Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
00:14:42 · Tim Rowe, Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:14:42] S3: No. We're leaving it. So I was looking at the T Mobile website earlier in in leading up to this, and that seems to be on the ad sales page. I can pull it up. But the [00:14:51] S1: app are they saying that they're going to get people to pull up the T Mobile app because they see a billboard that says, hey. It's T Mobile Tuesdays. Get a good deal. That sort of [00:14:59] S2: thing. [00:15:00] S3: You know what? I think I've fumbled this so well that we'll get lots of good answers in [00:15:03] S1: the Okay. Well, someone... Reader reader respond. Let us know what we mean. [00:15:08] S2: Let me take a step. [00:15:09] S3: Eric will say, [00:15:09] S2: behold a moment. Let... Let's give Tim a moment. Let let me let me take a stab at this. Go ahead. Before I do, when the deal was announced... And by the way, Aperium is not an investor in Vistar, unfortunately. Can't can't do the usual joke. [00:15:24] S1: I'm not either, which is remarkable.
00:15:24 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi, Tim Rowe
[00:15:24] S1: I'm not either, which is remarkable. [00:15:27] S2: I gave some some thoughts on this, and one of which was around this idea of using T Mobile data to help infuse out of home in an interesting way. I got some pushback from folks on X about this, basically saying like that was a big thesis behind some of the Verizon acquisition, some of the AOL acquisitions. And they were like, if you start getting into the nitty gritty of PII, this stuff is a little bit less easy to do in theory. On the app install and app engagement piece, T Mobile is not just a device seller, they're a carrier. So I think based on the fact that they're a carrier, again maybe Tim could check me on this, they then have unique insight into what is happening from a device engagement perspective. So perhaps somebody sees an ad on a screen somewhere out there in the wild, digital out of home at its finest. They take some kind of engagement that results in an app engagement on their phone. You then have an interesting measurement story. Yeah. Tim, am I wildly off? [00:16:31] S3: No. It it seems to be that is the case. App life cycle marketing, the messaging on the website is becoming part of the journey, reengage app owners, discover new possibilities. So it does seem to be just that.
00:16:42 · Ari Paparo
[00:16:42] S1: On Android devices, you can... The vendor Digital Turbine, which is a public company, has the ability to do one click installs when they work with carriers. So I assume T Mobile's part of that network, which means if you were on an Android, you could hit a QR code and get an app automatically without going through the App Store. So that might be part of this. I'm just speculating. I wanna talk about data, though. So if we go back in time to the early days of the iPhone and Android devices, there was a pretty big security loophole where you could sniff out people's IP address and MAC address and things like that and use it for telemetry and analytics. And there were a bunch of startups that did this. They'd say, like, we could track exactly how many people saw your billboard because we... Basically, we passively look at their Wi Fi signals and are able to tell. And that loophole was closed pretty tightly by Android and Apple. So as a result, if T Mobile wanted to do something where they recorded users' behavior versus the billboards, it would certainly have to be opt in in some way. Certainly on an Apple device, it would have to be. So I would love more feedback on that. If it's possible on Android for a carrier to just track the user individually versus their location without explicit consent. Maybe it is possible for the carrier. They can triangulate by the cell towers. Right? But that's maybe not precise enough for billboard attribution. One thing I do think they can do is non individualized traffic patterns. Like, how many gross T Mobile visitors were in the store? I think that's very possible to do without any privacy issues and with quite a bit of data. Tim, did what I just say make sense or am I off on some of that?
00:18:29 · Tim Rowe, Ari Paparo
[00:18:29] S3: It does. And I I think that that would be an exciting future state. Some of really what exists today is a little bit more rudimentary than that. So getting to a place where we're incorporating some of the live data and and and maybe maybe it's synthesized audiences and maybe we're looking at it scaled out, but I do think that that could be an interesting future state. It's not really how the industry operates today, more on historical data, patterns, things like that, but that would be exciting. [00:18:59] S1: Yeah. I mean, certainly, it's a better approach than an independent out of home company renting this data from data brokers. Yes. You know, even if T Mobile only has a small amount of market share in the overall telecom market, having a pure signal on that percentage of users and then extrapolating is a much better approach than what's currently out there. [00:19:16] S3: Absolutely. And, again, from the source of truth of T Mobile, the digital out of home DSP, I I think that that's such a big piece of the story is just the an absence of trust because of the fragmentation. So it's it's multivariate. What is digital out of home? You've got publicly traded publishers who we know, love, and trust, and that's lumped into the same, you know, inventory pool as maybe an independent operator who's got a 100 screens in a in a region that isn't really relevant. So I think normalizing and standardizing that's gonna be a a big piece of this.
00:19:16 · Tim Rowe, Ari Paparo
[00:19:16] S3: Absolutely. And, again, from the source of truth of T Mobile, the digital out of home DSP, I I think that that's such a big piece of the story is just the an absence of trust because of the fragmentation. So it's it's multivariate. What is digital out of home? You've got publicly traded publishers who we know, love, and trust, and that's lumped into the same, you know, inventory pool as maybe an independent operator who's got a 100 screens in a in a region that isn't really relevant. So I think normalizing and standardizing that's gonna be a a big piece of this. [00:19:48] S1: Yeah. And I think you're begging the next question, which is the history of telecoms and ad tech isn't good. So, you know, the haters came out immediately being like, oh, you know, that's a summary of what they said. Yeah. I think the question is, is T Mobile in this to win this, or is this another sort of dilettante approach to ad tech? [00:20:11] S3: Think that they're in it to win it. I think that they see a lot of ways to to make money out of the deal. Maybe this is the the hot take. I think that the digital out of home advertising piece may be the least interesting piece of this for T Mobile, but maybe, maybe too soon to say that. So I think the T Mobile wins thinking about other telco in ad tech, AT&T and DIRECTV. DIRECTV just announced DIRECTV remote, which someone's gotta think about the SEO. That's their new digital out of home platform. But if you search DIRECTV remote, obviously, what are the... No one thought through that. At least I don't think so.
00:20:11 · Tim Rowe, Ari Paparo
[00:20:11] S3: Think that they're in it to win it. I think that they see a lot of ways to to make money out of the deal. Maybe this is the the hot take. I think that the digital out of home advertising piece may be the least interesting piece of this for T Mobile, but maybe, maybe too soon to say that. So I think the T Mobile wins thinking about other telco in ad tech, AT&T and DIRECTV. DIRECTV just announced DIRECTV remote, which someone's gotta think about the SEO. That's their new digital out of home platform. But if you search DIRECTV remote, obviously, what are the... No one thought through that. At least I don't think so. [00:20:49] S1: Wait. What is DirecTV remote? [00:20:51] S3: So it's their digital out of home network. It's mainly mainly venue entertainment based. They just announced this, a couple days ago. DirecTV announcing remote footprint in hotels, planes, small businesses. So, you know, DIRECTV obviously was pretty tied in with AT&T for for the last decade. AT&T got out of that business and simultaneous to that DIRECTV lanes all the way in on digital out of home. So I think that's interesting. Verizon and Catalina have had a long standing partnership. Could that mean something in the in store retail media space? Maybe, but I don't think we've seen anything yet from from anyone in a in meaningful way. So [00:21:31] S1: I mean, it makes sense as the same sort of synergy. Go ahead, Eric.