Ericsson Emodo Launches Carrier-Verified Audience Solution
In a bid to address quality concerns currently looming over the mobile advertising industry, Ericsson Emodo is launching a product that uses carrier data at scale to pre-verify mobile audiences and inventory, and then makes those audience segments available through any major demand-side platform. Dubbed Emodo Audiences, the new product is considered to be the first carrier-verified audience solution available in the U.S. market.
Today’s announcement comes on the heels of another major product release from Ericsson Emodo, just last month, when the company launched Emodo Verification, a tool to help advertisers minimize wasted mobile advertising dollars and better reach target audiences. With Emodo Audiences, Ericsson Emodo can now apply the same technology before the start of a campaign so that filtered data is combined with verified supply.
“Emodo Audiences offers curated, carrier-verified audiences in a programmatic environment,” says Alistair Goodman, chief commercial officer at Ericsson Emodo. “With this product, advertisers can build their intended audiences using only clean, filtered location and behavior data, and activate them on their DSP of choice.”
During its short time in existence, Ericsson Emodo has made a big push into the data management and mobile advertising markets. The company, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Swedish networking and telecommunications firm Ericsson, was launched late last year as the multinational firm’s mobile advertising and monetization arm.
Shortly after Ericsson Emodo’s launch, in February of this year, Ericsson acquired Placecast, the data management and DSP for location data. Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, it was announced at the time that Placecast’s 38 employees would be joining Emodo’s team at the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
Emodo is looking to reduce wasted ad spending and deliver a higher ROI with its Audiences solution.
“Emodo Audiences is the first solution to bring verified data and supply together—available for activation via any buying platform,” says Goodman. “This approach addresses the data quality concerns in today’s digital targeting.”
Although data—and location data in particular—have become crucial to the advertising industry, Goodman says that Emodo’s internal studies reveal that, on average, 59% of location data is inaccurate. That comes at a time when targeted advertising is rapidly growing, with expectations that location-targeted mobile ad spend will reach more than $32 billion by 2021.
“It’s wholly unacceptable to have that level of uncertainty,” Goodman says.
Goodman explains that the biggest challenge in putting together Emodo Audiences has been demystifying the quality of mobile data, and location data in particular.
“In our experience, media buyers know they have issues with data quality, but until recently they have not had the tools to easily monitor and fix the problem,” Goodman says. “With Emodo Audiences, and the Emodo Ad Stack overall, we’re offering marketers solutions to understand and verify the success of their targeted campaigns, while ensuring from the get-go that they accurately target the users they seek.”
Emodo is hoping that the back-to-back releases of Emodo Audiences and Emodo Verification will solidify its position as a firm that’s qualified to fill the gap in advertising and bring high-quality, reliable data to the industry.
“In combining both cutting-edge technology with the established systems and channels of a 142-year-old company, Emodo is in a unique position to aggregate anonymous data and provide marketers with valuable insight into real-world behaviors,” Goodman says. “We hope to shed light on the problem of data quality and misrepresentation and at the same time offer solutions that will combat those issues at every stage.”
Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.
