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After buying out-of-home platform Vistar Media and geography-based, privacy-focused ad targeting firm Blis earlier this year, T-Mobile added new functions and brought in IPG Mediabrands in its latest step to connect brands with audiences.
At this morning’s IAB NewFronts presentation at Moonlight Studios in Manhattan, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions (T-Ads) announced its partnership with IPG’s media holding company that would give IPG Media brands clients and agencies access to the first-party data that T-Ads has compiled and distributes through Vistar, Blis, and other sources. T-Ads’ first-party data is now available within the Vistar platform, with Blis integration coming soon, while its Vistar-developed retail media smart screens will be available to brands looking for their own in-store networks.
T-Ads said its glut of solutions, along with T-Mobile’s mobile data, provides an overview of consumer behavior that can help brands with campaigns and omnichannel ad buys.
“We’re always seeking partners that can help our clients unlock new value through innovation, scale, and smart use of data,” said Justin Wroe, U.S. CEO of IPG Mediabrands. “This partnership with T-Mobile better positions us to not only deliver performance today, but to plan for what the advertising experience will look like tomorrow.”
That data also steers ad buyers into the right corners of what’s rapidly becoming a sprawling map of T-Mobile inventory. At last year’s NewFronts, T-Mobile launched a retail media network that added to its reserve of rideshare screens and mobile offerings through its T-Life app and T-Mobile Tuesdays promotions.
JP Colaco, chief T-Ads officer for T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, breaks down T-Mobile’s presence into 130 million total customers, 40 million T-Life app users, and a 10,000-store and 35,000-screen media retail network across its T-Mobile and Metro brands. T-Ads and Vistar are offering that same hardware, software, signage, and ad sales to other retailers looking to launch their own retail media networks.
In addition, the company has introduced “near-store” activation of digital out-of-home messaging within a mile of its T-Mobile and Metro locations as an enhancement. That tweak increased sales of Android devices by 52% as part of a recent Google campaign.
With the infrastructure in place, Colaco and his team are now trying to connect brands and consumers through those magenta channels.
“Seventy percent of the ads that you see are irrelevant to you for consumers, so how do we make the world better for consumers?” Colaco asked. “With the fragmentation of the industry and the difficulty of getting the right ad to the right person at the right time, the outcomes for advertisers are harder and harder, and we feel that pain ourselves. How do we fix that?”
Graphing the future
A big portion of the answer lies in T-Mobile’s new acquisitions. Blis uses cookie-free technology to track transactions and other mobile activity based solely on location and no other identifying characteristics to give T-Mobile and its brands a sense of what customers in certain geographies are doing and when. Vistar Media, meanwhile, has more than a million connected screens around the world in elevators, bus stations, and shopping malls that target and measure consumer activity in ways that T-Mobile believes will be particularly attractive to IPG Mediabrands clients.
“We have a global platform, and many brands are looking to reach a global audience, so that’s one of the most powerful things that we can offer folks across the board,” said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media. “Most of these agencies are also global entities, so it allows us to support them everywhere they are.”
While focused on out-of-home advertising for more than 13 years, Provenzano noted that Vistar broke into retail media networks with T-Mobile and saw how all its data could function under one roof. If data was telling T-Mobile that consumers in a certain location favored the McDonald’s app over a Burger King app, it could use that data to build an app graph to inform Vistar’s store and outdoor screens and sell add inventory in that area accordingly.
When T-Mobile ran a T-Mobile Tuesdays promotion with WingStop this spring, Colaco said the supporting data helped the chain get 55% more redemption of its promotion within the first 12 hours than it had initially estimated. Colaco sees the combination of IPG Mediabrands’ clientele and T-Mobile’s use of Blis, Vistar Media, and its own user data and app graphs as steps toward similar success for other brands.
“One of the challenges with digital out-of-home is that it hasn’t had that addressability, that ability to know who’s actually in front of the screen,” he said. “In the past, it was about, ‘Did my ad actually play, and did it reach a certain number of people?’ Now, it can be targeted, reach, and drive outcomes for marketers, and then we can actually measure those outcomes.”
