Enpocket brings predictive analytics to the advertising party
Rating: so far so good
By Annie Turner
Enpocket 6.1 is described by the company as first mobile advertising platform that can predict and influence consumer behaviour. In other words, operators are able to send apt SMS messages to their customers based on what they know about their previous activity. So if I’ve searched on pilates via mobile, then an SMS with instructions for a pilates exercise would be considered personal and appropriate, for instance. Previously, the problem has been that operators have not been able to mine the data they have on their customers.
Apparently the first operator (unnamed but Tier 1, US and Enpocket has a big relationship with Sprint) to deploy Enpocket 6.1 realised a 400% increase in purchase rates among a trial group of millions of consumers, while opt out rates fell by 30% However, Enpocket wasn’t able to tell us what the dropout rate was, so it’s hard to gauge what this means and what it’s compared with.
Likewise with the 400% increase in download transactions doesn’t tell us much, because we don’t know what the baseline is and anyhow, stuff like ringtones are often bought from a third party previously.
Now it might be that a significant portion of customers does want information about what is available pushed to them because we all know that search and discovery on mobile is much more difficult than on the web. Certainly that’s the theory and this trial would seem to bear it out, although it’s early days yet.
I’m a bit edgy about this is because if you say the words ‘mobile advertising’ to anyone outside the know, the word that comes back is ‘spam’ (as I found out while queuing for just under an hour to get my press pass and talking to my peers). And mobile advertising is about much, much more than sending unsolicited text messages to the punters – in particular, it will become inextricably entwined with search, which is pull, not push.
Enpocket says that the operator is only sending out one campaign a week per subscriber, which seems sensible – nothing will get people’s backs up like being bombarded with the stuff, but I’m concerned that not everyone will have the sense to show such restraint.
I’m also concerned that people are likely to take umbrage that their personal activities (looking at a pilates site, say) are being used, without their express permission, to try to sell them stuff. This seems to be something of a legal grey area that I plan to investigate in the next issue of
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