Focusing on Mobile and App Data. An Interview with Sabio’s Aziz Rahimtoola

For Aziz Rahimtoola, CEO and Co-Founder of Sabio, the richness of mobile data is one of the keys to understanding consumer behavior. “Sabio means wise or experienced in Spanish,” he noted. His company strives to address the issues with current panel measurement systems through mobile and app data.  

 

Charlene Weisler: What is the state of CTV/OTT in general at this time and where is it headed?

 

Aziz Rahimtoola: The CTV/OTT media landscape is quite fragmented due to the various operating system platforms and increased competition from every angle. This is good for consumers as it allows choice, but it will continue to be confusing for marketers. 

 

Weisler: In terms of methodology, what approach is best for marketers?

 

Rahimtoola: I believe that app data is more effective than panels in understanding consumer behaviors. This has been validated by Nielsen and other panel-based companies that admit to not effectively understanding streamers (app users) or diverse audiences via panels. In the 1970s, when society was 11% and monolithic, panels were more effective than now when at 42%, our population is more diverse.  

 

Weisler: What is App Science?

 

Rahimtoola: App Science combines data signals from 280 million active mobile and 110 million CTV devices and closes the quality gap between multicultural and general market data. Traditional survey panels have historically underrepresented and undercounted multicultural segments of the population. By analyzing CTV and mobile device data, App Science draws a complete picture of multicultural audiences, their preferences, and interests. They also provide trends and insights for their clients to help them better understand consumer actions and interests so they can make better strategic business decisions. This can entail programming preferences, competitive analyses, industry vertical insights, or multicultural and diverse audience trends that traditional measurement companies typically underrepresent.

         

Weisler: What data do you at Sabio collect and apply?

 

Rahimtoola: We have GDPR and CCPA-compliant ways of obtaining mobile and CTV/OTT IDs. We also use machine learning extensively to understand consumers via predictive modeling better. In addition, we provide advertisers with a pixel, or a snippet of code used for tracking, that can be applied across media buys to measure campaigns. The information can help to compare viewership among different platforms and avoid targeting the same audiences repeatedly.

 

Overall, we capture over one terabyte of mobile and CTV/OTT data daily and ensure that everything is ethically sourced, privacy compliant, and cleansed. This data contains a wide range of metadata that allows us to apply machine learning algorithms and other predictive modeling to considerably understand consumers’ demographics, points of interest, behaviors, and life stages. From there, we can create granular audience insights and segments that can be applied to media buys and measure campaigns’ effectiveness.

 

Weisler: How do you craft segments from your data?

 

Rahimtoola: Segments are created from a collection of CTV and mobile data where we apply the nearest neighbor, lookalikes and another predictive modeling to various attributes. When we look at the data collected from CTV/OTT and mobile, we analyze various attributes such as app ecosystem, technographic, brand visitation, purchase signals, and census data and further verify with trusted 3rd party sources. From there, we apply machine learning algorithms such as the closest neighbor, lookalikes, associations, and topic modeling to create clusters, user profiles, and audience segments that all connect back to our proprietary 55MM household graph. 

 

Weisler: How does Sabio differ from other platforms in the CTV/OTT space?

 

Rahimtoola: Sabio Holdings is the only company outside Roku with a complete end-to-end CTV/OTT technology suite of services. We can partner up with content creators and launch apps along with creating and distributing add breaks in content with our newly acquired Vidillion SSP (Supply Side Platform) acquisition, monetize them via our Sabio DSP, all while providing differentiated non-panel-based analytics via its App Science platform.

 

Weisler: How do you use your data to inform political campaigns?

 

Rahimtoola: We enhance National voter files with insights that help identify a political party’s viewing habits, app behaviors, points of interest, and key issues that matter to them most so that they can use this audience insights to inform their future campaigns, validate they are reaching their audience, and optimize in real-time.

 

Weisler: What were some of the trends in political advertising leading up to the midterms?

 

Rahimtoola: Looking back on November 8^th, we noticed the most notable political advertising trends being the increase in growth in CTV and OTT.  The political sector has always been reluctant to buy into CTV, but compared to 2018, the shift has been dramatic. Prior, most political ad spending has been programmatic. We also saw an increase in the use of QR codes, and interestingly, there’s been a multicultural shift. In previous years agencies said they didn’t have a big enough budget for the Hispanic demographic. Still, there has been an increase in the general market putting money into the multicultural market.

