Vodafone using Xiam to track your mobile behaviour
30th of September 2007 by conor
Xiam Technologies announced last week that Vodafone Ireland and Orange UK have signed up to use their MPOS (My Personal Offers System) technology to serve ads on their Mobile Internet portals.
It looks like this is the next logical progression in context sensitive advertising where mobile actually has a leg-up on web advertisers by knowing your history in addition to your current activity. They claim to have:
- One-to-one Targeting Technology
- Advanced Profiling Techniques which targets advertising to specific market segments and individuals
- Ad targeting using Demographic, Contextual, and Behavioural profiling
- Real-Time Intelligent Recommendations
Your mobile operator knows pretty much everything about your history and activity including your location. Of course it is pitched as a way of providing you with accurate information but it'll be interesting to see if this technology is used on a subscriber opt-in basis or whether you suddenly find yourself shocked by spookily accurate mobile advertising.
I'm a privacy sceptic; everything I do on the web or the phone is based on the assumption that I have none. In fact I like getting targeted accurate advertising instead the generic rubbish that Yahoo Mail generally tries to push on me. I'll happily swap my attention data for good discounts on products and services I like. But I'm not sure that is a mainstream position. How do you feel about ads based on knowing lots about you?
Comment posted by technokitten
at 9/30/2007 2:23:55 PM
Looks great in principle, and should work a treat. However, the relevance and context will all be around what the advertiser is looking for rather than what the customer is looking for. So it just means that those loan, insurance and credit card ads are better targeted rather than directing stuff to me that I am actually interested in. And that boils down to where the money is unfortunately.
There are also plenty folks around who are paranoid about their personal privacy. And on top of that, when you are paying good money to a company for a service, you don't expect to be tracked (without express permission) so that they can make even *more* money from you. A balance needs to be found and I'm very interested to see if they manage to find the balance or whether the dollar signs will win.
Keep us posted!