Home Mobile Ericsson’s Mobile Ad Platform Taps Telcos To Validate Location Data

Ericsson’s Mobile Ad Platform Taps Telcos To Validate Location Data

SHARE:

Emodo, Ericsson’s mobile ad platform for telcos, is aiming to boost the quality of location data in the ad ecosystem with a tool launched Thursday that uses carrier data to verify mobile audiences on a pre-bid basis.

Marketers are shelling out for bad targeting and it’s akin to flushing their budgets down the toilet, said Paul Cheng, GM at Ericsson Emodo, which helps carriers aggregate and monetize their subscriber data.

“People spend a lot of time talking about viewability and brand safety, but the data accuracy problem is more prevalent than most people realize,” Cheng said.

Around 59% of exchange-derived location data is junk, according to Placecast, a location ad tech company Emodo acquired in February.

A lot of the problem is related to how location data is derived.

“Location data is collected from two sources: the device itself from the sensor or GPS and from the cellular network,” Cheng said. “Carrier data from cell towers is 100% accurate, but not necessarily precise, and GPS data is very precise, but not necessarily accurate. It’s a balancing act between the two.”

Precision refers to the range of possible error and accuracy is how close you are to hitting your mark, so it’s possible to be precise and highly inaccurate.

“For example, an SDK in an app can pull GPS and a six-digit precise lat/long,” Cheng said. “In reality, though, the device might be a hundred miles away from the known location, because we don’t know the last time the lat/long was updated.”

But carriers must have accurate location data to provide subscribers with reliable cell service – which is why their data makes a solid truth set to verify mobile audiences and inventory.

Applying technology that came along with its Placecast acquisition, Emodo uses carrier data to train a machine learning model to score the validity of other data sets. If a model’s smart enough, probabilistic matching can be just as accurate as what you get from a deterministic match, Cheng said.

“It’s a combination of proprietary whitelists and blacklists filtered by domain and source compared with machine learning models,” he said. “It’s a fairly large data science problem.”

Subscribe

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

Marketers can activate the verified data in their demand-side platform of choice, although they have to do it using a deal ID. Emodo doesn’t sell data outright and marketers never get access to actual advertising identifiers.

Emodo’s audience verification product isn’t a value-added service. Existing buy-side clients must pay for access, but the ROI backs out, Cheng said.

“When you compare apples to apples, the return is there,” he said. “It ends up being a better deal than wasting half of your ad spend and bidding on impressions that aren’t even close to your targeting parameters.”

Which all sounds well and good, but what about the four-letter word, GDPR? Europe’s newly implemented privacy regulation is top-of-mind at Ericsson, Cheng said.

Carriers have always operated in a highly regulated industry, which means they didn’t need GDPR to tell them to get consent. Only consented data makes it into Emodo’s models, which is anonymized, aggregated into segments and then only used to measure the quality of other data sets and not for any direct targeting.

“We do a lot of what we call data wrangling, which means that we pre-process data to normalize, harmonize and anonymize it,” Cheng said. “The only data that leaves the carrier is associated with an advertising ID and it’s not reversible in that it can’t be linked back to a specific person.”

Must Read

Wall Street Turned Against Ad Tech – But May Learn To Love It Again

What can pureplay ad tech companies do to clean up their rep on the Street?

Glenniss Richards, senior director of digital media, Bayer

How Bayer Wrote Its Prescription For Programmatic

Bringing media buying in-house is “chaotic and disruptive” – but totally worth it, according to Glenniss Richards, Bayer’s senior director of digital media.

AppsFlyer and Roku’s New SRN Integration Will Shed Light On CTV Campaign Impact

Roku and AppsFlyer announced the launch of a new self-reporting network (SRN) integration between both companies, which will allow mobile app advertisers to more effectively measure their streaming video campaigns

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters
Comic: Gamechanger (Google lost the DOJ's search antitrust case)

DOJ v. Google: How Judge Brinkema Seems To Be Thinking After Week One

Where the DOJ v. Google ad tech antitrust trial stands after one week’s worth of remedies arguments.

Swish, A Company That's Bringing Programmatic to Product Sampling, Announces Seed Funding

Swish, a startup that partners with retailers to provide product full-size CPG samples to people doing their grocery shopping online, announces $2.3 million in seed funding.

DOJ v. Google: During Opening Arguments, The DOJ And Google Battle Over An AdX Divestiture

Court is back in session. And the fate of  the open internet is in the balance.