How T-Mobile Uses Data to Build A Better Experience

In order to make executive decisions on how to move forward and grow your business, you need data. Once you’ve acquired your data, it can be difficult to know what to do with it and utilize it effectively.

This is where Decoded Advertising comes in to play.

During #SMWNYC, the company’s CEO & Founder, Matt Rednor, discussed how he helped Tiffany Holland, Digital Marketing Enterprise Director at T-Mobile, collect and translate figures differently to the typical and misleading A/B technique. Together, they analyzed and understood them, experimented, and strategized.

“T-Mobile has recently become a disruptor brand in the marketplace trying to be the un-carrier amongst the carriers,” Holland explained. “We are heavily customer focused.”

“Thoughful ignorance”

The ethos of Rednor’s Decoded Advertising is “thoughtful ignorance” and when it comes to marketing, “designing around what we don’t know is more valuable than building on what we know,” he says. “This is why it’s not just about using the data you collect but understanding it. The more we understand it, the more we can use it.”

Key factors to consider when working with data

Factors to think about when using data to drive campaigns include the mode of message, format, and tonality. “Can we make the offer more interesting if we articulate it in different ways? What is the right sequence for a particular campaigns progression and content creation? What are we offering? Employment or a community?” Rednor continued.

It is essential to separate the signals from the noise as you can often drown in too much data. Even by starting off collecting data from broader audiences, the aim is to move to more segmented in order to notice particular trends and inclines. “Certain benefits would work well with certain audiences,” Holland said when discussing T-Mobiles own campaigns.

A/B experimenting and marketing can find businesses averages, but these can often be misleading. Often polarizing figures can have the most impact when tended to. Delving into data further outlines circumstantial, indicative and red herring results.

Explore the full potential of ideas

Holland says they use data to expand minds around experimental design in order to explore the full potential of an idea.

For example, T-Mobiles senior discount campaign, targeted at those aged 55 years and over, explored their data on this particular demographic until they reached a resonation of them being savvy travelers and went beyond their initial stereotype. They went forward to incorporate this narrative within their advertising as well as taking their visual photography model a step further into the realms of illustration and then graphics. At the point of illustration, they saw a 200 percent increase in performance and 225 percent in graphics.

Holland concluded by saying, “None of this matters unless you embrace the data. When you have the data to prove what will work then it becomes really powerful and forces you to have conversations and be players and influencers in the brand market place. Think Big. Assume Nothing. Build that love.”

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