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Using visual and text features for direct marketing on multimedia messaging services domain

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Abstract

Traditionally, direct marketing companies have relied on pre-testing to select the best offers to send to their audience. Companies systematically dispatch the offers under consideration to a limited sample of potential buyers, rank them with respect to their performance and, based on this ranking, decide which offers to send to the wider population. Though this pre-testing process is simple and widely used, recently the industry has been under increased pressure to further optimize learning, in particular when facing severe time and learning space constraints. The main contribution of the present work is to demonstrate that direct marketing firms can exploit the information on visual content to optimize the learning phase. This paper proposes a two-phase learning strategy based on a cascade of regression methods that takes advantage of the visual and text features to improve and accelerate the learning process. Experiments in the domain of a commercial Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) show the effectiveness of the proposed methods and a significant improvement over traditional learning techniques. The proposed approach can be used in any multimedia direct marketing domain in which offers comprise both a visual and text component.

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Notes

  1. Click-through rate, or CTR, is a common way of measuring success for an advertising campaign targeted to mobile devices. For the scope of our paper it can be measured as the ratio between the number of users who clicked a specific offer over the total number of users that were exposed to that offer.

  2. For mobile operators, sending commercial messages to their customers is very cost-effective: operators can easily reach millions of potential buyers at little cost, making the profit potential of these advertising-related services very high. In addition, in the case of mobile phone operators market saturation and fierce competition [23] have turned value added services (VAS), like the ones these commercial messages advertise, into significant revenue source and in some cases the only opportunity for revenue growth. Because these services are now central to profitability, mobile phone operators and independent production companies are becoming increasingly creative in generating and proposing new services and offers. The result is a rapidly growing set of possible services available.

  3. In the following section we explain in more detail what commercial mobile multimedia messages are and present several examples.

  4. Given the speed of offer production in our application, even with daily contact (e.g., daily messages sent to mobile phone users), the number of offers to be tested grows at a faster pace than the rate at which a traditional pre-testing system is able to learn (while at the same time keeping enough potential customers for optimized delivery).

  5. The real targeting system could reach millions of users, but large segments of users would have to receive the same message. Only a maximum of 20 messages could be sent daily.

  6. By definition, a holistic cue is one that is processed over the entire human visual field and does not require attention to analyze local features [29].

  7. By using the Bayesian classifier one can infer the presence of faces in an image by the skin appearance in the pixel domain; likewise, an outdoor context can be inferred by sky and/or vegetation appearance [21]. We used these three types of visual information in our system as proposed by [4] and used the percentage of pixels belonging to each one of these appearance classes as determined by the Bayesian classifier to describe each image. The disadvantage of this method is that it required hand-labeling of a training set.

  8. Taking into account the overall simulation settings, 30 offers per day is an arrival rate comparable to the mean arrival rate observed in the real system.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Daniele Ravì for helping in the implementation of the simulation studies. The authors would also like to thank Neodata Group for giving access to the mobile messaging dataset, and for helping in the implementation and testing of the proposed approach.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, Viale A. Doria 6, Catania, 95125, Italy

    Sebastiano Battiato, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Giovanni Giuffrida & Giuseppe Tribulato

  2. Imperial College Business School, Imperial College London, South Kensington, Campus, London, SW7 2AZ, UK

    Catarina Sismeiro

Authors
  1. Sebastiano Battiato
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  2. Giovanni Maria Farinella
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  3. Giovanni Giuffrida
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  4. Catarina Sismeiro
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  5. Giuseppe Tribulato
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Correspondence to Sebastiano Battiato.

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Battiato, S., Farinella, G.M., Giuffrida, G. et al. Using visual and text features for direct marketing on multimedia messaging services domain. Multimed Tools Appl 42, 5–30 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-008-0250-z

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