MWC 2009: mobile social network profiler Xtract reveals new product and a new deal with Flirtomatic

We spoke to Jouko Ahvenainen, Co-founder of Xtract & Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, about its news for MWC. At the top of its list was the release of the new version of Social Links, Xtracts flagship product.

Back in 2001, Xtract started as an advanced data analysis team. Since then the focus has changed to specialising in data analysis for social networks. Social Links combines this data with behavioral and demographic information from subscribers (all anonymous and private, I assure you) to create 3D profiles of the audience for a particular social network. The reason for this is to make marketing and advertising more effective, and to make tools for measuring data more effective. Social Links wants to find not only the people who are likely to buy a product, but also people who have high influence on other people.

Jouko explained it like this: “Mobile advertising at the moment is not really targeted at all. Most ad networks operating today are mainly looking for high numbers in ads sent. We don’t believe that is the solution to get mobile advertising really working. We realise mobile advertising is in very early stages. It’s more important to get interactive communication with the right ads to the right people”

So what’s new with Social Links 3.0? Nothing to do with the actual data analysis, really. The main update is that the UI has been updated and made customisable. This is has been implemented for the operator and marketing end, so that various types of information from the service can be read more quickly and easily.

Jouko also announced that Xtract is entering into a deal with London-based mobile social networker Flirtomatic, to provide more precise information for proper ad targeting.

What we think?

Jouko gave us an insight into how he thought mobile advertising would pan out in 2009. Because of the economic downturn, operators are trying to make their own advertising and customer-retention services more effective. The problem is that mobile advertising is, to a great extent, still in its infancy, and no one is sure what methods are actually effective. There is evidence that operators and advertisers alike want to see how they can make their campaigns really pay out, with more impact from less units. Xtract really believes that this year will see mobile analytics become more central to advertising than ever before.