This week is Advertising Week in Toronto that is produced by the ICA and Masthead will be covering some of the sessions and the opening breakfast was hosted by Bell Media on how Big Data is evolving in the marketplace. The telcos are in a unique market position as they are now distributors and content creators that enables them to track the customer journey.

It was an eye opening session as they revealed how Bell Media uses all the data to help advertisers to see the media effectiveness of their ads. There are 3 sources of data subscriber profiles, location data (via cell tower pings) and behavioral data (smartphone usage). This enables marketers to get a sense of user intent in market segments in specific geographical areas. They estimate that the average user/subscriber generates 300-500 location events per day.

Left to Right; Mark Finney VP, Strategic Sales, Bell Media;  Scott Knox, ICA; Matt Alexander, Bell Mobility

For example in a specific trade area some of that data shows 1500 people were on real estate sites, 13% used the Starbuck apps in the last week and that people prefer Swiss Chalet over Pizza Pizza. It can also tell if people prefer Store A to Store B (by location data) and the use of loyalty apps to estimate store traffic. What was really fascinating was the correlation of TV ad viewing and mobile search trends in specific FSAs that help drive store visits. The limitation was the correlation of sales in the marketing funnel, but with mobile payments growth this may be possible in the future.

Some of the questions from the crowd asked about privacy issues and Mark Finney, VP Strategic Sales, Bell Media said that individuals are not tracked and data is only looked at based on 100+ person data buckets and the users are anonymous. General demographic information is used based on the subscriber profile. I asked the question is it possible in the future for mobile ads be targeted to user profiles in a general trade area or FSA to optimize the message. Mark answered that this is on Bell’s roadmap, but requires subscriber consent to make this work in the future.

This data as you can see will be great to have in planning advertsing campaigns in the future for advertisers and is just a drop in the bucket of what is store in the future once privacy rules are put in place. To see what other sessions that you may want to attend you can go to this link and if this session was any indication of what is there , this is a must attend event for any publisher. http://advertisingweek.ca/