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Several leading research organisations including the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and Juniper Research have recently released reports on the current mobile advertising market and its future.

This year represents the first time truly quantitative research has become available on mobile advertising, and the numbers indicate conflicting trends in this nascent market, points out Xtract, providers of social intelligence software.

For example,
• The first expenditure study on mobile advertising in the UK, taken by the IAB and PWC, showed that the mobile ads market is growing 99.2% year on year, even when advertising in other forms of media dramatically decreased in the same period
• The huge growth in mobile advertising has been attributed to its exceptional targeting, immediacy and return on investment, says the IAB
• It also showed an impressive 44% of 16 - 24 year olds have checked social networking profiles on their mobile phones, suggesting younger generations are at the ready for mobile web and advertising
• Source: [http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/mobileadvertisingexpenditure120509.html]
However,
• Juniper Research’s study released in June indicates that by 2014, mobile advertising would still only account for up to 1.5% of total global adspend, despite mobile advertising offering ’substantially higher’ response rates than advertising in other media

“There is clearly a conflicting trend at present,” said Jouko Ahvenainen, co-founder and VP at Xtract. “Mobile ads are the most interactive, compelling forms of advertising for many brands, and offer far better response and click through rates when they are done well. And usage of the mobile web is growing rapidly. Other forms of media are struggling to sell advertising, in particular newspapers, and are shutting down. Yet even in five years time, leading industry bodies predict that mobile advertising will remain a mere drop in the ocean in terms of overall global ad spend.”

“This is leaving the industry scratching its head about how to cash in on the promise of mobile advertising. One thing that we constantly hear from advertisers and marketers, who hold the purse strings, is that they need far more intricate levels of targeting than are generally available today; measurability; accountability; and clearly defined ROI, in order to choose mobile over other media platforms. Clearly, highly-targeted forms of advertising that can be measured back are the way to continue the upwards trend in mobile ads. If marketers can’t see exactly who they are targeting, and understand the likely behaviours of these customers socially, they can’t trust the most personal advertising channel available today, and mobile will continue to be insignificant in the overall global ads picture.”

More information about Xtract’s social intelligence approach, on the frontiers of targeting in the mobile advertising market, can be found at www.xtract.com.

Press contact:
Emily McDaid (emily(at)hatch-pr.com | +44 7748 6333 55)

Helsinki, Finland - 24 June 2009 - Xtract’s VP of product management Sari Aapola will deliver a speech today at the Customer Retention Forum. In her talk, titled ‘Can Consumer 2.0 be a loyal customer? Understanding and utilising social intelligence in retention marketing,’ Sari will discuss how gaining social intelligence and knowing your customer better can become a key anti-churn strategy for mobile operators. The presentation will delve into capturing the power of communities and word-of-mouth in the battle against churn, a social problem faced by all telecom operators.

The presentation will discuss:
• Consumer 2.0 in the driver’s seat
• The power of communities and word-of-mouth
• What does Social Revenue reveal to you that ARPU does not?
• Churn is the symptom – what’s the disease, and is there a cure?

To schedule a one-to-one briefing with Sari after her talk, or via phone, or to obtain a copy of the presentation, please use the press contact details below.

About Customer Retention Forum
The conference, held from 24 - 25 June in Singapore’s Amara Hotel, will focus on minimising churn to maximise customer retention and profitability. Companies at the show include Vodafone Australia, Tibco, Bharti Airtel and Chunghwa Telecom.

This is the direct link to the event for more information: www.churnforum.com

Press contact
Emily McDaid
emily(at)hatch-pr.comout Xtract

Xtract’s Helsinki office is moving to Espoo. Our new office will be the tenth floor of the brand new Panorama Tower in Leppävaara district. Choosing a suitable location was not easy. We started the process already in March as our contract with the current landlord was getting close to its end. After hours of search and classification, we came up with 8 candidates. From those we picked 3 most suitable ones. After a series of tough negotiations with the providers the Panorama Tower was chosen as our new location.  Now we are preparing the seating which always raises questions and starting to pack our staff before holiday season. I look very much forward to working in Panorama Tower and getting things settled there.

Helsinki, Finland and London, England — 29 May 2009 - Xtract co-founder Jouko Ahvenainen will deliver the opening speech at London’s Mobile Web 2.0 Summit on 3rd June, at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower in Knightsbridge. In his presentation, titled “Mobile 2.0 Business - how to fund and monetise the new ecosystem,” Jouko will discuss how mobile and web operators can make money from social media and the 2.0 revolution, while steering clear of strategies that don’t work such as contextual advertising on social media platforms.

Jouko’s presentation will discuss:
- Delivering advertising over ‘hot’ media that users get involved with, including Wikipedia and Facebook, versus ‘cold’ media such as one-way broadcasting
- Social networkingis about people, not content. Social sites are places to make connections with others, and advertisers must understand the people behind the networks to best leverage the opportunities they provide
- The ‘active’ footprints that users leave behind in social media and how they can be analysed for improved, more individually relevant, marketing and advertising
- 2.0 monetisation and the sometimes-competing goal of maintaining user privacy

About Mobile Web 2.0 Summit
Speakers from companies including Xtract, Orange, Microsoft, Admob, Flirtomatic, Symbian and Telefonica will help lead the two-day conference, focusing on monetising the next generation of the mobile web, via a roundtable format.

