Yuriy Gorokhov will tell you, without much prompting, that telecom data isn’t as valuable as telcos like to think. Which is a little odd to hear from the head of ad platform at an identity-focused ad tech startup for telecom providers.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a smart way to use that data, despite its limitations, which is the entire premise of his company, myGaru.
MyGaru didn’t start out as a telco play, though. The original idea, said CEO and Co-Founder Vitalii Morozenko, was to bring a “romantic vision” for a post-GDPR world to life by giving users control over their data.
That vision quickly ran into a practical problem, however: reality.
Without a stable identity layer, you can’t really know who you’re talking to across different environments – browsers, apps, connected TV – because no single identifier works reliably. But telcos have something that does, which is a network-level signal that doesn’t rely on cookies, device IDs or email logins.
This realization turned out to be the foundation they were looking for, said Gorokhov, who also sits on the board of IAB Ukraine.
“Basically,” he said, “we want to accumulate more data signals than any walled garden while not being one ourselves.”
A brief history
Telcos have been trying to crack advertising for years, with results ranging from mediocre to expensive.
In some cases, they spent billions in an attempt to acquire their way in – and then wrote it all down not that long after. (We’re looking at you, Verizon.) Others spent major chunks of change to buy ad tech companies and built full stacks around them only to sell the whole shebang, as AT&T did with AppNexus, which became Xandr before getting sold to Microsoft and partially wound down.
“There is no telecom in the world that succeeded with this,” Morozenko said.
(T-Mobile might beg to differ, but he’s not wrong, broadly speaking.)
Gorokhov has a few theories about why telecoms keep failing at launching digital advertising businesses.
Most operators receive their signals primarily from DNS lookups, which provide a rough sketch of intent. You can tell if someone visited an automotive site, for example, but not whether they clicked an ad. The resulting segments are, therefore, only directionally useful at best. Coverage is the other problem. A single operator might reach only half of a regional market.
MyGaru’s approach is to bring multiple operators onto the same platform – combining their reach without combining their data – so a subscriber on one network and a subscriber on another can both be identified through the same system.
“We don’t start in a market unless we see a clear way to getting at least 70% population coverage,” Gorokhov said.
According to myGaru, it can reach more than 115 million users across its active markets, which include Ukraine, Vietnam and Azerbaijan.
How it works
But what’s happening under the hood?
Carriers know who their subscribers are; that’s just the nature of the relationship. When subscribers go online, they generate an identity signal, which carriers immediately pseudonymize, stripping out the personal details.
Telcos that integrate with myGaru pass that pseudonymized signal into its platform. What arrives is a coded value that myGaru can’t reverse back to a phone number, name or email address. When there’s an ad request on a page a subscriber visits, myGaru generates a one-time token for that session.
The advertiser’s buying platform uses the token to check whether the subscriber matches the target audience, after which the token expires. No personal data changes hands at any point. MyGaru, which is DSP agnostic, charges transaction-based fees for identity usage and data activation across whichever demand-side platform its clients use. Every time it enters a new market, it licenses its technology to local operating partners who handle telco onboarding.
“Even if we were to get hacked and all the data is washed away, there’s nothing there to identify a person,” Gorokhov said. “No PII whatsoever is stored inside our perimeter.”
The same logic extends to data collaboration, he said. A retailer and a publisher, for example, could run joint analysis without either side seeing the other’s underlying records. (In Ukraine, the already platform combines telco data with retail and other sources alongside carrier signals, since telco data alone has real limitations in terms of addressable use cases.)
Every time data is accessed, the event is logged with a cryptographic audit trail, which Morozenko said is the same one used in Ukrainian battlefield management systems.
For GDPR purposes, myGaru acts as a data processor, and its clients are the controllers.
“We’re just the pipes,” Morozenko said, “a data intermediary and not a data owner.”
Can it travel?
Which sounds well and good. But convincing competing telcos to share infrastructure is a hard sell. Telecom providers are fiercely competitive.
Yet myGaru has managed to make it happen in Ukraine. (Both Morozenko and Gorokhov are from Ukraine, although they no longer live there.)
All three major mobile operators in the country (Kyivstar, Vodafone Ukraine and lifecell), as well as landline operator Ukrtelecom, are integrated with myGaru. Getting these rivals to align, even through a neutral third party, required overcoming massive regulatory hurdles and deeply entrenched market friction.
From there, though, it can be a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats sorta situation.
Kyivstar, for instance, could previously reach roughly 35% of its own subscribers through cookie-based systems; the rest were browsing in Safari, Firefox and in-app browsers where cookies don’t work. MyGaru claims that, after integrating with its platform, Kyivstar was able to boost its addressable reach to 97%.
The question now is whether the model can travel. Because getting telcos to collaborate isn’t primarily a technology problem; it’s a trust thing. Operators also have to be honest about their own scale limitations and embrace the idea that collaboration can benefit them more than staying siloed.
“Telcos are very concerned about anything that could hurt their reputation or lead to audiences migrating to a competitor,” Gorokhov said. “It’s still a huge challenge.”
🙏 Thanks for reading! As always, feel free to drop me a line at allison@adexchanger.com with any comments or feedback. And also have a look and a listen as this tiny kitten meows a series of famous ringtones. It’s kinda cute and kinda creepy in equal measure.
🎟️ Oh, and while I have you, you’ll forgive me for making a quick plug for our Programmatic IO event coming up in New York City on September 28 and 29.
💡 We’ve got a great agenda lined up for you, including a panel on AI governance with Yum! Brands, The Brandtech Group and BBDO, and a session hosted by privacy attorney Daniel Rosenzweig of DBR Tech Law on why it’s imperative to get AI right from day one.
