Tag: Blis

United States – Global advertising platform Blis is set to be acquired by T-Mobile for $175m in cash, following the recent completion of T-Mobile’s acquisition of Vistar Media. Said strategic acquisitions reinforce the company’s commitment to transforming advertising through its T-Mobile Advertising Solutions (T-Ads) business by creating comprehensive solutions that unlock better and more relevant ad experiences for consumers, greater value for marketers, and meaningful growth for the business.

Through the acquisition, Blis will bolster the Un-carrier’s ability to deliver more addressable omnichannel advertising with future-proof, cookie-less technology and targeting capabilities, enhancing T-Mobile’s own marketing efforts and offering a comprehensive, privacy-centric solution for other brands. 

Moreover, by directly connecting advertisers to ad inventory across any screen, the Blis platform complements T-Mobile’s end-to-end capabilities, making the company’s campaigns more efficient and empowering advertisers to reach more consumers in a fragmented advertising landscape, especially as traditional signals like cookies continue to diminish.

As part of its strategic framework for growing new businesses, the Un-carrier leverages its unique assets – embedded customer relationships, broad distribution, strong brand affinity and the most advanced 5G network – to unlock opportunities that meet clear customer needs in new areas. 

In the advertising space, the company has successfully evolved internal innovations into distinctive solutions that generate over $1b in annual revenue. These acquisitions further expand and accelerate the growth of this business and are expected to contribute approximately $250m in revenue, $75 million in EBITDA, and $50m in free cash flow this year, representing additional upside to the company’s financial guidance.

JP Colaco, SVP and chief T-Ads officer at T-Mobile, said, “Acquiring Vistar Media and Blis marks a significant step forward in T-Mobile’s strategy to create truly transformative advertising solutions that are built by marketers for marketers. Advertising is at its best when it cultivates deeper, authentic connections between brands and consumers. With the addition of Vistar and Blis, T-Mobile has an incredible opportunity to deliver this experience along the customer journey with privacy-centric solutions that drive targeted, measurable outcomes.”

Meanwhile, Greg Isbister, CEO at Blis, commented, “Joining T-Mobile marks an exciting new chapter for Blis and a significant step forward in our mission to reshape advertising with privacy-first, future-proof technology. With Blis’ advanced omnichannel targeting capabilities alongside T-Mobile’s scale and rich dataset, we’re even better positioned to directly connect advertisers to premium inventory across all screens. As traditional signals reduce, we’re proud to be at the forefront of innovation, ensuring advertisers can continue to reach and engage audiences effectively.”

Lastly, Vinayak Hegde, consumer chief marketing officer at T-Mobile, said, “As one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., T-Mobile manages complex campaigns across multiple business units and products. That means we need ad solutions that are both consumer-friendly and capable of delivering results at scale. Our early pilots with Blis showed us the power of its addressability, especially on mobile devices where standard identifiers fall short. It’s a key addition to our broader suite of ad tech partners and we’re excited about its potential—not just for T-Mobile’s own campaigns, but for other marketers as well.”

Mumbai, India – Blis, the integrated planning and buying platform for advertising, is further expanding its operations in India with two new strategic roles. 

Blis has added to the investment in regional roles to drive growth and meet advertiser demand, now offering a truly national sales representation across India. The company welcomes new Head of Sales, Nabajit Nath, and Associate Group Head, Nived Kansal. 

Nath will be based out of Mumbai to lead the sales efforts across the region. Nath joins the team with more than a decade of experience in digital advertising and technology sales, including Paytm, Flipkart and Network 18. Most recently, at Paytm, Nath led the foundational sales team, driving growth and success for the business across a number of years.

On his appointment, Nath said, “I was drawn to the role due to the company’s strong people focus, and I’m determined to contribute to this dynamic, innovative, and fast-paced organization which pioneered location-powered advertising solutions.”. 

Supporting Nath in Mumbai is Ishika Sharma, who has recently been promoted to Associate Director West, and in the south, Sales Lead, Lloyd Joseph, who joined the Blis business in Bangalore last year.

