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 once 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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  1. Search Engine Optimization Journal

    Interesting. We can understand how a Myspace layout site and Nike.com would be on this list but Starwood Hotels — Urban/Multicultural Youth? It seems quite random?

  2. Jeff

    @Search Engine Op

    my guess would be spring break trips?

    what time period was behavior match run for?

  3. Elaine

    Hi Jeff,

    The data was run for the month of February. Spring Breakers certainly could influence behavior over this period, but I’m not sure that is consistent with what we see across the other carrier & provider sites.
    T-Mobile’s index for starwoodhotels.com over the

  4. Elaine

    Sorry got cut off. Here are the indices for the other carriers & providers.
    – TMobile: 162
    – AT&T: 151
    – Sprint: 225
    – Verizon: 178
    – Virgin: 105

    it doesn’t appear that other youth-oriented wireless brands are seeing the same sort of lift. I didn’t look into whether there was a particular promotion or offer that would appeal to Boost customers specifically during this time, but another hypothesis could be that something about one of the Starwood chain’s brands is resonating with this segment.

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