HeyStaks reveals its vision for future of advertising

Search analytics startup HeyStaks Technologies has unveiled the next stage of its business, with a new advertising tool that will allow its customers to find new revenue streams through monetising customer data.

The company, which has its background in collaborative search, will offer “intentional advertising” to mobile operators, who are searching for new ways to make money.

With services such as WhatsApp eating into the revenues of mobile operators, they’re on the lookout for something that will help arrest the slide.

“They need to find a way to monetise the data,” explained chief executive Maurice Coyle.

The next phase of the business will see customers offered an advertising platform based on what their clients intend to do and search for online. That will allow firms to advertise or direct offers to customers that are more targeted and suitable for their needs at the time, and could be more successful for the mobile operators in raising revenue.

The company uses proprietary profiling and algorithms to help mobile operators build profiles of subscriber interests, which can help advertisers reach the customers more likely to become to yield revenue. The algorithims use people’s daily search activities to deliver value-added services, knowing who people are, what they like and what they’re doing right now.

This new “intent” marketing is already in use by large companies such as Google, but HeyStaks’ technology will open it up to mobile operators and allow them to monetise their own data in a way that best suits their business.

Business development head Lorcan Jordan said the company’s biggest rival in the sector was the “inertia of mobile networks”. Traditional revenues are “imploding” he said, with many firms turning to cost reduction rather than finding new revenue streams to survive.

Mr Coyle said there had already been good response from the industry for the new offering. HeyStaks is understood to already be in talks with major mobile operators regarding the new service.

The company, which was spun out from UCD’s Clarity Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, is headquartered in NovaUCD. The firm has raised €1.8 million in funding, and has also opened a subsidiary in the US as it seeks to develop its business internationally.