Advertisers looking for fast evidence of their Black Friday ad campaigns’ success may want to leverage what mobile networks can see about their customers’ behavior.

T-Mobile Advertising Solutions’ App Insights program uses data captured about its mobile phone subscribers’ actual app ownership and engagement to create targetable audience segments.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mike Peralta, VP& GM, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, says that could speed-up time to insight.

Signals from apps

In App Insights, collected data allows T-Mobile to profile groups of users based on installed and used apps, creating corresponding user segments.

It came out of beta after a year in testing, having changed customer terms in April 2021 to automatically share subscribers’ anonymized data into the scheme.

According to T-Mobile’s website:

“Mobility Data refers to a comprehensive view of the apps a user has chosen to download to their smart device, as well as how often and for how long they open and engage with those apps …

“Note: T-Mobile does not use subscriber location data and does not track individual activity within apps.”

The scheme does not work on iOS users’ data and users of both iOS and Android can opt out of data collection through a downloadable app.

Instant impact

“Right away, you could see the impact of how folks are using your app, how folks are downloading your app,” Peralta says.

“We’ve got the shopping season coming up here in Q4.

“When you’re doing Black Friday and you do a TV commercial, we could see automatically, ‘hey, here’s the increased usage, people are spending 20, 30, 40% more time in your app’.

“We could create a direct correlation between that and the TV.”

Privacy buy-in

Outside of the ad-tech space, T-Mobile’s scheme has prompted privacy concerns.

But T-Mobile’s Peralta says the scheme is privacy-friendly.

“We got the buy-in all the way up through our senior leadership team around the appropriate use of our data,” he says.

“We’re using T-Mobile first-party network data, right? It’s not cookies.

“As a consumer, I’m in my phone all the time. So we look at that as a much better indicator of who you are and  your intent.

“We take that data and we’re creating audiences around it, particularly around app ownership and app usage, and have had great success enabling that with different brands and advertisers.”

You are watching preview coverage of Beet Retreat Santa Monica 2022, presented by Ampersand, MiQ, Nielsen, PubMatic, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, and The Trade Desk. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page