Effective audience targeting for both programming content and advertising has been a challenge throughout the history of commercial broadcasting, as well as later in pay TV and then online streaming. A whole industry grew up around use of return path data and serving recommendations or ads on the basis of user attributes, enhanced by exploitation of third-party data, with further iterations in the streaming era.

New challenges have arisen through more recent developments, notably the rise of mobile viewing combined with crackdowns against use of third-party data, particularly when collected and analyzed by temporary downloadable cookies. This has driven brands, advertisers and now video service providers towards first party data obtained directly from customers. That may come from web site interactions, social media online purchases, abandoned shopping carts, and other legitimate sources that do not infringe rules over privacy, transparency, and data locality.

As a consequence, a new industry has grown up around first party data, bringing concepts such as the data clean room, which although not entirely new has recently sprung to prominence and become a major platform for targeting micro segments of audiences inside the new rules. The analogy with clean rooms that have low levels of airborne particles required in semiconductor fabrication for example is rather lose because we are not talking about data hygiene in any sense.

Instead, the idea is to protect data against infiltration, abuse or breach of privacy, while still allowing as much analysis as possible. For video service providers such analysis is aimed at customer personalization, while targeting content and ads as effectively as possible. The idea is to exploit the power of first party data with its accuracy and direct relationship to the customer, while still harnessing the greater scale and range of third-party data as far as possible.

The data clean room is more like a virtual laboratory where multiple parties can pool their first party data and conduct analysis to their mutual advantage. This must avoid infringing data regulations in all the jurisdictions of the participating parties, which could embrace multiple countries around the world with different rules. This means clean rooms may have to be distributed to contain data within particular regions or countries to comply with data locality restrictions.

In practice this constrains the analysis and in particular restricts the degree of personalization that a broadcaster could derive from the pooled data, being confined perhaps to its own first party information. Data would have to be anonymized, with only the aggregated results made available to all the parties sharing the clean room.

Such analysis is still valuable for micro-segmentation of users with the help of contextual information, relating to the content being played out and other factors such as weather. These can also be combined with location for mobile viewers, which can enable targeting of ads on the basis of where the user is, featuring a restaurant, shopping area, or even museum, for example.

But broadcasters would like to combine this with individual user identification, if possible. This has prompted at least one major service provider to engage in an unusual development, which makes sense when this combination of first party data with user identification for direct targeting is taken into account.

This is the South African based telco and video streaming provider MTN Group, which operates across the Sub-Saharan region. The company set the stage early April 2025 by launching a streaming service across the whole region in conjunction with a London based cloud broadcasting technology provider. The objective was to cater for different monetization models while also tailoring the service to the diverse cultures and languages of the Sub-Saharan region.

Proposed monetization models included subscription tiers, ad-supported content, and free streaming models entirely funded by targeted advertising. As this suggests, personalization was desirable, both to cater for varying content tastes in an area with considerable cultural and linguistic diversity even within countries, and to enable effective ad targeting.

Therefore, MTN made an interesting move by developing technology for insertion of video clips inside basic SMS text messages. At first sight, this makes little sense because the whole mobile industry has been moving for years towards multimedia messaging in various directions.

Firstly, a multimedia extension of SMS was developed called MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). Introduced as early as 2002, MMS extended the core SMS to text messages longer than 160 characters in length, but crucially added multiple media, including single images or slideshows, audio, and up to 40 seconds of video.

Later various over the top multimedia messaging services arrived, such as WhatsApp, Snap and WeChat, which gained greater traction than SMS on account of being promoted by major platforms. Then in 2007 development began of Rich Communication Services (RCS) designed from the ground up as a unified protocol for instant messaging, defined by the GSM Association (GSMA) representing Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).

This was positioned as a replacement for both SMS and MMS in acknowledgement of shortcomings in both but has proved a slow burn itself. After various machinations, it was only in September 2024 that RCS really obtained lift off when Apple introduced support for it in its latest iOS 18.

RCS has been gaining momentum as a result, which again underlines the apparent strangeness of MTN’s investment in and commitment to this seemingly proprietary version of the same technology, embodied in SMS, rather even than the MMS extension. The answer lies to an extent in the particular situation in Sub Saharan African countries where internet access is still often patchy and at low bandwidth, with constraints over data volumes. But that is only part of the reason.

Rather than get bogged down in the details of these various multimedia messaging technologies, it is worth just noting they all require internet access to transmit cellular data. Indeed, RCS and MMS default back to SMS in the absence of this ability to send data over the cellular network. Likewise, OTT platforms such as WhatsApp also require internet access, and indeed one of their attractions is the ability to make multimedia calls over them without incurring voice charges.

Basic SMS messages by contrast are usually sent over existing voice channels on a store and forward basis through text message centers (SMSCs) and on from there to the recipient’s device. Even though voice and SMS are now carried over IP packets under 4G LTE and 5G, they are still separate from data carried over the internet.

Just to confuse matters a little, SMS messages can be encoded as data for transmission over the internet, in order to allow devices such as laptops and tablets that may not have cellular connectivity to send and receive them. But from mobile handsets, SMS is usually carried with voice.

This gives it ubiquity in the mobile realm, since just about all cellular networks and handsets support it. This was critical for MTN, but another factor came into play, the ability to harness first party data for targeting.

MTN Ads, the operator’s digital advertising arm, laid the ground for video SMS in 2024 with the launch of its Addressable Audience and User Identification (AAUI) services, in partnership with a specialist in that field called Novatiq. This in turn was motivated by South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPIA), which came into effect in July 2021, perhaps encouraged by the EU’s GDPR which came into force just over three years before that in May 2018. To comply with that act, AAUI applies machine learning to identify addressable audiences based on attributes such as ARPU (average revenue per user), device type, context, and location.

It allows users service providers to exploit first party data on behalf of advertisers while maintaining privacy to comply with PoPIA. They can target individual users with SMS messages carrying embedded video if desired, combining that with the other information gleaned on a statistical basis from multiple users with similar profiles.

Embedding video into SMS required no additional app or software component in the device, and the messages can be sent without internet access, providing there is a mobile signal. SMS messages can incorporate up to 2MB of video, enough for a 30 second clip or ad. This could include graphics, animated gif, content about products, how-to guides, or action replays, as examples.

MTN exploited its position as both mobile network and video service provider to develop video SMS, which could well serve as an example to other operators, especially in developing countries. A key point is that mobile messaging will increasingly be incorporated into streaming video services, including linear and on demand. At this stage, it is a proprietary system which requires collaboration between the mobile network and the video delivery platform, which in the MTN case are the same party.

Other operators around the world are already harnessing basic SMS for interactive targeted advertising for receipt of product or service information without video at this stage. Among these are several clients of a French video technology developer after it launched an interactive feature for its server-side ad insertion (SSAI) system. This allows viewers to click directly on banner ads within a video stream to elicit further information for receipt as either a notification or SMS text.

The French service providers existing SSAI customers are natural candidates for this feature, such as France’s most popular commercial TV network TF1 ultimately controlled by the Bouygues conglomerate. The dynamic ad insertion service is incorporated in the network’s TF1+ streaming service, where the interactive banner ads would come into play.

Video is a natural extension of such SMS or other interactive ad features in streaming services, and we can expect more of these to come into play, led by the likes of MTN and other customers of the French service provider, which include Canadian multiplay service provider TELUS, and US Spanish language news platform Comercio TV.