The new Associate Group Head, Nived Kansal, meanwhile, will be leading the Delhi region for Blis. Kansal comes to Blis with over 10 years’ media experience across India, working at major global and local companies such as Google, LinkedIn, and most recently mobile ads provider Inmobi, where he was the Brand Solutions Expert across telco, consumer durables, OEM, and auto.

Commenting on the announcements, Emma-Jayne Owens, managing director for APAC at Blis, said, “We’ve driven significant growth across the APAC region over the past few years and I’m delighted to be building further momentum with our new hires. They join Blis to drive our ambition for an even stronger team across more regions in India, where their combined local knowledge, expertise and seniority in digital advertising and technology allows us to support market leading solutions and our clients’ businesses growth.”

Sydney, Australia – London-based adtech data and location firm Blis has made a number of appointments and promotions to expand its operations in Asia-Pacific, specifically in the markets of Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. Amongst the notable leadership unveiled is the announcement of Donald Saw as its new country manager for New Zealand.

Saw’s role is expected to charge efforts forward in meeting the increasing demand from advertisers in New Zealand. He will leading the company’s sales and operations across the country. 

For leadership targeted at the whole of APAC region, meanwhile, Blis has named Lupe Prada as head of marketing and Clarie O’Mahony as head of client services. Prada will lead marketing initiatives in APAC while O’Mahony is tapped to be in charge of the client services team in the region.

In addition, Scott Mathison is the newly appointed sales manager for Queensland and Western Australia. 

Commenting on new appointments, Emma-Jayne Owens, managing director at Blis APAC, said that she’s delighted for their new hires as they continue to grow across the APAC region over the past few years.

She added, “They join Blis to drive our ambition for an even stronger team within each of our markets, where their combined local knowledge, expertise in client service and growth marketing allows us to provide solutions to help our clients’ businesses grow.”

London, United Kingdom – Blis, the programmatic advertising platform that doesn’t rely on personal data, has acquired a significant investment from LDC, the UK’s mid-market private equity firm. This investment will back the platform’s existing management team to further grow and expand the global business, enabling Blis to double its headcount in the next few years.

As it marks 18 years in business, Blis has spent almost two decades shaping the role of location in the evolving programmatic landscape. It has invested heavily in its privacy-first technology for many years, expanding its solutions beyond location and launching its planning tool, Audience Explorer, in early 2021. This future-proofed approach enables Blis to deliver integrated planning and buying solutions via the Blis Platform to deliver highly accurate, targeted campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands, through personalised and scalable targeting, without reliance on personal data.

According to Blis, some of the world’s leading global brands and their media agencies use its solutions to tackle challenges in a cookieless era. Blis’ unique approach provides personalised targeting and performance without relying on personal data, serving up relevant ads to the most high-value, addressable audiences across any channel. Ahead of impending industry changes, Blis is not only delivering privacy-first targeting, but it is also providing the most holistic understanding of customers by combining consented location data with other rich, powerful data signals, helping clients to prepare today for the increasing lack of intent data.

Greg Isbister, CEO of Blis, commented that he is proud of everything they have achieved in the past 18 years, and he is looking forward to accelerating the platform’s growth plans in partnership with LDC. 

“We have an incredibly dedicated and passionate team focused on the company’s growth and ready to help the industry move forward in the right direction. LDC believes in our promise as the audience-first platform that doesn’t rely on personal data, and their unparalleled expertise will, undoubtedly, help Blis to continue expanding globally,” said Isbister.

LDC’s investment director John Green and partner David Andrews will be joining the board alongside Isbister, Blis’ CFO Parm Dhami, and John Farrell, who joins Blis as non-executive chair. With more than 25 years of experience, Farrell has led some of the world’s biggest marketing services brands and was the former president and CEO of Publicis Group’s specialised agencies and marketing services arm.

