Plex has more than 22 million monthly active users in more than 180 countries around the world. T-Mobile Advertising sees Plex, the T-Mobile retail media network, the T Life app and other offerings as a chance to grow the company’s multichannel marketing ecosystem—with Plex potentially providing T-Mobile-branded experiences and customers sharing their connected TV behaviors through T-Mobile logins.
“There’s also [Plex] working with us on how the mobile phone talks to CTV, and can we create bespoke interesting, innovative types of solutions for customers that make the mobile phone a centerpiece of a CTV experience,” Colaco said.
The big magenta picture
Mike Katz, T-Mobile’s president of marketing, strategy and products, kicked off the company’s first NewFronts appearance by bringing out its Super Bowl commercial star Common—who claimed he’s “noticed more for T-Mobile commercials now than anything”—and touting the influence T-Mobile’s wealth of data and its position at the event as one of the Top 10 advertisers in the country.
“It’s not just that we’re another vendor like, you know, pitching other ad products into the marketplace. We’re actually a big participant in this marketplace ourselves,” Katz said. “It’s a testament to our commitment to understanding and solving the real challenges that advertisers face every day, because we’ve been facing them too for a long time.”
The retail media network and the Plex deal add sizable T-Mobile Advertising audiences to the millions of people who view the 55,000 T-Mobile Advertising-driven screens currently in U.S. ride-share vehicles. Colaco said T-Mobile plans to increase those ride-share screens to 100,000 by year’s end and noted that, through partners, T-Mobile’s out-of-home reach increases to roughly 700,000 screens across the U.S.
Combined with data from T-Mobile’s 119 million global subscribers—including what apps they use and their engagement levels with those apps—data culled through the various interconnected sources that T-Mobile Advertising calls its Magenta Advertising Platform give the company information about more than 240 million consumers through its screens. T-Mobile considers that information especially valuable domestically, where 75% of time U.S. consumers spend online is dedicated to either their phones or streaming video.
At a time when, according to T-Mobile, consumers are seeing thousands more ads than they did two decades ago—with just 20% being relevant to them—the company sees its expanding ad infrastructure as essential to providing a more efficient marketing message for brand partners.
While T-Mobile still treads cautiously with its Magenta Advertising Platform—noting that the app ownership and engagement data it uses to build profiles of movie geeks or coffee lovers comes from anonymized first-party data, and that it asks users to opt into data-collection elements of its T Life app (and opt out of targeted ads)—its advertising wing can be an effective first-party data source.