Three Hutchison UK becomes zeotap’s 9th telecom data partner to join their platform across the globe. From now on, agencies and advertisers in the UK will be able to activate Three UK’s ID-verified socio-demographic data across their campaigns, which has proven to be up to 6x more accurate than market benchmarks. Additionally, Three UK’s data will also be adding into zeotap’s matching capabilities for their recently launched identity solution Connect. Clients will be able to deterministically match offline to online identifiers, thanks to the GDPR-compliant and patented technology zeotap has in place, solving the long-lasting data connectivity problem for advertisers who have heavily invested in their 1st party data.
November 7, 2018 – The Drum writes:
Three has made its first major move into programmatic, launching a proposition that will allow advertisers to target customers based on anonymised data from the telco.
It’s a far cry from Three’s previous experiment, and subsequent U-turn, around network-level adblocking, but it’s a launch with the same goal at heart: to make mobile ads better, and open up new revenue streams.
Dubbed ‘Relevant Advertising’, the product has been 18 months in the making by the firm’s 40-strong digital team, which is spearheaded by Three’s director of advertising Charlie McGee.
“It’s been a lengthy process. Doing this in the year GDPR was implemented was quite choice timing but it allowed us to make sure we got it exactly right,” McGee told The Drum.
The fully-compliant, ID-based tool will not only let brands find new ways to target audiences in a post-cookie mobile landscape, but it will also let them mine the data of around 1 million consumers who have opted in via Three’s Wuntu loyalty app. The process is part of the app on-boarding process and the only incentive is a better mobile ad experience.
For now, brands can target these customers based on their age and gender, as well as their approximate work location and home location.
A ‘eureka moment’
Three decided to make the leap into programmatic after gleaning insight from brands, customers and all corners of the media supply chain. McGee said his team was presented with a “reasonably bleak” picture about the state of the industry, with big advertisers conceding they struggled to target audiences or extract value from their media buys and publishers facing off the likes of Facebook.
“It created a eureka moment for us,” he explained. “The one thing that underlines all of this is data, and the opportunity for us as a mobile telco is that we have a lot of high-quality data, if we get it right we can create real value for the ad ecosystem.”
Relevant Advertising was developed in partnership with mobile data firm Zeotap, which already works with nine major telecoms firms around the world.
While Three is the first out of the gate with this technology in the UK, Zeotap’s senior vice-president for EMEA Oliver Kanders told The Drum that it’s in talks with other UK operators to provide similar services.
For Kanders, there’s also the potential from a CRM perspective. Three and Zeotap, along with other data partners, have also launched a product called ‘Connect’ which is helping brands connect their first-party CRM data to online identifiers to give customers an even more personalised experience.
For its part, Three has conducted its own “friendly tests” around its new proposition but Kanders said that Zeotap’s own benchmarked data showed brands that had plugged into this type of build got up to a 500% boost in engagement. Revenue rates for publisher’s websites and apps, meanwhile, have noted up to 200% more conversions.
Red Bull, Mercedes-Benz and a “giant FMCG” firm are among the brands experimenting with Zeotap’s tech.
Changing tack
Three’s decision to monetise its data comes two-and-a-half years after the giant unveiled plans to launch a network-level adblocking solution in partnership with the now-defunct Shine Technologies.
The aim of the brand-led tool was to filter ads that it and the industry deemed acceptable in order to spotlight the all-too-often implicit “value exchange” associated with ad-supported content.
Eventually the plan was abandoned. While this was before McGee’s time he said the business had “come a long way since then and changed our stance to suit the needs of the market”.
“If we rewind two-and-a-half years, adblocking was a thing that was more front-and-centre with consumers but we feel there’s a greater acceptance that the ad industry fuels big parts of the industry from a consumer perspective.”
Now, the next step is to scale the Relevant Advertising proposition to woo brands.
Some 1 million of Three’s 10 million customers are currently opted-in. It has a goal to double its subscribers to 20 million by 2021 and it hopes the opt-ins will follow.
To get permission from these new customers, McGee said the option to opt-in would be extended to the app Three customers use to manage their bill payments, MyThree.
The launch from the mobile network follows on from rival O2 saying it would no longer deliver mobile ads via Weve – the joint venture originally set up between O2, EE and Vodafone to challenge Apple, Google and Facebook’s monopoly on mobile.
About Three UK
Three is a communications company focused on connecting people to people, people to things and things to things.
Today, Three has more than 10 million customers who use over 3.5 times more mobile data than the industry average. Our network covers over 99% of the UK population.
Three has the UK’s leading 5G spectrum portfolio holding more than the rest of the industry combined. Three is the only operator able to meet the IMT 2020 standard for full 5G services.
Three was voted the Best Network for Data at the Mobile Choice Consumer Awards, as well as Best Network for Roaming by uSwitch, and the Best High Street Retailer at the Mobile Industry Awards. We have a Net Promoter Score of +13, the best of any UK network, alongside +18 score for Employee Net Promoter Score, reflecting a high level of employee engagement.
Three UK is part of the CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd group of companies which has mobile operations in 11 countries. We employ more than 4,000 people across our offices in Maidenhead, Glasgow and Reading and our 300 retail stores.
About zeotap
zeotap unites the world’s most valuable data to fuel growth. We enable our clients to achieve better results through precision at scale and intelligent technology. The first company to win by now 9 major telecom operators around the world as data partners, zeotap has since become the leader in sourcing, refining and distributing high-quality data from large enterprises.
zeotap provides data to the digital advertising ecosystem for better mobile targeting, insights & patented data connectivity. Stringent quality audits, sophisticated methodologies and state-of-the-art technology ensure our data has proven up to six times more accurate than current market benchmarks, solving a fundamental quality problem in the industry. Up to now, roughly 50 of the world’s top 100 brands are using zeotap’s data.
We have earned our partners’ trust through a strict focus on regulatory compliance, privacy-by-design and information security and in total 8 enterprise grade certifications and many more pro-active measures that go beyond necessary standards in the field. We have built our company on an ethical company vision and are applying GDPR law around the world – not just in Europe.
Founded in Berlin in September 2014, zeotap today has offices in New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Milan, Bengaluru and Mumbai and counts all major media agencies and many global brands as its clients.