Green shared that Blis has created a leading tech business that allows the advertising industry to move forward in a more transparent and effective way, and the management team, led by Isbister, now has the necessary support to further grow the business. 

“We can see a real opportunity to support the growth of Blis across the globe, and we’re excited to work in partnership to achieve great success and help advertisers deliver scale and result in a privacy-centric world,” said Green.

Sydney, Australia – Blis, the audience-first platform that doesn’t rely on personal data, has announced the launch of its new e-guide, entitled ‘Missing something? Finding the audiences no one is talking about…yet’. The new interactive e-guide was launched to assist marketers to understand the real impact of ID-reliant solutions on addressable audiences and the virtues of privacy-first solutions that don’t rely on IDs to achieve accuracy at scale.

Changes to IDFAs and cookies have fundamentally impacted the ad ecosystem, from planning to targeting and measuring campaigns. The new e-guide looks at data from the UK, Europe, United States, Australia and New Zealand to demonstrate that almost half of the digital addressable audiences on mobile – and nearly half on desktop – are being missed due to IDs.

To enable marketers to uncover the people behind these percentages, Blis also launched its new interactive calculator showing which lifestyle audiences are being impacted the most by this drastic audience deprecation, covering 10 lifestyle audiences from travellers to fashionistas.

From questioning the sustainability of the solutions to understanding different technologies’ limitations, the guide highlights three top tips for marketers to consider when choosing their advertising partners. Blis hopes the e-guide will help brands and agencies better understand how to embrace the privacy-first reality and adjust expectations and methods of targeting, to find and reach their missing audiences.

Aaron McKee, CTO of Blis, said, “There’s still this belief that brands are achieving the right audience at scale – and that that will only change once the Chrome deprecation comes into force. But the current reality is much more troubling, as advertisers that still rely on IDs are already missing out on almost half of their audiences.”

Mckee adds, “This is happening right now, in front of our eyes and marketers need to have the right questions in mind when choosing their advertising partners. Today, not tomorrow. If your partners tell you they’re still reaching your precise audiences at scale with ID-only or cookie-led solutions, you’ll see that the numbers in our ‘missing audience calculator’ tell a different story”.

The e-guide is available for download and reinforces Blis’ commitment to audience-first targeting at a scale that doesn’t rely on personal data. Blis’ approach is based on accurate, consented location data, combined with a range of rich online datasets giving clients the deepest audience understanding available.

Auckland, New Zealand – The privacy-first location-powered programmatic advertising partner Blis has announced the launch of its new product suite, Audience Explorer, into New Zealand, enabling brands and agencies to target their customers to drive key outcomes in the post-cookie world. Launched in 2021 in response to privacy changes by major tech companies, Audience Explorer is made available in the UK, US, Australia, the Netherlands, Italy, and now New Zealand.

Audience Explorer is a visual, real-world planning tool that combines precise location data with hundreds of rich and anonymised third-party signals, ranging from lifestyle characteristics and affinities to browsing and shopping habits, giving brands and media agencies the most holistic view of their customers. Using Audience Explorer, brands are able to discover richer audience insights, ready for activation at scale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W_iWK7Q70A&t=29s

Emma-Jayne Owens, managing director APAC of Blis, commented, “With market challenges around reach, relevance and measurement set to continue, there is no better time for brands to look to partners who can still deliver the audiences they would otherwise miss. We are delighted to bring Audience Explorer to New Zealand, enabling privacy-first audience insights and campaign scale without the reliance on personal data.”

As the industry pivots away from targeting based on IDs and personal data, brands need to find new ways to drive key business outcomes through personalised and high-performing digital advertising. To address this, Audience Explorer combines data from Blis’ global panel of 370 million opted-in consumers with precise location data and anonymized rich third-party signals.

Based on a deep consumer understanding, brands can serve up relevant ads to customers by understanding consumers’ needs, lifestyles, spending habits, competitor landscape and interests based on privacy-first, anonymized data – what Blis dubs as ‘Dynamic Audience Targeting’.

