MarTech Interview With Mike Peralta, VP and GM of T-Mobile Advertising Solutions

Mike Peralta, VP and GM of T-Mobile Advertising Solutions chats about the benefits of mobility data and how it can benefit marketing and advertising ROI in this quick catch-up with MarTech Series:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Mike, tell us about your role at T-Mobile Advertising Solutions as VP and GM. We’d also love to hear about your journey before this!

In my current role, I’m focused on building and growing the company’s advertising technology business, which is driven by the strength of T-Mobile’s mobility data. Mobility data gives marketers a comprehensive view of which apps people choose to download and how long they engage with those apps – or whether they do at all. That said, it does not include any data on specific activities within apps. These valuable insights can power a number of advertising use cases.

I’ve been with the company since the formal launch of our ad tech unit, only about a year ago, and in that time we’ve accomplished and grown an impressive amount. Bit by bit, we’re evolving into a comprehensive end-to-end ad platform, complete with owned and operated media, exclusive activation partners, and a new analytics solution built around deep app insights.

I’ve spent more than two decades immersed in the advertising space, and mobile marketing and apps have always been a passion of mine. I moved deeply into this realm when I joined Criteo as EVP back in 2018, and it’s been a tremendously rewarding journey. The future of marketing is going to require an app-first strategy, and I’m pleased to have joined one of the companies that’s going to play a major role in defining this future and its capabilities.

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A few of the top marketing lessons you’ve come away with through all this experience and time in the industry?

One thing I’ve been struck by is how over-reliant we allowed ourselves to become on standard user identifiers that didn’t necessarily tell us as much about consumers as we thought. For the past 20 years, we’ve been so obsessed with addressability that we’ve sometimes missed the forest for the trees. After all, even if marketers can accurately reach standard user IDs, that might not represent their true audience. What’s really important is the capability to define and understand the audiences that are really going to move the needle for your business. To do that, the industry needs to think about data a little differently than we typically have.

When it comes to B2B and B2C marketing today, how are you seeing the industry shift as businesses and end users move back to a pre-Covid pace?

The pandemic taught us a lot about how marketing really needs to operate. As people shifted to home offices and remote work, and personal and professional lives intertwined more deeply than ever, we realized something we should have always known: No matter what type of brand we represent, we need to treat people as holistic individuals, not just marketing to a single behavior or demographic detail.

Even as certain elements of life pivot back, this truth will remain. It’s one of the reasons I’m quite enthusiastic about app-first marketing strategies. Mobile app usage provides the truest, most multi-faceted glimpse into who we are and what we’re interested in, both in our personal and professional lives, and it’s entirely possible for marketers to tap into those insights while also respecting consumers’ privacy concerns.

In all of this, how are you now seeing mobility data play a key role in driving marketing interests? Can you talk about a few brands who use this to drive business ROI?

Mobility data, in the form of app ownership and engagement data, provides highly accurate insight into real user behavior and intent – two areas that have become increasingly difficult to understand due to ongoing industry changes and the loss of audience identifiers. And importantly, it’s a privacy-compliant data source. We don’t use precise location data, call records or other sensitive data. And yet the insights that can be derived from app engagement data alone are incredibly valuable in understanding user behavior and needs, enabling marketers to tailor media plans and creative accordingly.

Mobility data is being put to use across a wide variety of industries, from quick-serve restaurants to gaming to finance. We recently worked with a popular subscription video on demand service (SVOD) that wanted to reach potential new subscribers. Using app ownership attributes (powered by mobility data) to address audiences who would most likely be in the consideration funnel for the SVOD service, we were able to help drive measurable ROI and thousands of new subscribers. Over the course of the resulting campaign, our app targeting tactics beat the cost-per-site-view campaign goal by over 56%.

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In what ways do you feel B2B and B2C marketing will change in the near-future as newer data experiences shape up the buying journeys of tomorrow?

Emerging data sources, including app ownership and engagement data, will help marketers be more strategic when it comes to where and how they interact with their customers and prospects. Importantly, it’s also going to help brands understand who their true audiences are better than they have in the past.

To date, there’s been an interesting gap between how brands leverage data to understand their audiences and how they then use data to find those audiences online and market to them. Many have tapped into traditional market research techniques to build audience personas, but those traditional techniques produce very static snapshots that are almost instantly outdated. Then, they’d look to target those personas with relatively cookie-cutter media buys.

Mobility data can solve for limitations on both sides of the equation. It can be a source of relevant intelligence into the real-world behaviors and intent of your real-world audience, and it can help you understand when and how to best reach them across channels.

Some last thoughts, takeaways, before we wrap up?

I’d leave you with the optimism I’m feeling about the future of advertising these days. We read a lot today about how new privacy regulations and the loss of certain identifiers are going to turn back the clock on personalized advertising. But the simple fact is that there are rich, undertapped sources of highly insightful data available to advertisers, from both a strategic planning and a media execution perspective, that can be harnessed in a way that respects user privacy. The brands that are paying attention and pivoting their data strategies accordingly aren’t going to miss a beat. In fact, they’re going to accelerate their success and deepen their customer relationships.