T-Mobile’s Banking On a New AdTech Platform. Bad Idea.

For most companies, all press isn’t good press. Just ask T-Mobile, the third-largest cell service provider in the US. The Washington-based employer of approximately 75,000 is back in the news — and not for launching a new innovation, improving cell service, or giving back to the community; instead, T-Mobile has elected to prioritize advertisers over customers, “selling its customers’ app download data and web browsing history to advertisers.” And this is after multiple setbacks and a failed attempt at buying back customer data from hackers. If you were to ask Gizmodo’s Shoshana Wodinsky, this “programmatic sales pitch” is “yet another example of T-Mobile being The Worst.” Allison Johnson, however, sees it differently, writing in The Verge: “With companies like Google and Apple allowing people to opt out of tracking more easily, marketers are looking for different ways to peek into your online habits. Wireless carriers have eagerly jumped in to provide that information, and T-Mobile is only the latest to do so.” While Wodinsky uses her opportunity to take some swings at T-Mobile, and Johnson provides solutions (opt-out options) for T-Mobile customers, I have some advice for you on how your organization can prevent similar missteps and the resulting media onslaught.

Embracing Third-Party Data When Others are Looking Inward

Nine in 10 consumers say they’re “concerned” or “very concerned” about the privacy of their data online, and just as many disengage with any company that breaks their trust. Meanwhile, one recent study found that only 11% of website visitors accept tracking cookies; more than three quarters of users ignore the cookies pop-up banner completely — despite its adverse effect on user experience. This is why, for years now, browsers, apps and iPhones have been rejecting tracking cookies — and 83% of brands are still dreading the impending cookiepocalypse, when Google gets rid of third-party cookies completely. 

Consumers are more sophisticated and demanding than ever; they’re tired of traditional ads and are choosing only to support brands that deliver engaging, intimate experiences and speak to their unique needs, goals and values. Without tracking, companies fear they’ll lose critical customer data: the key to empathizing with and personalizing content for each and every customer. 

Is this why T-Mobile is risking (further) alienating customers to appeal more to advertisers? According to James Hercher in Ad Exchanger:

Rather than trying to create a media empire with an ad business alongside (à la Verizon or AT&T), he said, T-Mobile is coming at what could be a multibillion-dollar ad revenue opportunity squarely from a data perspective… But therein lies one of its major challenges: As a carrier, T-Mobile must tread extremely carefully when using subscriber data.

Indeed, while Verizon and AT&T are still using third-party data, they’re not basing an entirely new advertising program on it — and they’re not third in market share. T-Mobile could be differentiating itself by rejecting the very data selling/sharing that keeps consumers up at night; instead, the mobile subsidiary of German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom AG is doubling down.

Before I delve more deeply into why this is a mistake, and what T-Mobile (and you) should be doing, here’s a breakdown of exactly what T-Mobile is offering its advertising partners — and, inevitably, their partners' customers.

About T-Mobile’s App Insights Adtech Product

On the surface, T-Mobile’s new programmatic ad platform looks like a goldmine: “The program allows third-party marketers [like you] to buy T-Mobile customer data and centers around a key piece of information that it has unique access to: what apps you use.” 

Recently renamed T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, the self-proclaimed uncarrier’s ad division hypes this adtech with its “Apps speak louder than words” tagline and the proclamation that “app insights” (all lowercase) are “the strongest indicator of consumer intent.” As it turns out, McDonalds probably agrees (though its customers may not).

McDonald’s was one of T-Mobile’s beta partners for App Insights; the world’s leading fast food chain used the platform to run app install retention research campaigns using its own app as well as the Burger King and Popeye’s apps to determine whether mobile users were only installing the app temporarily to access an app-exclusive offering — or if the app was truly succeeding at retaining McDonald's customers. (Of course, no one asked McDonald’s customers whether this type of tracking would prohibit future app use or downloads.)

According to The Verge, T-Mobile has described App Insights as the way for brands to “transform” customer data into “actionable insights,” leveraging “app usage, growth, and retention” to compare activity among competitors and versus industry averages.

