One of the drums we’ve hammered here at SiliconANGLE in our coverage of the digital mobile media industry is that when you’re judging the worth of an ad network, the importance of reach is key.

Even before Millennial Media came on as an official sponsor at SiliconANGLE, we talked about it as an important and often over-looked metric when ranking the various players out there in terms of relevance to their respective amounts of hype. In general, this deeper look we took wasn’t driven exclusively by our friends at Millennial, but also by third party verification John and I got from industry analysts at Nielsen and elsewhere.

While the tech media buzz around smaller players like AdMob has reached a fevered pitch lately, it’s interesting to note that deeper looks are being taken by the “Virtual Analyst Network” Om Malik now employs at GigaOm PRO. From a post this morning:

How many unique customers can you reach? Reach is still the most important criterion for advertisers to judge success of a campaign. With mobile we can measure unique users much more accurately than with any other medium. Mobile offers the opportunity for the advertiser to the reach the consumer at the right time and the right place using the right medium with the right message.

It’s important to note (and the team at Millennial will be the first to admit this) that there are no standardized ways of identifying unique visitors industry-wide.  Most of the mobile ad groups are best positioned to talk about the shape of the mobile market’s demographics, and the degree to which they expose that data to the public varies from company to company.

As I’ve talked to the heads of these various companies, I’m struck by the need for an independent traffic and metrics verification system, similar to what Nielsen and Quantcast have done for podcasting and web metrics respectively.

Incidentally, Nielsen’s involvement in podcasting was facilitated in large part by a company that our own John Furrier had a strong hand in founding: the Association for Downloadable Media. I don’t see as much come from them these days as I did when they first kicked off, but I am struck by the need for an intra-industry kumbaya moment. The mobile ad networks all seem to be at each others throats for what appears to be a very small slice what’s destined to be the most popular platform for reaching the public since the invention of the printing press.

The global mobile phone customer base is truly mind-shattering in it’s size, and now is the time for the industry leaders in monetization to get together and come up with some standards for measurement and sales, before larger and more entrenched players take up that role for them.