How in-House Advertising Teams Can Make the Most Telco Insights

By Charlie Smith, MD Europe, Blis

It’s no secret that in-housing is a big thing for brands when it comes to their advertising operations. Figures from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) suggest that 66% of brands already have in-house agencies, and a further 21% are actively considering one. The shift to in-housing is no small feat but the brands that have made the leap have proven that it can be incredibly effective. It’s clear that the momentum behind in-housing is only growing.

The rise of telco insights

As this shift takes place, in-house teams are looking to increase their agility and enhance their ability to explore innovations. They do so in a fast-changing programmatic advertising landscape where the decline of traditional advertising signals, such as tracking cookies, is driving innovation and emboldening marketers to try new approaches and improve the accuracy and performance of their campaigns.

In this environment, aggregated, anonymised mobile device data is becoming a crucial asset for brands, offering insights into areas such as geo-location and crowd movement to boost campaign impact. This offers brands the unique opportunity to better understand their customers and reach audiences via omnichannel strategies

The extent of telco data is impressive. As Tom Guy, Managing Director of Etc. at the BT Group, explains: “Our audience insights are created from 25 billion anonymised and aggregated data points processed daily on our platform. These data points are a combination of real-world and online activities. Using advanced data science techniques, we create insights that help brands better understand and reach audiences delivering maximum impact and spend efficiency.

Integrating data on a single platform

As in-house teams look to the exciting opportunities brought by these actionable insights, the most successful will also evolve their underlying technology stack to handle large volumes of diverse data types. Here, selecting from the large number of solutions available on the market and investing in effective technologies for data integration will be key requirements, and will demand that in-house agencies can collaborate with ease and maximise their omnichannel solutions.

Fortunately, advances in technology integration mean that in-house teams are in a better place than ever to integrate billions of data points into their advertising efforts. The key shift is that leading omnichannel advertising platforms are increasingly integrating mobile device insights directly into their offerings. Brands are already used to relying on these platforms to maintain a unified message across multiple channels and deliver a consistent brand experience. Now, they can also use the platforms to plan, activate, and measure campaigns that are centred on mobile-powered anonymised and aggregated location and movement trends.

The benefits of the platform approach to data integration

The benefits of this approach are clear. From a planning perspective, in-house teams can gain a better understanding of target audiences predicting where consumers are most likely to engage.

As Guy puts it: Mobile data provides consistent and effective insights from over one third of the UK adult population, making it unsurprising that telco data is increasingly used for planning, activating, and measuring campaigns. From a measurement perspective, these insights enable deeper analysis of campaign performance and in-flight optimisation across different channels and consumer touchpoints Additionally due to the stringent regulations governing telecommunications, data is inherently secure, and is anonymised and aggregated, ensuring that individual user identities are protected.

Critically, by leveraging advertising platforms to access this data, brands can unlock the benefits of rich insights without seeing their data costs spiral out of control, having to integrate and manage complex new technologies, or needing to increase their headcount. The platform approach is one ideally suited to the in-house environment – a service-based consumption model that reduces complexity, delivers economies of scale, and enables advertising teams to get on with their core responsibilities.

Finally, given that in-house teams often work with agencies in certain areas of marketing outreach, such as above-the-line activities, a unified platform provides significant benefits in terms of joining up these different teams. The best data-powered programmatic platforms enable in-house teams to share and activate the same data and audiences to enable more cohesive and ultimately impactful activity.

“By leveraging mobile-powered location and movement insights, in-house teams are seeing improvements across the planning, activation and measurement of their campaigns,” adds Guy.

Three considerations for success

Of course, not all advertising platforms are equal. When looking to leverage data through such platforms, in-house teams should consider the following:

  1. Cost. Does the provider charge additional fees for access to specific datasets? If yes, brands could quickly see their costs shoot up or be forced to restrict their use of these sets
  2. Coverage. How many different datasets are included in the scope provided through the platform?
  3. Data enrichment. Can the datasets provided be augmented with insights, such as location-based? Adding a spatial dimension further enhances campaign impact and measurement.

With any in-house advertising planning models, the platform approach to integrating and utilising data is critical. Key to success will be finding a platform with the coverage required to ensure accurate campaign planning and the cost points needed for the business case to stack up.