Specifically, App Insights would allow you to track, segment and target T-Mobile wireless subscribers based on the apps they install and use, as well as the WiFi networks they join and their browsing history and behaviors. 

T-Mobile uses its app-based ad platform — in beta for the past year — to anonymize and aggregate customer data and develop ad targeting personas. Brands that buy into App Insights can use these personas to target their ads using the T-Mobile DSP (but no outside buying platform can use T-Mobile carrier data). Fortunately, at least for consumers (and T-Mobile's reputation), advertisers cannot use App Insights to:

• Buy the data of a specific customer
• Pull (controversial) geolocation data — T-Mobile does not incorporate location data into the platform; it does, however, allow the use of location data if advertisers work with a third-party vendor to capture it
• Pull iOS data, including from opted-in IDFAs — T-Mobile doesn’t target any Apple users via its DSP

This will: 

• Improve T-Mobile’s chances of maneuvering around the wrath of the all-powerful Apple empire
• Allow T-Mobile to tell its wireless customers that the company’s not selling their personal data and brands won’t be following their every move

For consumers not ‘buying’ the ad team’s attempts to assuage them, T-Mobile offers an Android and iOS app, the oddly named Magenta Marketing Platform Choices, which allows users to track the companies tracking them — and opt out. Or, “if you don’t want to, you know, download a T-Mobile app to opt out of T-Mobile app tracking,” you can use AppChoices from YourAdChoices, “now with ‘do not sell’ enhancements.”

But is that enough? Can T-Mobile successfully “navigate the perilous line between programmatic and privacy?”

The Future for T-Mobile, Digital Advertising, Disfranchised Groups, and Your Business

According to Albert Thompson, the digital managing director for award-winning digital agency Walter Isaacson, one of the App Insights beta partners, perhaps the most exciting feature of T-Mobile’s ad solution is the ability to create LGBTQIA+ audience segments. With this data, he said, brands can better target by identity in not only their online promotional campaigns but also in their employee recruitment efforts.

While this could help advertising, marketing, sales and CX professionals deliver more personalized, empathic customer experiences, as well as aid HR departments and third-party recruiters in diversifying talent pools and improving equity and inclusion in the workplace, being targeted by advertisers for their gender, sex or sexuality is almost certainly not something the majority of the LGBTQIA+ community wants. In fact, nine in 10 respondents to a recent Twitter poll of 250-plus LGBTQIA+ people said they’d opt out of any targeting if they had the choice. 

As Kit O’Connell, digital editor of The Texas Observer, tells me:

Advertising companies need to grapple with the fact that the information they gather and sell today could be used to target families with trans young people or to track teachers who educate their students about acceptance of others, based on something as simple as their web search history. Online marketers need to be having serious conversations about the ethics of how they handle every piece of data that could ever be used against a vulnerable population. Not collecting that data has to be an option. Even if you are ethically using that information now, what happens in the future after a data breach, or if your company goes out of business?

These are questions that, unfortunately, can’t be answered to the satisfaction of most consumers — and for members of “vulnerable communities” the seriousness is dire, particularly “considering the frequency with which even Fortune 500 companies with huge cybersecurity budgets have their info successfully leaked, hacked or subpoenaed.”

I asked Andy Izenson, vice president of the National Lawyers Guild (NYC) and senior legal director at Chosen Family Law, how he’d feel knowing a company was targeting them for identifying as LGBTQIA+. Here’s what he had to say:

In an increasingly hostile political environment for LGBTQ populations, any company purporting to have our needs in mind needs to prioritize privacy above all. Anything that creates data identifying and separating LGBTQ individuals from the wider population puts us at risk and prioritizes profit over our safety.

For New York City attorney, journalist and columnist John Teufel, meanwhile, there’s perhaps less fear and more disgust and resentment. “I’m not so much afraid of how my data would be used as I am afraid that I’m just helping some terrible company seem woke,” he says. “I don’t want to be tracked anymore than I already am, and a corporation doing this feels a little like pinkwashing.” 

