Xtract » Advertising

White paper on consumer benefits and privacy protection

Janne A — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:37:26 +0000

We have a brand new white paper online on the topic Brands need People and People need Brands: How social analytics benefit consumers while protecting their privacy.

Using new social tools, consumers can decide, what information they want to reveal to the advertisers and what to keep private. For marketers and advertisers, this is a unique opportunity. They can concentrate on promoting their products and services to those who have already shown interest to them.

In the white paper, we analyze ways of making marketing relevant and useful for the end users. This can be done by targeting the Alpha users, the most influential persons in a social network.

We list six topics to consider when planning social analytics:

Provide simple opt-out
Inform users on data usage
Protect customer information
Respect industry guidelines
Let users control their privacy
Advertise to youth with care

The white paper also presents, how mobile operators can use Xtract Social Links to find effectively the targets for marketing campaigns. The Product Marketing Module for Xtract Social Links can bring this power to targeting specific products effectively to the influential users.

Did you find the white paper useful? Was there something missing? All feedback is welcome!

Download the white paper here.

Xtract in MIT Technology Review cover story: The Business of Social Networks

Jouko — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:02:49 +0000

The latest Technology Review has an interesting article about social network business and how social networks still have a lot of challenges to monetize their communities. New models, but also new solutions, are needed. And a key issue is to get advertising work properly in the social media.

Technology Review summarizes the new technologies to get advertising work in social media: “Startups that help advertisers and marketers better target the users of social-networking sites are fashionable investments for venture capitalists in North America and Europe. Such startups hope to sell advertisers detailed information about individual social networkers. They include the brand-new 33Across (which we profile in our list of 10 notable startups, which begins on page 50) and the more established Finnish company Xtract, which counts Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Blyk among its customers and has begun selling its software to advertising agencies and online marketers and publishers. ”

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, commented in the Millenium Prize event that our solution is the most complete solution he has seen for solving “the multi-billion dollar problem.” It is nice to see that we have really found a way to build solutions to monetize digital communities.

White paper on Social Advertising Intelligence

Janne A — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:11:15 +0000

We have a new white paper online on the topic Social Advertising Intelligence: How to reach consumers with active advertising.

Customers are increasingly moving from mass broadcast media to social media, making current advertising processes less effective than before. Until now, the tools for planning and buying online and mobile advertising have been lacking.

In the white paper, we analyze the four main challenges that advertisers face with online and mobile advertising, that is:

Measuring the full impact of the ads
Lack of tools
Ads cannot be bought in a unified way
Lack of information on online users

The white paper also presents, how Xtract Social Advertising Intelligence can be used to target campaigns effectively, solving some of the challenges with multi-channel advertising.

Did you find the white paper useful? Was there something missing? All feedback is welcome!

No surprises from Google

Jouko — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:56:05 +0000

Google has published their mobile and social network platform plans during the last week. Not so many surprises.

OpenSocial is quite natural next move from a company that wants to collect a lot of data. Social networking platform is a valuable source of behavior and social network data. And it is much more than have one or two social sites. The main concept with mobile has similar objectives. Who will dominate mobile usage and social data in the future. And finally who will prevail in digital media marketing.

But is it so simple that one company can prevail all relevant data in the future. Is it even possible that one company can collect all data when there will be more and more data all the time everywhere? I believe they can collect a lot of data. But on the other hand I believe that the services and data will be much more de-centralized in the future.

Intelligence comes nearer users and user devices. Smart analytics, customer profiling, and social intelligence come also to terminals (PC or mobile). The best solution to challenge Google is not to try to collect more data, but to have more intelligence to utilize the data. And this kind of analytics and advertising solutions help media and mobile companies to challenge Google.

Pay attention

Janne S — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:18:00 +0000

In the early days of Web 1.0, micropayments were going to arrive any day now. Most web pages were written out of sheer enthusiasm, and micropayments looked like a viable economic model of the web. Instead of getting the content for free, you would have paid a small amount, say one cent, per page view. That would not have hit anybody’s wallet too hard, yet the most favorite web authors would have got a substantial compensation.

Apart from Paypal and similar services becoming close, micropayments are still absent. Or are they? Many pages give a nagging feeling of a non-free lunch. Of course there is sometimes the time wasted from family, work, and even self, but also the pages themselves contain elements that eat up your resources: They take screen real estate, sometimes irritate, or even try to hijack your browser. But in general, they are after your processing time, or attention.

Ads are the micropayment. For reasons that would be interesting to understand, the currency of web microcommerce has not become euros or dollars, but attention of the users. Mostly commercial content providers conspired with ad brokers, and later the vital infrastructure providers such as Google have become ad brokers themselves.

This is both good and bad. The good is that free, innovative services proliferate, the bad is that most of the action takes place under the glowing sun of attention catchers trying to provide you the latest commercial information (hmm… or should I just write “banners”?).

How analytics is related to this is obvious. Because the ads are presented in the context of other information, that other information can be analyzed to fit with the ad, so that the ad has at least some hope to be relevant to the viewer. Even better, the viewers are sometimes quite intimately “known” to the service, so that the ads can be personalized, making them even more relevant.

At its best, then, the commercial information becomes so relevant that it does not bother the user any more, but quite the contrary, the user wants to see it. The attentional price paid by the user, analogous to a micropayment, has become zero, or even negative. Getting into such a situation would require intense competition between service providers, users willing to expose their personal information, and advanced analytics. How far can we go in this direction? Or should we? I don’t know, but some of the current “Web 2.0″ sites are a good start.

Social networks and communities – A fundamental part of Internet

Jouko — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 21:10:00 +0000

There has been an active discussion whether social communities are a fad. It was said that even Steve Ballmer thinks they are only a fad. Engagement marketing gurus, like Alan Moore, think communities are something fundamental for human beings. Here is my prediction: Internet communities as we know them today are a fad, but social networks and communities will be a fundamental part of all Internet and mobile services and marketing. I just flew from London to San Francisco and had time to read some articles and really thought this question. Communities like Facebook and MySpace are now very popular, but I see they are only the first step and still quite artificial social networking between people. Advertisers have seen the value already today, and we at Xtract also offer tools for find the right people and communities for each advertising campaign. Individual community services comes and disappears but the phenomenon itself will live. But this is only a starting point. People have many other services they use daily in the Internet. They live with their mobiles 24/7. It cannot be so that your social activities and at the same time community marketing intelligence is limited only to certain web sites. Social network perception will be a fundamental part of everything people develop for the Internet and mobile in near future. And community marketing intelligence will live inside all services and platforms in the future to offer better usability and more relevant and effective advertising.