PHOENIX — InMobi’s deal to acquire Sprint’s Pinsight advertising unit may have closed last Q4 – but that doesn’t mean InMobi’s data on mobile subscribers is getting stale.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Anne Frisbie, InMobi SVP programmatic, says InMobi continues to enjoy live data on telco consumers.
“It’s current,” she says. “It’s updated daily, I mean we run a telco-grade DMP (data management platform) that actually processes all the network carrier-level data.
“We anonymize that to protect the privacy of these consumers. It is opted data from these consumers, especially when that comes from an audience targeting standpoint. There’s different uses for the data, but it is all actively and currently processed.”
At the time of the deal, AdExchanger reported: “No Sprint data is being exchanged in the deal, just Pinsight’s tech stack.”
Despite Pinsight having hoped to grow in to a $1 billion business, last year it was sold to InMobi, the veteran mobile ad company, in an all-stock deal that kept Pinsight’s employees located in Kansas City.
Across the industry, telcos have been building up their ability to use subscriber data to power advanced ad targeting, going on a series of acquisition sprees to build in-house capabilities.
But, although it offloaded the unit, Sprint gained new powers to monetize that data across InMobi’s publisher network.
Frisbie says the potential for carriers helping advertisers leverage their data has been underwhelming so far, and trumpets the value of an “independent” vendor.
“It’s passive data and it gives you a holistic view of that consumer, a much more holistic view because – as you know – the first wave of kind of digital insights and from surveys… has really been on the browser side of the business,” she says.
“This kind of (data) gives you a holistic view of that from location and from all their content consumption.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
