T-Mobile Is Quietly Paving the Way for its Ad-Tech Unit

The self-styled “un-carrier” T-Mobile is entering ad tech just as rival carriers appear to be exiting the media space. Ad-tech industry veteran Mike Peralta was recently appointed as vp of T-Mobile Marketing Solutions, a division of the telco formed of its 2019 purchase of PushSpring. He joins from Future where he served as global CRO for the publisher, having formerly served in senior roles at companies including AOL, Criteo and MediaMath. T-Mobile Marketing Solutions can be considered a peer of AT&T’s Xandr plus Verizon’s (soon to be divested) media offering with the telco positioning its ad-tech solutions similar to how it markets itself to consumers. “Right now, advertising is a little bit broken, we've created a new marketing solutions group to help fix that,” Peralta told Adweek, explaining how its offering is based on its pool of consented, first-party data. In March, it was reported that T-Mobile updated its privacy policy to, starting on April 26, automatically share subscribers’ data with third-party companies for the purpose of serving those users targeted ads. Albeit the carrier highlights how its subscribers are at liberty to opt-out of the scheme. T-Mobile Marketing Solutions sees opportunity as the industry prepares for the demise of historic ad-tech tools such as third-party cookies as well as mobile device identifiers (MAIDs) such as Apple’s IDFA. At the center of these ambitions is the Magenta Marketing Platform which enables brands to hone their media targeting using MAIDs derived from data generated by the T-Mobile cellular network. Advertisers using the Magenta Marketing Platform can access the data, and audience targeting capabilities of up to 35 of Marketing Solutions’ partners to plan, implement and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. “We've got our own product engineering team that have built a lot of the mobile data functionality,” explained Peralta. Although he declined to name some of the 35-plus third-party companies his outfit partners with when quizzed by Adweek, he did highlight how T-Mobile Marketing Solutions wants to be as “media agnostic” where possible. T-Mobile is doubling down on its mobile marketing offering at a time that contrasts it with AT&T and Verizon with the former having sought to sell Xandr at the end of 2020 and the latter in the process of offloading Verizon Media to Apollo Global Management. AT&T and Verizon both reportedly cooled on the potential for pursuing their earlier media ambitions after leadership at the respective telcos expressed concerns that subscribers may have concerns over privacy, especially as laws such as CCPA became more commonplace in the U.S. “I think there’s probably a couple of main differences between us, Verizon and Xandr,” Peralta told Adweek. “Other than some T-Mobile owned and operated properties, we haven’t other media assets [compared to the other two telcos which spent billions on media assets].” In an attempt to highlight the “un-carriers” privacy credentials, he highlighted another point of differentiation between T-Mobile and its peers. “We don't use or share customers' precise location data. Right, I know Verizon and Xandr have done that, but we don't … we just don't feel that we need that today, and you know, we want to really be focused on privacy as well.” How Social Listening Speaks to Brands and Improves Consumer Targeting