Gigafone and Xtract combine targeting and tracking for better ad delivery

Gigafone and Xtract have joined forces to create a comprehensive, targeted mobile advertising platform for operators, publishers, agencies and advertisers. They will be combining the Gigafone mobile ad platform with Xtracts Social Links. Social links uses behaviour and demographic data to identify social structures within the customer base and find the most influential people for marketers to target.

Gigafone’s targeted marketing service allows consumers to choose the type of ads they want to receive in return for incentives such as discount vouchers or free mobile minutes. When combined with Social Links info, it will provide marketers with a better idea of who, how and when their audience is viewing their ads. So, marketers can improve ad targeting and better measure returns on investment.

From the release:

Jouko Ahvenainen, vice president and co-founder of Xtract, said: “We wanted a partner that offered a solution that overcomes the last mile delivery problem of mobile marketing. Mobile marketing simply falls short at the last mile without the ability to capture user preferences and profiles in an engaging way. Gigafone’s full service mobile marketing solution fulfils this need and its established links in the mobile advertising ecosystem places us in a great position to take this proposition to market.”

Gregory Khaldey, President of Gigafone commented: “Xtract’s powerful offering greatly enhances our mobile marketing solution. Operators and marketers have been demanding clear metrics on advertising campaigns along with the ability to ‘add social’ to the mix for some time now. Our partnership with Xtract delivers on this and will provide real benefits to mobile operators and advertisers who are now able to evaluate return on investment and optimise future campaigns.”

What we think?

The entire point of opt-in advertising is that it’s delivering relevant content to the end-user. Generating relevancy is a tricky proposal - gathering accurate info on your users is difficult at best. The last thing users want is to be pestered with ads that don’t interest them. Xtract are really big on collecting information while maintaining user privacy and anonymity. We haven’t  tried and tested Gigafone’s mobile ad platform (but I want to). I’ll be interested to see how this one works out.