CTIA: Globys launches contextual marketing for mobile

More than any other customer-facing service provider, wireless operators have reams of information about their customers. Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) may know where you go on the Web and what you might buy while there, but wireless operators know where you live, where you work and probably how you get between the two. Simply put, they have all sorts of contextual information that could be used to create tailored marketing campaigns. Globys asks why not put it to use?

Globys will launch its new Mobile Occasions platform at CTIA Wireless next week. It might sound like a greeting card line, but Mobile Occasions is actually the former VeriSign (NASDAQ:VRSN) billing analytics division’s most sophisticated contextual marketing engine to date. It combines billing information combed from operator’s back office systems with demographic and personal information, social network analysis and even psychographic data to create a platform that can not only target the most receptive customers to a carrier’s marketing campaigns, but also determine the most opportune times to target them, said Lara Albert, senior director of global marketing for Globys.

“What is the best offer for an individual at specific moment or a specific occasion?” Albert asks. “That’s what we can determine for operators.” And once those calculations are made, a simple SMS of MMS message could be all that it takes to grow a carrier’s incremental revenue base, she said.

Most mobile marketing campaigns fly blind, making the same offer to millions of users based on one on just a few bits of data. It makes no sense to offer a customer a vehicle navigation service if they don’t own a car. Mobile Occassions can not only determine if a customer has a car, it can tell how they use it. Based on cell-registration information and calling patterns, Globys can determine if a customer is a regular commuter or a road warrior in a different city every week. Based on those profiles, a carrier could choose to push an offer for vehicle navigation to the road warrior and a traffic congestion application to the commuter. Not only can it determine the appropriate app, it can time the best moment for an offer, Albert said. A customer with a long commute home might be much more receptive to a traffic tracking application offer right before he leaves the company parking lot, rather than after he arrives home, Albert said.

Albert was quick to point out that Globys uses predicted location not GPS tracking in its analytics. Wary of Big Brother perceptions, the Globys system won’t be sending out offers for caskets every time a customer enters a funeral home. Mobile Occassions analyzes patterns of behavior, which it uses to predict future behavior. Needless to say, even with privacy safeguards in place, any such marketing campaign in the US would most likely be opt-in, Albert said.

Initially, Globys is targeting the platform at internal operator campaigns, providing a marketing outlet for the customer data they already have, Albert said. But eventually, operators might let third-parties onto the platform to help them craft their own individualized marketing campaigns utilizing information that they simply can’t collect, she said. It’s one way for operators to bring value back to their networks as they’re flooded with content from over-the-top providers, she said. That step my take a while, though.

“The carriers are in a position where they have a lot of information they could use for this, but they’ve been slow to show they can leverage it for their own purposes, much less third parties,” Albert said.