This new Dynamic Audience Targeting enables Blis to continue developing highly accurate, targeted campaigns for some of New Zealand’s biggest brands without reliance on personal data. Programmatic traders at agencies and brands can also activate these audiences via our self-serve platform or work with Blis on a managed service basis.

Sydney, Australia – Despite privacy becoming a crucial part of the business in the marketing and advertising industry, new data from programmatic advertising partner Blis shows that 50% of media planners in Australia are still not seeing privacy-first solutions as a key priority during 2022.

This is despite 33% of the respondent media planners citing privacy-first solutions as one of their biggest challenges this year. According to the data, media planners are still skeptical, or even confused, about how to tackle this challenge.

In terms of media planners’ views about current privacy-first solutions in the market, just one in three media planners feels they have good privacy-first solutions in place to reach their audiences. 

For specifics, 36% of media agencies are considering a mixture of contextual targeting, unique identifier (UID) 2.0 and FloC. In-house planners seem to be more skeptical, with 36% of them still saying they wouldn’t consider any of the current solutions as ideal to overcome privacy concerns.

The data also noted that CTV gained planners’ attention during the pandemic and will continue to do so in 2022, with 52% of media agency planners expecting to spend more than 50% of their overall digital media campaigns on CTV. Similarly, in-house media planners expect to spend 33% of their budget on CTV, a much lower but still significant part of their budgets.

In addition, media planners are also preparing to increase in-app advertising budgets as in-app spending is expected to account for 44% of total media spending by 2026. 

For Aaron McKee, CTO at Blis, the new data shows his research highlights on some key areas that media planners, and the industry as a whole, need to be aware of and plan for, if they’re not already.

“Many media planners are already missing half their web audience and 80% of their most valuable in-app audience and challenges around reach, relevance and measurement will only get worse with the Chrome third-party cookie changes coming shortly. This is the year to try new approaches to reaching wide audiences in a way that demonstrably performs,” McKee said.

He added, “The approaches that stand the test of time will be rooted in privacy and respect for personal data. Finding trusted privacy-first partners will help make their lives much easier – and their campaigns more effective – in the long run.”

London, United Kingdom – With the eventual ‘death’ of third-party data in favor of privacy-centric advertising strategies, global location-based programmatic advertising company Blis puts focus on this dilemma businesses in the future may face by launching a global campaign that likens this ‘data drought’ to an actual drought in real life.

The campaign, which features Blis’ CEO Gregor Isbister, demonstrates the metaphor of being alone in the desert during a drought is aligned with the fact that businesses should migrate as soon as possible with advertising strategies with privacy at its core, unless they wait to be affected by the changes on data-centric advertising.

Furthermore, Blis demonstrates that businesses can ‘escape’ this ‘drought’ by implying privacy-centric ad strategies, including their commercial message of location-powered behavioral data that can provide marketers and media planners with real-world behavior data.

Other messages include location data that can help brands understand the real purchase journey and through an interactive and visual tool that combines data from the company’s global panel with precise location data and anonymized rich third-party signals, discovering and activating audiences is quick and easy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya42f6Z3gtw&t=1s

“The scarcity of data in the post-cookie world does not remove the ability to engage and connect with your digital audience. Brands can still reach their online prospects at scale via privacy-compliant personalized advertising. Even though at Blis we work in the B2B space, we are still marketing to people, and especially during this exceptional time in history, we want to engage our audiences and leave them with a positive and memorable impression, by speaking to them not as robots, but as actual real humans with needs and wants,” Ed Burleigh, head of marketing for Asia at Blis shared to MARKETECH APAC.

When asked why they used the metaphor of a drought in the desert to represent the campaign, Burleigh stated that the desert is an ‘extreme metaphor’ for what may happen when cookies disappear entirely from the digital advertising ecosystem, adding also the new landscape where Apple’s ID for Advertisers (IDFA) update eliminates ad tracking.