Kitty Stryker, on the other hand, was more even tempered. “I feel like there are ways to demonstrate a need for diversity other than tracking,” the author and digital content creator told me. “Honestly, it depends a lot on how much faith I have in the brand.”

So, the question, then, is: How do we, ‘the corporations,” nurture that faith in our target audiences? The answer is simple: By being authentic, or true our roots, vision and values. 

In case you missed it: the 2020s consumer is shrewd; often juggling multiple platforms and devices at one time; and more likely than ever to shop (and promote) a brand because it ‘stands for something’ equally meaningful to them.

T-Mobile, for instance, could’ve: 

• Separated itself from its peers by taking a stand — as ‘the little guy’ (versus the Twin Towers of Verizon and AT&T) — against invasive customer tracking and privacy infringements
• Surveyed its customers on why they chose T-Mobile, and what T-Mobile could change to improve the customer experience — and not sales
• Surveyed past customers on why they left for a competitor
• Invested in developing a brand partnership platform that wouldn’t rely on third-party cookies for tracking consumer behavior
• Reallocated the adtech development dollars toward strengthening and expanding broadband, hiring a director of DEI, or improving its own customer experience processes and digital marketing/advertising messaging

Why? Because “this is the same company that [already] opted its customers into a targeted ad program that none of them consented to” — and it makes a lot more sense to counteract the bad press than to create more.

Indeed, unlike an organization that derives all its revenue from advertising, T-Mobile is, first and foremost, a wireless business with paid subscribers. And at a time when privacy rights and consumer protection are at the forefront of advertising discourse, testing the waters is risky at best. 

But you know that, don’t you? Instead of joining App Insights from T-Mobile, you can gather your own customer data — and better customer data — while saving lots of money. Here’s how.

How to Enhance Your Digital Advertising, Marketing, Sales and CX with First- and Zero-Party Data (You Still Can)

Instead of resisting shifting regulations and industry standards, or trying to circumvent them with a DSP like T-Mobile’s, the successful company of the future will embrace the current data paradigm by future proofing — cleaning up historical data obtained through third parties and shifting ongoing strategy to focus exclusively on using customer data derived from direct interactions between company and user. 

Fortunately, first- and zero-party data is the data your customers want you to have, as well as the data that can best inform the messages, moments, products and services you provide. 

Just ask Adobe: “Understanding the benefits of first-party data versus third-party cookies is critical for organizations to provide superior customer experiences, [particularly] as support for third-party cookies in browsers declines.”

To succeed into 2030 and beyond, you must become proficient at precision marketing, acquiring, retaining and developing long-lasting relationships with customers — without third-party cookies.

To get started:

• Collect first- and zero-party data now, using giveaways like ebooks and discounts for lead generation, as well as surveys and interactive experiences to expand and enhance customer data for better personalization
• Obtain authentication as soon as possible, across sources
• Redesign your website to focus on user experience and collecting first- and zero-party data
• Leverage existing and new, authenticated first- and zero-party data to build audience lists for direct communications as well as retargeting across ad platforms
• Reduce and then eliminate the use of all cross-app site tracking
• Acquire new customers through lookalike audiences
• Develop stronger relationships with high-value customers by using first- and zero-party data to deliver more targeted, individualized experiences
• Learn from and support organizations for and led by LGBTQIA+ people or people from other historically disfranchised groups — if your core values and business goals align with providing your products or services to individuals from these groups
• Measure performance via server-side conversion tracking
• Actively work toward better data sharing and collaboration among your marketing, sales and CX departments

So, what’s the best way to collect, store and leverage first- and zero-party data? The CDP.

Image Credits (in order of appearance)

1. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/-kPQQ4Kw9lM
2. Photo by Mateus Maia on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/v2xovpHhf6s
3. Photo by Alonso Reyes on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/3vxTnz3seKE
4. Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/wqAuyugJIeU
5. Photo by Raphael Renter on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/wuxdtGMNYaU
6. Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/rfpSOlH1JlQ