TechBytes with Alexandre Schont, VP Strategic Partnerships, TabMo

Alexandre Schont
VP Strategic Partnerships, TabMo

More than 80% of the mobile ads that TabMo receives on its DSP come from mobile applications, rather than (mobile) browsers. In this context, we spoke to Alexandre Schont, VP Strategic Partnerships, TabMo, to understand precision advertising in mobile and the technologies that come together in delivering these campaigns.

Tell us about your role at TabMo and the team/technology you handle.

TabMo is a mobile-first demand-side platform (DSP) that is available as a self-service model. It focuses on creativity and powering drive to store mobile advertising campaigns. We are a team of 80 mobile AdTech experts, with six offices across Europe and the US. Our engineering team, which developed our DSP product, Hawk, accounts for 40% of our workforce, which puts us at the forefront in terms of innovation for our agency and brand customers. My role is to establish valuable business partnerships that will be beneficial to our clients; the focus is new media (supply side platforms, or SSPs) and data providers (first party/CRM and third party), as well as analytics, measurement and viewability companies.

What are the core tenets of your partnership with zeotap?

Along with the main providers of mobile data in the industry, zeotap is part of the Hawk DSP data marketplace. It provides our clients with one-stop-shop access to the tools that enable them to target audience on mobile devices. The combination of telco and application usage data, provided by zeotap, along with proprietary automated creative modules, real-time footfall measurement and mobile-specific private marketplaces (PMPs) — all of which are available within Hawk — is a key driver for any marketer that wants to achieve strong results in their mobile media buys.

How do anonymized, ID-verified mobile/telco data deliver relevant audience segmentation to marketing teams?

Anomymized telco data delivers on two key elements. Thanks to the huge number of users in major advertising markets it offers unprecedented scale; and, because the data is fully ID-verified, behind every ID sits a potential consumer (i.e. the data is ‘real’ rather than modeled).

Therefore, using our mobile-first DSP, Hawk, and its unique creative capabilities, marketers now have a huge opportunity to activate quality mobile data at scale for their mobile campaigns.

Would you define ‘transparency’ in location data optimization? How does TabMo deliver committed transparency?

TabMo operates four levels of transparency in location data optimization:

• Buyers need to be able to set up geo-targeting for their campaigns on a self-service basis.
• Location precision is key, so buyers require access to the best ad exchanges that provide GPS coordinates of users.
• Our GDPR-compliant technology only delivers ads to users that have consented to receive geo-targeted ads.
• The results of drive-to-store campaigns are available in TabMo’s user interface, which offers reporting and analytics so that brands can deliver and optimize against footfall KPIs.

What is ‘precision advertising’ in mobile? What technologies come together in delivering precision advertising campaigns?

More than 80% of the mobile ads we receive on our DSP come from mobile applications, rather than (mobile) browsers. As we enter the post-cookie era (mobile apps do not not use cookies), precision advertising in mobile is about giving marketers access to media and data suppliers that are device-ID, not cookie, based. TabMo’s  technology stack has been built from the ground up to focus on mobile IDs, along with creative mobile standards such as IAB MRAID, and mobile GPS location.

What is your roadmap to build readily adaptable precision AdTech platforms? How do you leverage/work with audience data platforms?

We constantly integrate new partners with our Hawk data marketplace, and we will keep investing in that strategy, as we grow our client base.

In the GDPR era, what change have you made to audience data strategy? How does the post-GDPR impact the ecosystem?

The available data volumes on our DSP has only dropped very slightly since GDPR was introduced. This is due to the fact that we focus on mobile in-app ads, and not cookie-based ads.

How do you work with AI/Machine Learning in making your ad personalization platform more effective?

At TabMo, AI is not a buzzword; it is an integral part of our operations that sees us develop machine learning algorithms, built for mobile advertising buyers, and available in an ‘as-a-service’ (SaaS) format on our DSP.

Our data science team works constantly to improve our algorithms in order to optimize against any KPI. We are seeing algorithm-personalization as a growing trend, and we plan to partner with expert companies in that field.

What are the opportunities and risks you foresee in the way location data is shaping for 2020-2025? How do you prepare for these disruptions?

Drive-to-store advertising is very exciting for TabMo at the minute because it offers the ability to go further than footfall measurement; our retail clients can create an ad that encourages consumers to physically visit a store, and then measure in real-time the uplift in footfall traffic from the campaign. It seems likely that the IAB will at some point define standards around footfall measurement (the maximum radius around the store for example) and because we have already have extensive experience in this area, we will be among the first programmatic players to comply.

Thanks for chatting with us, Alexandre.

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