a focus on demographics to audience targeting, which increased four times month over month.

Two-thirds -- 66 percent -- of campaigns drove users to specific microsites or expanding rich-media ad units.

Consumers between 18 and 24 years old who were exposed to a mobile campaign had a nine-fold increase in purchase intent.

Seventy-eight percent of publishers provided some level of geographic information.

As for devices, iPhone and iPod touch impressions grew 8 percent month over month and set a new network-wide record.

Apple edged out LG as the No. 2 device manufacturer after Samsung.

Initial Palm Pre impressions showed up on the network, as Palm apparently started to seed the market pre-consumer launch (see story).

The Blackberry Storm cracked Millennial Media's top 20 mobile phone list at No. 15.

QWERTY surpassed the traditional keypad as the top input mechanism for mobile, while touchscreen/QWERTY combined input devices like the G1 doubled month over month.

"The April SMART once again displays that mobile advertising is continuing on the path to becoming a spending imperative for brand advertisers," Mr. Palmieri said. "Brands saw particularly good dividends on spend in custom subnet and audience targeting.

"Additionally, increasingly effective campaign targeting, which resulted in stronger interaction rates, continued to represent more effective spend than online," he said.