How Anghami monetised the biggest first-party data pool in MENA

Challenge:

To take first-party data off-app, opening up an entirely new revenue stream through programmatic advertising.

Solution:

Cleaning, segmenting, and unifying the data that customers consent to share, before moving it to the demand-side platform (DSP).

Results:

Anghami uploaded 98 million registered user profiles to Tealium’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) in just ten days, with 55+ attributes per user, before pushing them to marketing platforms. On the demand-side platform specifically, Anghami matched 25% of their registered users through mobile ID which gives you unprecedented accuracy

“We hold the largest first-party data pool in the MENA region, and we know our listeners well through the data they consent to share with us. Rather than just sitting on that data, we wanted to monetise the one billion data points we collect per month, to keep serving more listeners and investing in the platform. A deployment of this scale understandably threw up new challenges along the way – migrating some 98 million files is no mean feat. However, we were able to overcome this hurdle through close collaboration with Tealium’s engineers and implementation team.

Now, as we are ramping up, we’re using Tealium’s CDP to identify more audience segments and attributes than ever. It’s a testament to the power of Tealium AudienceStream that Anghami can provide its programmatic advertising partners with deep insights into our premium audience while driving increased revenue for our platform.” Joubran Abdul Khalek Head of Commercial — Anghami

Founded ten years ago in Beirut, Anghami is the first legal music streaming platform and digital distribution company in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Since 2012, Anghami has expanded its services across MENA, offering its 98 million registered users over 72 million International and Arabic songs.

However, to continue serving the highest quality experiences to its expanding listener base, Anghami realised it needed to find new ways of monetising the data its customers consent to share.

To achieve this, Anghami approached Tealium with a unique proposition: to deploy our Customer Data Platform (CDP) purely for data monetisation purposes. Rather than using Tealium AudienceStream to build a new marketing platform, the deployment was designed to help advertisers find Anghami audiences ‘off-app’, in the programmatic world.

This unique approach enabled Anghami to monetise its broad listener base, which makes its first-party data pool the biggest in MENA. Until now, the only alternative for advertisers was paying numerous big tech companies a premium to access their ‘walled gardens’. Having to rely on data spread across multiple walled gardens can lead advertisers down unnecessary siloes that ultimately yield inefficient, fragmented, and costly results.

Anghami wanted to solve this problem by providing access to its vault of first-party data, within the confines of a CDP. As the first service of its kind in the region, the success of this revenue stream was to be centred on the type of data that listeners consent to share.

Since making the data more uniform and utilising ML, Anghami can assign over 55 attributes to each of its individual users – ranging from basic demographic data points, like gender, to contextual data, such as what type of music they prefer and the devices they use to listen to it. Through understanding these music tastes, Anghami offers rare insights into the mood and context of consumers in MENA – creating a premium audience for programmatic advertising.

Due to the unique use case and scale of the deployment, Tealium worked closely with Anghami on a proof-of-concept from the outset of the project. Initially, the partners developed a small sandbox to prove that when the data was uploaded to the CDP, it could be sufficiently cleaned, segmented, and made uniform to push to marketing platforms (such as Snapchat, Facebook, DV360, The Trade Desk, or any other marketing platform).

Anghami quickly found that the beauty of working with Tealium was the number of integrators that it provided to marketing platforms – including those Anghami already used and others it wished to use in future. Using AWS, Anghami uploaded all its user data safely, migrating about 10 million users a day across 10 days.

Of these, roughly 25% of profiles were matched on the programmatic DSPs, allowing Anghami to serve them ads on a device level. Processed in huge file sizes of 100,000 per upload, this represented one of Tealium’s largest uploads during the set-up phase in the MENA region.

Since the successful proof of concept, and signing up with Tealium in early 2022, Anghami recently finalised the deployment with its chosen, third-party implementation partner. It is now using Tealium’s CDP to clean and segment the audiences it reaches in-app, as well as discovering additional audiences off-app, opening a new revenue stream.

Download PDF