AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is planning to offer customers new ways of reducing their bill by up to $10 per month by offering wireless phone plans that will be partially paid for by ads.
AT&T introducing a plan that could save subscribers $10 per month
In a recent interview, AT&T CEO John Stankey gave insight on how advertising can play a vital role in reducing the cost of wireless phone bills. Stankey said that a segment of customers who were offered a choice will take some advertising to save between $5 and $10 off their monthly mobile bill. However, subscribers will still pay a huge percentage of their bill. According to Stankey, AT&T is planning to introduce these subsidized plans in a year.
Although ads are not that popular on mobile phones despite Sprint and Virgin Mobile’s efforts, AT&T thinks they can do better than competitors through enhanced targeting of ads. Most importantly, targeting will mean knowing more about a user, which suggests that better tracking. The company will personalize ads to subscribers identified across various devices, which is a strategy that will help the carrier sell add for extra money.
AT&T working on unique identifiers for targeted ads
AT&T engineers are already creating unified subscriber identifies, which will enable markets to identify users in different devices to target their ads. The identifiers will provide more information about the customer, and for the subscribers, the question is whether they will like targeted ads returning $5-$10 per month.
Stankey also revealed that the company will also profit from an ad-supported version of the HBO Max video streaming service from next year. This will be a foundation before the launch of the phone plans supporting ads. The company’s ad business, called Xandr, uses outside data to personalize ads, but it could face legal scrutiny in the long-term over privacy concerns. The CEO admitted that he doesn’t know whether AT&T will use outside data for targeting ads in perpetuity.
