T-Mobile’s Andrea Zapata on the Power of Mobile Data

NEW YORK – Smartphones have become digital appendages for millions of people, making mobile devices powerful tools for gathering first-party data about consumer behavior – both online and in real life. T-Mobile Advertising Solutions aims to help marketers harness the data for audience targeting while also protecting customer privacy.

“With T-Ads, what we’re able to do….in a highly privacy-compliant way, is to understand app usage and behavior holistically,” Andrea Zapata, vice president of advertising data, measurement and partnerships at T-Mobile, said in this interview with Lisa Granatstein, editorial director of Beet.TV.

“A brand is going to know how users and consumers are engaging with their specific app, without question, better than anybody else. Because that’s their house,” Zapata said. “What we can do is sort of click up and say, ‘you know your house really well, but we actually know all your neighbors.’”

In its first-ever NewFronts presentation, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions announced a new in-store retail media network with 20,000 screens throughout 11,000 U.S. store locations, an expansion of its connected TV (CTV) offering through Plex, a streaming media company, and ad inventory on its T Life app, which reaches 7+ million customers.

In one campaign for a food-delivery app, T-Ads helped to boost engagement and reinstalls on mobile devices, Zapata said.

“We were able to obviously build a cohort, a persona that said, we are going to 18 to 44 food lovers – those who actually have the food apps on their device,” she said. “We not only saw success in brand halo north of 20%, but we also saw re-engagement with said app, and we saw reinstallation of that app at 6%.”

You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of the 2024 NewFronts.