MMA’s Business Impact Index recognizes the region’s marketing industry’s top brands, agencies, and solution providers who are driving significant business impact through modern marketing campaigns. The methodology developed in collaboration with WARC determines business impact. Locally-established data mining platform, MEmob+ UAE has been ranked second in line with InMobi Saudi Arabia.

MEmob+ entered the digital ad world in 2016 as a mobile ad provider. Today, the platform has evolved into a full-service data-driven, and location-based solutions provider. It uses data to enhance and activate crucial marketing insights for its clients through contextual and location-driven products.

To further understand MEmob’s business strategy and solutions, Communicate interviewed Co-founder and CEO, Ihab El Yaman.

Empowering brands with data

As a data-driven platform, MEmob+ helps brands and advertisers enrich and enhance their audience database by helping them maintain billions of unique addressable profiles. “We believe that precise decision-making for a marketing strategy should be driven by data and its inference,” says El-Yaman.

What according to El-Yaman makes MEmob+ different is its ability to navigate across all platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and Google. “All these platforms derive data internally. Brands & advertisers monitoring data internally will see this as a challenge as they cannot obtain a cross-channel report. That’s where we come in, we can help them derive data from all the existing big mammoths and also from contextual targeting, which might even be through data collected offline. This is very unique to MEmob+ as it dives into people’s mobility and location in compliance with the privacy laws of the region,” he explains.

The data solutions provider aggregates insights from a pool of resources with accuracy to help its clients identify consumers who align best with their brand’s identities before sending an ad.

“Take a customer who goes to the gym four times a week. Other data sources might want him to see an ad from Barcelona on Facebook just because he’s a sports enthusiast. But, with our enhanced approach, we’ll look into other possibilities such as does this person only enjoy watching football or does he enjoy playing it as well. Is he even a football fan? If not what kind of sports does he enjoy?” explains El-Yaman.

Connect. Plan. Maintain. Enhance

MEmob’s various data analytics programs help advertisers and brands first connect with the right consumers then plan their next strategy and then enhance their approach respectively.

“We kickstart with a consulting session, putting together a plan for our clients. That’s another aspect unique to MEmob+ because existing platforms like Google and Meta don’t do that. With a plan in place we support with the launch and then provide clients with options to track footfall – be it online or offline,” says El-Yaman.

MEmob+ scooped a gold award for Nike’s ‘Start Fresh’ campaign in the Consumer Promotions Category at the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) Smarties Awards.

The platform’s ‘Start Fresh’ campaign for Nike tackled the challenge to boost sales during Ramadan. Using geo-fencing technology, Nike tracked 2.2 million impressions with 1.2 million unique users. With a target to reach out to goal-oriented sports enthusiasts for achieving foot traffic to Nike stores in the UAE, MEmob+ drove sales worth over 7 million at the Nike UAE stores.

Effective and efficient use of data

The pandemic saw a dramatic shift in budget allocations and the marketing mix for brands and advertisers across the region. In the post-pandemic world, speculation on where to invest still remains. Scott Turner, CMO at BERA, a brand technology platform, explains in an article for Forbes how brands in the post-pandemic era need to set up ongoing data collection on brand metrics that matter – such as familiarity, regard, meaning, and uniqueness.

El-Yaman explains how MEmob+’s solutions help its clients drive a greater ROI as compared to them taking a separate data approach for every platform, “While programmatic social platforms help clients customize their audience and run campaigns, they don’t connect with each other. The challenge faced by brands and advertisers alike today is jumping from one platform to another to obtain insights. But, when you come to MEmob+, we provide efficiency in the form of detailed research across all these platforms which we experiment on. For instance, if someone receives the same ad on Facebook and Snapchat and only engages with it on Snapchat, MEmob+ will no more roll the ad out on Facebook to the same user, thus, eliminating the budget for the ad on Facebook. This is how we ensure a greater ROI.”

“Moreover, our entire ecosystem allows us to carry out A/B testing once we have cleared the core KPIs of our clients. This is in order to understand each impression as a customer. Because we have our data segmented we are able to stand out, whether that be through engaging ads or dynamic creative executions. This recognition by the MMA’s Business Impact Index helps us convey the message to the communications market that we are a 360 data solutions consultancy.” he concludes.