Why Telco Data is the Hidden Giant of Advertising

In a recent interview with Lindsay Rowntree at ExchangeWire, Alex Petrie and Peter Hanlon reveal the hidden potential telco data has for advertisers and how Skyrise uniquely apply it.

Why can Telco data be so valuable to advertisers?

Alex: It’s not just because of the death of the cookie, not just because a lack of ID’s, you start to understand that really rather than trying to target the individual, you can target the behaviour, you can target the cohort, you can target the congregation of an audience in terms of how they live, how they move.

And what better way to do that than something that continuous, always one, huge sample size?

But I think we’re still somewhat in a transition from what was the old world to a newer world which is really talking aggregate, talking about your audience in terms of who they are, where they are, what they do.

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What are we talking about when we’re talking about telco data? Where is it coming from? How do we make it data compliant? What are the things that advertisers need to understand about why it's so valuable in today’s world?

It’s a huge sample size and it reflects real world behaviour so with some consolidation in the telco industry, 3 or 4 main players, you’ve got virtually 25% of the population, and we hardly ever put our phones down now so it's a reflection of everything we do in life, coupled with the fact that it knows where you are, then that gives us geography and it gives us context and we turn that into sentiment.

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What makes Telco data unique versus other data sets that are out there that are predominantly being used by advertisers?

It’s not entirely limited to telco, but there are data sets, and you might say that as well as telco there's debit/credit card might be a good example, the key thing is that you’ve got data sets that exist at scale, and are in continuous use, that’s the key thing. As opposed to, lets just say cookies for example, which is an individual piece of data it’s quite short-lived, it’s quite a momentary thing, it lacks context, it lacks behaviour, and by behaviour I mean it’s not were you there at that particular moment, am I there to be targeted? What it’s saying is the pattern of behaviour that comes from that data, talks about time and geography. And of course content and behaviour.

So what’s the types of things that you might do, that an audience might do. If I’m looking for an audience for a key brand: where does it live, when does it do it, not the individual, not the fact that you were there once, not that you bought once, or that you bought once before.

Let’s take Out of Home as a good example, where and when might you find an audience? It might be that you’re going to gear more towards commuters and of course, that’s got urban vs rural, it might have regional share around it.

But it might be more socialising, drink type thing and think about patterns of travel to and from. These are key behaviours that don’t come from a point in time, point in space data point, they come from a continuous view, of large volumes, large numbers, of people brought together to explain the behaviour rather than ‘I’m going to target you because I think I want to talk to you’ which has got it’s own set of problems with it.

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How can the data be applicable to current systems that are in place and how can you overlay with other data and running international campaigns, how it applies running across different markets, there’s some uniqueness there versus other datasets that advertisers are using?

There are, we’re in the process of expanding the business out internationally. The one thing I would say is that our relationship with telco here in the UK, and we announced a significant partnership with Virgin Media O2 this year, there is a little bit of legacy, partly because Pete and I used to work for them, but that’s not actually the key to how we’ve done what we’ve done.

There’s also attitudes towards this data in the UK, like in France for instance, they are still a place where they just don’t think they want to do this type of thing, that’s the telco position. So there is applicability, but actually the key to this is the way we work with data in Skyrise, and we love data that comes from handsets because we believe that they express real behaviours and express real things.

That’s not to say that we don’t like GPS, that’s not to say that we don’t like card transaction data, but the principle is the same. We’re taking something that starts with an individual, has the PII removed and again it's really about insight and patterns that come from that.

So for example, when you’re talking about Out of Home, we would be equally at home interpreting signals from card behaviour because a card transaction for example compared to a telco web event, well a web event might say that you’ve looked at Uber Eats, well a card transaction would tell you that.

What you want to know is where did it happen, it’s that wider connection, so card transactions say you might have bought Uber but a pattern of purchases will tell you what’s the type of thing that you’re interested in, what might you do.

But also the location of those purchases, vendors, what expresses patterns of movement, patterns of behaviour.

So in terms of international, it absolutely plays in, we love telco data. We have a global partnership with VMO2 which extends into Spain with Movistar, and across Latin America for example, so it does build from there. And again, it’s all about interpreting and creating high quality analysis that can inform a strategy and come from those data signals and the way we do it.

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What would you say to someone who wants to get involved with using telco in their campaign, what is the first key thing to consider? And you can’t say call Skyrise.

Alex: Call Skyrise, you see I just did say it! Perhaps the best answer is to say what we would do, in terms of how we respond, perhaps we’re no different to anyone else, but when we receive a brief the first thing that we will do is we’ll build out that audience based on hard quality signals. Those audiences might be based on your brand, a lot of them are around competitors: I want to conquest my market. It might be about matching a persona, or it might be very behavioural-based. The key step is that we will build out and prove the audience at the point of the initial conversation so maybe it does involve calling Skyrise! But that would be the key part.

Pete: I think that’s a part that’s often overlooked, being somebody new to the market, the competitor insight that we can give brands maybe is under-valued here. Because coming from an insight background in other industries, being able to see which of your competitors your customers are visiting is just gold. 

Lindsay: That’s definitely gold. That’s very powerful.

Watch the full interview here