Death of 3rd part Cookie: Rise of The Telecom

The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of his colleague Ravi and Industry partner Gaurav from Vserve.

Telcom companies (Telcos) have long complained that their role in the content business has long been neglected. All their efforts to establish walled gardens and control taps have long been destroyed by a new breed of OTTs.

However, the future has a new surprise for them – the death of 3rd part cookie. While Ravi wrote about Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple becoming even more powerful as they will have full control over ID based data (Read here), it’s the telecom who will have the ultimate user behaviour understanding.

In the core to this lies a fact that a telecom gets ICMP packets (Aka user history) for every web request he or she ever makes. They also know the mapping of illusive device id along with the (more permanent) phone number. All this can become Telco’s first party data by a simple update to its EULA (if not done already).

Effectively when a Telecom company morphs (or appends ) into a data analytics company, in conjunction with ad serving platforms it can beat every OTT in their own game. The advertising revenues that OTT makes on back of the Telcom channel will then be subservient to the data and analytics that Telecom will provide.

This will also open a new challenge for the big four - Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, as likes of Vodafone can then take them on in an entirely new scenario that may not have been gamed at all.

Now that the arena Google has decided us to take us all back into 1st party data era, it’s the telecoms who should start dusting the playbooks of AOL.