Agent M will later this month split from mobile marketing firm The Hyperfactory, becoming arguably mobile advertising's first independent third-party campaign performance tracking and optimization service.

Bruce Braun, San Francisco-based CEO of Agent M, claims that his service's key goal is objective measurement and optimization of mobile advertising campaign performance.

"In my experience, agencies and brands will not commit substantial or consistent budgets to any new medium unless there are credible and independent ways to verify performance," Mr. Braun said.

In this Q&A, Mr. Braun offers insight into issues related to measuring campaign performance for mobile advertising and the need that Agent M fills in the marketplace. Please read on.

When did Agent M start accepting third-party sites outside of The Hyperfactory's clients?
We began tracking non-Hyperfactory hosted mobile sites in June after extensive development and testing.

So when does the separation from The Hyperfactory take place? What does it mean for Agent M?
Agent M will be a standalone company by the end of the end of this month, fully independent from The Hyperfactory.

This means that Agent M will be mobile advertising's first and only independent third-party campaign performance tracking and optimization service.

When [Hyperfactory CEO] Derek Handley asked me to run Agent M I did so with the understanding that when Agent M was ready to go to market, it had to be independent from The Hyperfactory, without any possibility of conflicts of interest. Derek agreed.

How are you positioning Agent M in the marketplace?
Agent M is positioned as the singular campaign performance tracking and optimization service that is not part of a publisher, ad network or agency, engaged in the buying or selling any form of mobile media.

The only skin in the game Agent M has is the objective measurement and optimization of campaign performance.

Have you signed up any clients? Any major names?
We have a good number of well-known agencies as beta clients currently running and set to run over the next several months. Mutual confidentiality agreements preclude identifying those participants at this time.

What need does Agent M serve?
Until now, mobile advertisers have had to rely on unsubstantiated monthly performance reports from publishers and ad networks.

Absent a service like Agent M, in effect, advertisers have been told by publishers and ad networks to "trust us."

Advertisers rely on Nielsen for TV program ratings, in radio, it is Arbitron and print has ABC.

While these three services do not track individual ads, the media sellers must use those services as the basis for calculating the performance of campaigns back to the agencies buying the campaigns.

Agent M takes independent third-party performance reporting to a new level for mobile.

We track all of the campaign activity, by each publisher, and creative from the first click through the end actions.

We accomplish this with a user interface that we think even Steve Jobs would love.

We looked at all of the ad servers, publishers and analytics services in mobile and in online for ease of use and quality of data. Our conclusion was that pure independent third-party mobile campaign tracking did not exist.

Further, any tool or service that required days of classroom training with four-inch thick user manuals and reporting screens obliterated with data was not in any way user-friendly.

We believed that putting the agency in the position of having to spend endless hours aggregating multiple mobile publisher reports, slicing and dicing that data and conversion into pivot tables was counter-productive.

That process is labor-intensive, time-consuming and has made the buying of mobile essentially unprofitable for most agencies.

Agent M eliminates those hurdles and simplifies the tracking of mobile campaigns.

We put the advertiser in control of managing campaign performance and analytics. For mobile advertisers, Agent M provides a transparency and ease of use they have not enjoyed until now.

How does your service work?
Agent M tracks all creatives and the placements across all publishers for a given campaign from the click all the way through the final action or transactions. How we achieve this technically is confidential.

Agent M aggregates all publisher and creative campaign activity in one easy-to-understand and customizable interface.

In one glance you can see graphically what your top key performance indicators are and how they are performing. No need to hunt for the various metrics. We make it easy. So easy, we don't even have a user manual.

Agent M is completely intuitive. Think of Agent M as a Mac of analytics compared to other analytics that live in a PC world.

Several of the larger online ad servers have mobile products but they are nothing more than extensions of ad serving publisher products.

We don't serve ads, we track them with laser-like focus.

We believed that to be the best at the task, Agent M needed to be built from the ground up, by people who knew mobile, and exclusively for mobile advertising and not a bastardized version of some other legacy service.

Agent M reports independently and does so on a daily, weekly, monthly and end-of-campaign basis.

Having access to campaign performance on a daily or weekly basis allows for course corrections and adjustments during a campaign rather than the current post-mortem method.

In order to optimize a campaign, Agent M allows that optimization to take place during the campaign and not a month later.

Providing advertisers the ability to stay on top of a campaign helps them to see what creatives are performing the best with each publisher and placement.

We are especially excited about making it possible for our clients to define and customize engagement metrics.

Accountability in mobile advertising means being able to see if spending a dollar is in fact returning two or three dollars back.

If I'm an automotive brand, engagement for me could be tracking how many people asked for a brochure, scheduled a test drive or locating a dealer.

I'd want to be able to see exactly those specific engagement performance metrics are without having to convert data to figure it out. Agent M allows our clients to customize in just those ways.

What's the issue with metrics in mobile advertising?
Just as in finance, reports are only valuable if they are accurate and timely.

We don't think that mobile performance metrics that are sent out after the end of a month is in any way timely.

Public corporations hire independent accounting firms like KPMG to audit their books for the purpose of assuring shareholders the company numbers are accurate.

Absent an Agent M, verifying campaign performance, accuracy today is a case of "Let the buyer beware."

Why the need for independent third-party metrics?
Your question reminds me of the Carfax commercial where the prospective buyer asks the car salesman for the Carfax report and he responds that he has a note from the previous owner stating the car is really a good one.

In this age of accountability, mobile advertisers are demanding independent verification.

Jamie Wells of OMD sent a letter to mobile publishers earlier this year stating that "OMD would no longer accept site-served publisher data for mobile delivery and click performance related to mobile display advertising." Jamie is to be congratulated for his stance on this matter (see story).

As importantly, Agent M is a way to bring greater credibility to mobile advertising.

In my experience, agencies and brands will not commit substantial or consistent budgets to any new medium unless there are credible and independent ways to verify performance.

Cable TV networks were unable to get anything other than promotional or experimental budgets until Nielsen began hooking up their meters to cable boxes to measure the audience levels.

Once that happened, the cable TV networks began to gain real traction with advertisers and obtain major dollar budgets. Those networks achieved credibility and acceptance.

Mobile is at that same crossroads. We think Agent M is a key component in leading the way to making TV-size ad spends possible for mobile publishers.