 

First published in www.MediaVillage.com Thought Leaders

 Artwork by Charlene Weisler

Getting Rid of the Noise in Advertising and Data. An Interview with a4’s Hamid Qayyum

Hamid Qayyum, Head of Strategic Partnerships at a4, is a data and media veteran, starting his career at ratings upstart, erinMedia back in the 1990s. He is currently charged with taking all the data and media that is gathered from Altice and other data partnerships and acquisitions and use it to supercharge a4’s local and national sales efforts. 

Qayyum works with brands, agencies and supply partners “to facilitate our ability to deliver advertising effectively across all devices that consume media,” for the a4 universe of 92 million optimized linear TV households and 65 million IP addressable households. 

Charlene Weisler: You have worked for companies who very early on were working with data in very creative ways. How has the data landscape changed since the 1990s?

Hamid Qayyum: Data collection is far easier now. As the world becomes more digital, there is better data and as the TV world becomes more IP, we have access to more data. But on the flip side, we have to be more careful with how we treat that data – with more privacy and making sure that we are good caretakers of people’s profiles and habits. We have access to data that is very personal so we have to make sure that we guard that data very carefully. The more data we get the better products we can provide. From the media advertising perspective, we can do a better job of understanding what a consumer wants and delivering it to the consumer who wants it. 

Weisler: Talking about privacy and GDPR, how do you see this impacting the U.S.?

Qayyum: It’s very relevant for us. Altice, being a cable company and a4 being a division of Altice we take privacy very seriously. We have a lot of safeguards, such as a firewall between us and the data, to be sure that we got things right. How we use data, the ways we use data, we make sure that it complies with the latest privacy rules. Some industries will be greatly impacted by GDPR more than it will impact us because have already taken steps to be ahead of the curve and be GDPR compliant … or better. We don’t scrape data. There are a lot of companies that will scrape the bid stream and say ‘We have an IP address that we can target’ but we don’t do anything like that. That data is not really authenticated.  We authenticate everything in a privacy compliant manner.  

Weisler: What are the different datasets that you use?

Qayyum: One of the advantages we have is that we are part of Altice USA which is a very large marketer. We work very closely with the Altice marketing team to facilitate their marketing efforts. We also use the data that is used for marketing Altice’s products to better serve our strategic marketing partners from demographics to lifestyle to purchase habits to all of the viewership statistics – some of it is proprietary and some is acquired –as well as IP data. We have created a data warehouse that we can use for our national partners, brands and agencies. We also have a lot of political data, unique viewership data sets and have created a range of proprietary segments.

Data is at the core of what we do. But we don’t sell data. We are a media company. When you come to us you can buy local media, national media, TV, Digital and we will use all of this data that we have to find your audience.

Weisler: Altice was Cablevision. So this is Cablevision data?

Qayyum: We also have Suddenlink in addition to Cablevision plus data we acquire and data we receive through partnerships.

Weisler: What about the impact of the new technology – ATSC 3.0 and 5G?

Qayyum: The way we look at it from our side of the business, the more bandwidth you have, the more you will consume that bandwidth on more devices in the home. That is why we like the IP targeting aspect of our business, because consumers will consume more outside of just watching the television, whether through OTT or some other mechanism of content delivery.

That bandwidth has a couple of uses. One is driving the streaming part of the business and the other is driving the gaming part of the business. Everyone wants low latency in gaming. We are making huge headway in CTV and OTT with new offerings that leverage our IP targeting technology to deliver the next generation of addressable television. We have partnered with AT&T to cover the linear part of the addressable business to make a national footprint but also have the future of addressable through OTT and CTV where we leverage the IP targeting technology incorporated in our system to create a true multiscreen addressable solution.

Weisler: Can you de-duplicate your data?

Qayyum: Yes. We partner with various companies such as LiveRamp and Experian for data matching, etc. and we have a superb data team here internally that warehouses it and does the deduping. We then make it available to our customers for media buying through our platform, Athena. 

Weisler: What are some of the critical issues that the media industry faces now?

Qayyum: First, there is a lot of noise out there – what companies say they can do vs. what they can actually do. There are privacy regulations but data is still in the ‘wild west’ phase of evolution.  It would be great to have something that assigns a value to the data you have. People say, ‘here is the value of my data’ and that data may be wrong or improperly collected and there is no real way to say that this data is pure, authentic or good. 

The other issue is value of media. There are a lot of media choices as media consumption fragments. You no longer have families gathering in front of the TV on a Thursday night at 8 pm to watch Seinfeld. So while the audience and devices fragment, the business still works in silos. There are TV buyers and digital buyers. We need to get those walls broken so an advertiser can get the best value for their money. We broke down that barrier for Altice with a comprehensive media approach and are doing the same for other progressive marketers. 

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com