“In the desert, there are limited options to survive. However, Blis believes by applying the power of location data, and a myriad of rich and anonymized data signals, brands can reach the right people at the right time. We know that marketers are concerned about the removal of the Chrome cookie. However, we believe a data drought can be avoided,” he stated.

Burleigh added, “We’ve done this by addressing a key industry issue – that is facing all of us – with a sense of clever playfulness. One way we’ve achieved this is by putting a face on the brand, which is a great way to humanize it. Our new company video features our CEO Greg as the lead ‘character’ on a personal journey to beat the data drought. It’s authentic, believable, and fun.”

Singapore – Global ad location Blis has announced that it will be rolling out its Consumer Confidence Pulse in Singapore, which acts out as an interactive dashboard that is built on existing trending data around consumer mood to analyze COVID anxiety.

Said dashboard also now tracks consumer movement over a rolling 13-month period, across 18 retail and lifestyle sectors including airports, gyms, malls, restaurants and grocery stores.

The platform launch comes after COVID concerns in the country had been at an 18-month low before the latest Phase 2 or heightened alert measures. Blis also notes that retail foot traffic remains steady versus the same time last year., adding that the number of people choosing to invest their money rose sharply between June-July 2021 further suggesting confidence is returning.

“Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve seen brands pivot their operations, strategy and messaging multiple times to meet their consumers’ concerns about safety. The new dashboard will be an invaluable tool for brands to get ahead of the curve by ensuring their campaigns and messaging are striking the right tone and audiences at the right time,” said Emma-Jayne Owens, managing director at Blis.

Each month, the platform tracks responses to four questions around the economy, household financials, spend intent and COVID-19 anxiety. Coupled with consumer movement analysis, the dashboard enables brands to better understand trendlines by industry sectors.

For Alex Wright, global insights director at Blis, their data shows that consumers around the world are capable of exercising their own caution in advance of government-imposed restrictions. He added that while Singapore struggles through its latest set of restrictions, recent history suggests the post-lockdown recovery this time around may not be as gradual as when the pandemic first started.

“In Singapore, our respondents posted the lowest level of COVID concern across the 9 markets we track, prior to Phase 2 measures. This is likely linked to Singapore’s high vaccination rate and low death rate. Even so, consumer mobility in July demonstrated caution amidst rising cases until the tightening of restrictions on 22 July. Despite this caution, retail foot traffic remains steady versus the same time last year,”

The platform is currently rolled out as well across the UK, USA, Netherlands, Italy, and Australia. The markets of India, New Zealand and the Philippines will see the platform launch in the coming months.

Sydney, Australia – Digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising firm Hivestack has announced a new appointment to their first advisory board, a step towards Hivestack’s APAC regional expansion.

Harry Dewhirst, formerly of independent advertising platform Amobee, to which he co-founded and was acquired by Singapore-based telecom Singtel in 2012, joins Hivestack’s advisory board and will overlook the company’s advising and counsel on its APAC strategic expansion.

Aside from his Amobee background, he was also the president of data analytics firm Blis, to which he worked on the company’s commercial partnerships and international growth. Furthermore, he has also worked as a non-executive chairman for public relations agency Mutant Communications, non-executive director for alcohol delivery company Trouble Brewing, and more recently as partner for fund investing startup Ballpark Ventures.

“I am thrilled to have the honor of being appointed as Hivestack’s first Advisory Board member”, commented Dewhirst. “Having led companies in the region and being both a serial entrepreneur and investor, I can clearly see why Hivestack’s technology and talent will advance the ad tech and martech industry in APAC. I look forward to facilitating their success and supporting their expansion plans in the region.”

Meanwhile, Andreas Soupliotis, co-founder and CEO of Hivestack commented, “We are delighted to welcome Harry as a member of Hivestack’s Advisory Board. His success as a founder and entrepreneur building and scaling digital and tech companies to huge success, makes him an invaluable asset as we continue to expand our operations in Asia-Pacific.”