What Partner-Sponsored Ad Campaigns Would Work for Sprint's Boost?

Boost announced last week that it will begin its first-ever partner-sponsored advertising campaign targeted at its customers. Mobile web users will see ads for the new Keanu Reeves movie “Street Kings” or for the 2009 Acura TSX.

At first glance, these connections make sense; Boost markets exclusively to a segment of youth-oriented, urban and multicultural consumers. So of course this particular segment would be interested in things… well, urban and youth. Street Kings, about an LAPD cop who must question his loyalties, fits that description. So does the Acura TSX – a favorite among street racing enthusiasts. But these consumers have interests outside this one categorization and Boost is smart to look for less obvious partnerships there.

I was curious about the other interests of Boost’s customer base so I checked their online behavior during February using Behavior Match. As a reminder, Behavior Match indexes all the sites on the web for a certain segment (in this case: Boost customers) against the general Internet population. Any index over 100 means that Boost customers are more likely to visit that site than the average Internet user.

From this exercise I found a few other companies and websites Boost might want to think about partnering with (or competing against in one instance). What do you think?

• Starwoodhotels.com (2.9X more likely to visit)
  • Boost’s index was 25% greater than the nearest carrier
• Nike.com (2.8X more likely to visit)
  • Sneakers=urban youth, so this isn’t that shocking. But besides T-Mobile (275) no other carrier was within 50 index points
• Imikimi.com (9.7X more likely to visit)
  • Imikimi.com provides free MySpace layouts & graphics so again, it fits with the urban youth segment. But Boost customers are almost 10X more likely to visit imikimi.com than the average user! And the index was more than twice that of any other carrier
• Virginmobileusa.com (5.7X more likely to visit)
  • There’s a lot of cross-shopping among carriers, and Virgin Mobile stood out from the pack. Almost twice as many Boost customers visit Virgin’s site as they do the next leading competitive website, TracFone.com. Obviously Boost wouldn’t be partnering with VMU in this case, but Boost may want to keep this in mind when considering competitive positioning

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