5 Minutes with T-Mobile’s Kevin McGurn

Long known as a consumer telecom giant, T-Mobile has set its sights on marketers as its next growth opportunity. New projects — rooted in connected TV (CTV), digital out-of-home and, most recently, the launch of an in-store retail media network in April — marked big strides for the company in making its name more known as a marketing solution.

The company offers 20,000 screens within stores, as well as ads served through mobile and CTV, thanks to a partnership with Plex. This initiative enables marketers to reach a whopping 240 million people via T-Mobile.

Helping to lead this charge is Kevin McGurn, T-Mobile’s VP and head of sales, marketing and distribution. McGurn spoke with The Current Editor-In-Chief Stephanie Paterik about why measurement is the biggest challenge in the digital advertising industry, the company’s latest innovations for marketers and cutting down the time it takes to pick a show on streaming.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What kind of innovation is capturing your interest right now and what do you think has the potential to be the most transformative?

We started our business in the mobile world, obviously, but we identified two big parts of the media landscape that we wanted to focus on.

One is CTV, something that’s near and dear to my heart. We’re trying to create some synergies between how the inventory is surfaced, walled garden by walled garden, and then how you can target it. So, we think CTV’s a big growth area for us.

The second one is something that I think is very authentic to T-Mobile, which is digital out-of-home. Why is it authentic to T-Mobile? Because we are a network, we can connect things such as [remote] digital out-of-home screens and centralize the content management system in an ad server.

So, from an innovation perspective, we’re bringing a lot of network connectivity to those places.

You recently created an in-store retail media network. How’s it going so far?

It’s great. We wanted to first and foremost connect our own screens in 12,000 stores that are all around the United States for T-Mobile and Metro. That gives us the ability to control the message, control the content [and] control some select ad space that goes into the stores.

What would you point to as the biggest challenge facing the industry right now?

Without question, it’s always going to be measurement. You know, the way that we get messages out there is getting easier and easier and less expensive and less expensive, but measuring it is hard.

We do think that we have a unique place in that world to contribute to the measurement. You can’t create your own homework. So, we do want to work with third parties and syndicated research to be able to do that.

But the fact is, there are very few standards today as the media landscape is fragmented, starting with television and into every other line item on a plan. The measurement is fully broken. And in order to get large dollars that used to transact, like in broadcast television [for example], that measurement needs to be brought back and to be standardized. We can be a participant in that.

What do you think the outlook is on that? Do you see movement in the right direction?

The same technology that fragmented everything actually has the connectivity and the architecture to unify it from a measurement standpoint. It’s an industry problem that needs to be solved by the entirety of the industry. Not one walled garden, not one monopoly.

It has to be solved by a third party that has an unbiased approach to it. And I do think the technology is there to be able to get it done. In the TV space, ACR [automatic content recognition] data can do that on an unbiased level.

What’s your hot take or prediction for what’s next?

My big issue right now is that on average, it’s taking people between streaming apps 12 minutes to figure out what they want to watch next. And there’s no unbiased way to have a search and a recommendation engine for simple enjoyment when you’re sitting in a passively delivered television environment in a living room.

It’s much easier on a mobile phone. Can the mobile phone connect to the television to create a search recommendation engine that actually works and isn’t just the show in that app that that company made? You can either bring all those things together or you can put a layer on top that lets me find what I want.

And that hopefully will be the thing that grows this entire business exponentially in the next five years.