Flash Networks: "Content recommendations" will be Launched in June

David Murphy, MobileMarketing, interviewed Merav Bahat (pictured), head of marketing at Flash Networks, about the optimization vendor's future product "content recommendations" (or behavioral advertising) which is based on DPI analysis of  subscriber's traffic going through Flash' gateway.

"So we have these user sessions and traffic going through the gateway, so we know the context. We know, for example, that Jane is a sports fan, so we can recommend stuff to her that she might be interested in .. [we may push] messaging or interstitials, but we have something else - a toolbar we overlay on a web page. We can put this on any web page, and this toolbar contains the offers".

The history of behavioral advertising shows that operators should be careful with the way they present it to their subscribers, to avoid privacy concerns, and offer that through an opt-in process. For example, it is not the best idea to show that the information could be associated with the subscriber identity (Jane, above). See the recent example from Marriott - here.

Nevertheless, some operators already launched similar services(?) - Smart (here), Romtelecom (here) and Orange France (here).

  

"The toolbar solution with the content recommendations is not live yet, but we have had one live deployment for a year in Russia [MTS?? - here] of another service, which has been very successful, and there are more in the pipeline. This is a Quota Management service where mobile users can check their account status on the phone .. It tells you the status of your account, warns you when you are about to use up your allocated data plan, so you can upgrade to a more relevant plan that better meets your needs. It puts the user in control .. [content recommendations] will launch this June. We are in the process of negotiating the revenue share with a number of operators. The feedback we have had so far has been very encouraging".

See "Recommended Reading" - here.