by On Friday, February 10, Brussels has given the green light to the creation of a company that brings together four of the largest telecommunications providers in the region. Together they will develop and operate a technology platform to segment advertising that reaches customers on their mobile networks. The new company belongs to Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone, in an unusual partnership in the industryheld here to gain scale and try to establish a position in the profitable advertising market in a time of great change.
In Portugal, there has been a partnership with some similarities on the ground for almost three years. Scale was also the motivation, but here at the national level, inclusion MEO, US is vodafoneplus the Accenture, which manages the technology platform. The goal was the same: create a platform that allows advertisers to deliver targeted ads. Support is another. The partnership created by the Portuguese agencies is oriented to television advertisingcurrently limited to non-linear content – those that users can record or retrieve from the previous week, via pay-TV set-top boxes.
In 2022, the Playce has served approximately 1,000 campaigns, from 300 brands, in a total of more than 87 million ads and increased by 67% compared to the previous year. The outlook for 2023 is equally encouraging, both due to the volume of advertisers already working with the platform, around 150, and the number of channels, 117.
Jose Pedro Teixeirahead of Playce, admits that this collaboration, unprecedented between institutions in Portugal, was the only way to make interesting a business that would hardly interest any of the interlocutors individually – or for brands -, for the sake of scale.
The same happens with me consortium just established by the European counterparts (Vodafone is in both, but represents different markets), although in this case the focus is the mobile phone market and the timing of the decision has an explanation. European operators want to take advantage of it transit time for third-party cookies as a model for targeting and segmenting advertising, for less intrusive systems, to make their own model revenge.
José Pedro Teixeira acknowledges that the moment “brings an international stimulus for new models”, but predicts difficulties for telecoms to assume a truly significant role in an ecosystem where “there will always be a third element in the equation” and where the content display interface, as a rule, is not an asset of the operator. Unlike what happens in television, where the Portuguese operators want to continue the directing efforts.
How does Playce work?
The Playce platform receives and analyzes data sent by the three operatorsstarting from customer usage patterns in the set-top box and telecom consumption profile; from these customers, all of which are used anonymously,” to create segments that brands can then use to target their ads. These 30-second ads appear at the beginning of user-selected content on subscribed channels.
THE The system already allows you to work with 10,000 segmentation cases, applies to the placement of advertisements on the television platforms of the three providers. Among them, users with above-average telecom spend, passionate about movies, sports or animals, the type of residence or the geographical area. Some factors that depend on the creation of these departmentssuch as the existence of a sufficient volume of users, to ensure the anonymization of data (for example, in geo-segmentation options) or prior authorization by the user, in the set-top box configuration, to receive personalized advertisements. Those who do not agree to ad personalization see generic ads, which are also already placed by the platform.
You Operators do not disclose the investment already made in Playce, but José Pedro Teixeira guarantees that it is high and that the system is complex, although he also acknowledges that the project has already become profitable. In the short term, the goal is to evolve into a “more automated and digital platformwhich from an operational point of view is a challenge because we are in the world of television,” he acknowledges.
In relation to advertisers, it is intended that platform gain more self-service features. In relation to the consumer, more interactivity optionseven if something similar to what exists in an online experience isn’t expected anytime soon, given the limitations of set-top boxes.
In the medium to long term, the Linear TV is also Playce’s ambition, which will have some more significant technical challenges to overcome, but which admittedly is an interesting looking route. “It’s pretty much inevitable for the ecosystem that it will eventually be able to personalize, at the limit, everything on TV“, defends José Pedro Teixeira.
Therefore, a platform like Playce will eventually make sense in the linear broadcasting of the channels as well. In other European countries there are identical platforms that started with linear TV. right here, the possibility of starting to test the option soon is accepted, it is more difficult to predict a time horizon for the generalization of the segmentation model.