About Xtract
Xtract (www.xtract.com) refines social interaction, behaviour and demographic data to create accurate 3D user profiles. These profiles for the first time utilise data as a dynamic tool in the day-to-day marketing for effective and intelligent targeting of campaigns and advertising. Xtract’s Social Links is an automated, self-learning solution capable of analysing billions of mobile transactions with easy to use and actionable tools for operators to define accurate target groups for their marketing campaigns.

Press contact
Emily McDaid
Hatch PR
emily(at)hatch-pr.com

I run into an interesting website the other day. It’s called “My Parents Just Joined Facebook”. The site is edited by Jeanne and Erika who love their parents dearly (their words). I laughed while reading the cuts of conversations between the young kids and their parents over Facebook. If I were a mother of a teenage kid I would for sure visit this site often hoping to find new conversations and opinions every time I visited it. But, I do have other good reasons. As a marketer, I want to understand the new generation of “digital born”. I often ask myself the question: Do I get them?

Jeanne and Erika are good examples of the customer 2.0. Born digital, the customer 2.0 can be very different from what we’re used with. Why? Because, in most of the cases, we are simply just not well prepared to start a dialog with them. Customer 2.0 is asking us to make their experience with our brand fun, social and engaging. They are asking us to participate in a conversation with them. They can and do express their opinions about our brand freely and with as sophisticated tools as we do. This way, contributing in building our brand’s image. So, ready or not, we have jumped on the same boat with our customers and started a dialog.

Holding their attention
Here comes the next question: If we’ve handled the dialog part well and they use our services today, does that mean they will use them tomorrow? Holding the attention of the customer 2.0 means we need to hold the attention of their friends and community too.

We must learn more about communities and try understand how social networks work. Take churn in telecoms as an example. It has been shown that churn is highly viral. The churn behaviour within one’s community affects the individual’s churn decision. Combining information about social networks with the more traditional information about customers such as demographics and behavioural data in churn prediction can maximise the total number of saved customers through loyalty campaigns.

“Can customer 2.0 be a loyal customer” is also the topic of Sari Aapola’s speech at the 9th Customer Retention Forum on June 23rd in Singapore.

Further resources about social network analytics and solutions can also be found at our website: www.xtract.com.

An Alpha is similar to a champion or an influencer. Nevertheless, in addition to having high influence and links in the community, the Alpha also has high probability to buy some of your products, acquire more customers or churn away. So, there are different kinds of Alphas and today I want to tell you how we find the Acquisition Alphas.

For Customer Acquisition, we use highly advanced analytics software that can process billions of data points. This powerful software is highly accurate. We find exactly those subscribers that have the highest potential to recruit new ones from another network. We take into account their influence level and number of off-net (out of your network) friends.

The illustration shows subscribers that have high or low influence and that might have off-net friends. Xtract identifies that the subscriber with the green circle has off-net friends (the ones in yellow) as well as high recruiting influence. This means that she would be the best target for your member-get-member campaign.

Finding the Alphas in your customer base is like finding gold in a goldmine. Remember! You need your Alphas and you need to treat them well.

“We are similar to oil refining business. There is crude oil but crude oil cannot be used as such. You need to refine it and then you can get useful products which you can use. And that’s what Xtract does. We take raw data from mobile or internet and we refine it so that marketers and advertisers can use it,” says Jouko Ahvenainen, founder of Xtract while speaking in front of a large audience at Marketing Communications Week in Helsinki.

The user data is becoming more and more important as media is becoming more interactive and as advertising is shifting from traditional media to online and mobile. One of the most valuable aspects of using user data for marketing is that we are able to visualise, group and measure customers’ social networks. This has created an opportunity for marketers to utilise word of mouth marketing which is the most powerful selling tool (Nielsen 2007). Mobile operators have the largest social network in the world today. Xtract can refine that rich customer data to create 3D user profiles based on social network, behaviour and demographic information. These profiles for the first time utilise data as a dynamic tool in day to day marketing for effective and intelligent targeting of advertising, viral campaigns and predictive churn management. History has shown that companies who market more and more efficiently are the ones that survive economic downturn. If that’s the case then, now is a good time to turn to a social marketing intelligence solution.

Social media is becoming more and more important — even more important than other media because it is closer to our human nature. Imagine yourself without any communication with people around you. And then, imagine making all your purchase decisions based on the adverts without an opportunity to ask questions and exchange opinions. How hard could that be? And yet, when we create the marketing messages and adverts we take into consideration everything else such as age, gender and behavior but, the impact of social interactions.

Taking into account social interactionss between people and the impact they have on your brand is very important especially on web and mobile social networks. When we create target groups for our online advertising, we need to utilise tools that take into account how and what people communicate to each other online and how that communication influences their decisions. Marketers have known for a long time that word of mouth has an enormous impact on purchase decision making - we could just not measure it. With web and mobile technologies, that is now possible.

If you’re interested to hear more on the topic and happen to visit CTIA Wireless in San Francisco, come and listen our Chief Strategy Officer, Jouko Ahvenainen speaking on September 9th. This is a special conference the day before CTIA Wireless IT opens doors called Mobile Web Strategies.”

Tomi Ahonen has really an interesting post in Communities Dominate Brands blog. I agree very much with him. Anyway, I would like to emphasize that these digital identities work also on profile levels, so that you don’t have to know individuals or their phone numbers, but you can know customer profiles and then link or predict to which profile each individual belongs to. And this we have implemented many times.