Spotting the opportunities right under Infomo’s nose

It’s nice to get the right advice. But it’s even better to get the right advice before you know you need it.

When Infomo chief executive Dr. Ananda Rao asked EverEdge for an intangible asset audit, he was hoping for a 30,000-foot view of all the things that made his company valuable. He didn’t expect it to reveal an enormous opportunity that no one else in the ad tech sector was leveraging.

Founded in 2017, Infomo develops and deploys comprehensive, data-driven digital advertising and marketing ecosystems that empower telecom carriers, publishers and advertisers to engage with their target audiences and optimise their media strategies.

But Rao said Infomo’s successful business model only became possible after a key lightbulb moment of understanding intangible assets.

“What was clear in the EverEdge report was that all our other competition was looking at the data pools but ignoring the data pipes,” Rao said.

“The question then became: who has the good data? The answer boiled down to only one kind of company: the telecom carrier, because these provide you with the internet. At that point, we knew what to do, so we returned to the drawing board.”

The company could see that the digital advertising space was far too dominated by a few tech giants like Google and Facebook, who leverage their control over search and social media to maintain unparalleled access to consumer data.

While this ecosystem mostly worked, the marketers who relied on these platforms always seemed to struggle with the limited transparency and fragmented data sources, which led to inferior data insights.

On the other hand, although it was clear that excellent data was being generated at the other end of the pipeline with the telcos, data residency laws and operational complexities had prevented telcos from fully capitalising on this.

Telecom carriers have tried to fix this. For example, AT&T bought AppNexus in 2017 for $4 billion. The telco could not make it work, so they sold the company off as Xandr to Microsoft for just a billion dollars. Verizon also bought Yahoo in 2016 but couldn’t make it work either.

“The key problem is data residency. Most countries demand that data remain inside a telco all the time for privacy and security reasons. So, we thought, why not just rewrite the entire digital ad tech and make it work from inside the telco itself?” Rao said.

Infomo’s breakthrough insight was to develop a solution that would be layered on top of telcos’ raw data streams while addressing privacy, security, and operational constraints.

This was essentially creating a telco-driven identity management system that superimposed persistent IDs (e.g., mobile numbers, email addresses) with metadata IDs (e.g., device IDs, IP addresses), eliminating the need for third-party cookies and ensuring all data remained within the telco’s secure infrastructure.

According to Rao, the whole system would be run by a generative AI-based customer data platform (CDP) that analyses telco data to create actionable insights for marketers at a depth and detail never before possible.

This system would process CRM data, browsing habits, location data and app usage to uncover dynamic ad tech segments. This capability enabled telcos to refine consumer cohorts and deliver hyper-personalised marketing opportunities.

And to top it off, Infomo also developed a demand-side platform (DSP) that works within a telecom carrier, allowing advertisers to access telco systems directly.

This ad exchange integrates ad slots with telco data, creating a “share market” for auctioning ad slots tied to customer insights so that telcos can monetise individual impressions rather than just relying on bulk data sales.

“We found a new way to help telcos earn extra revenue from the data flowing through their pipes. Finally, doing something with the data became a very viable business for telcos.

“The highly precise audience segmentation drives a 15% increased margin for advertisers because they know far more about their targets than was ever possible under the old regime of Google or Facebook data,” Rao said.

Rao said it all comes back to the flash of inspiration from the EverEdge report about why Infomo’s access to telco data was so valuable for the company.

“When I think back to that debrief for the intangible asset report, I remember that we all looked at each other and realised the untapped potential in telecom carrier data. That was a turning point in our foray into digital advertising,” Rao said.

The company continues to add to its suite of disruptive technology. Infomo has just released a self-serve-based digital marketing telco offering for the SME sector that plugs directly into telco’s website. SMEs can leverage telco data and buy media from traditional channels like Google AdWords and Meta.

“Today, Infomo stands at the speartip of telco-driven ad tech, setting new standards for how data can be used responsibly and effectively. It’s a very exciting time for the marketing world, and we are a key part of that,” Rao said.