TL;DR
- Growth depends on lasting customer value: Cheap acquisition is useful only when customers understand the purchase, receive the promised service and keep paying.
- Payments and identification must evolve together: RCS, phone number verification, cards, wallets and bundles offer new routes to customers, requiring testing and operator cooperation.
- Relevance is the industry’s advantage: Local knowledge, distinctive content and useful personalisation can build stronger businesses when acquisition, billing and customer support share the same evidence.
|Check out all the session videos and interviews from Telemedia Marbella 2026 here and here|
There was a question running through Telemedia Marbella 2026, even when nobody asked it directly: what happens after we have persuaded somebody to click?
For years, this industry has been exceptionally good at getting people through a short journey and into a paid service. That remains a valuable skill. But the conversations in Marbella showed how much more of the business now needs to be visible before we can call that acquisition a success.
Does the customer know what they bought? Can they use it? Can we bill them? Will they want to pay again? And, if something goes wrong, does anybody in the chain know quickly enough to fix it?
Taken together, the discussions about cheap traffic, subscriptions, header enrichment and Africa – along side the other sessions on LatAm, payments and gaming – point towards a more demanding phase of telemedia growth. We have the tools to acquire customers at scale, the industry now needs to connect those tools to businesses worth staying with.
Measurement matters
The most immediate lesson was about measurement. Mesh’s Christopher Henseler made the point that looking at CPA and cheap acquisition is no longer enough. Overdrive Digital’s Kilian Espana pushed the same argument further into the subscription lifecycle: use early billing signals, then examine what those customers contribute after 30, 60 and 90 days.
This sounds obvious, yet it requires a substantial change in how agencies, merchants, aggregators and operators work together.
An agency can beat its acquisition target while delivering customers who never generate enough revenue to recover the spend. A merchant can buy more of that traffic because the dashboard looks healthy. An operator can then encounter the complaints, with nobody joining the three pictures together until the damage is done.
Marbella’s message was that these results must become part of the same conversation. Successful billing, renewals, cancellations, refunds and complaints belong alongside clicks and conversions.
There is a financial reward for doing that properly. Businesses can afford to pay more for customers who generate more value. The cheapest sign-up is only a bargain once we know what follows it.
Don’t just rely on AI
But there was an equally important warning about the rush to feed everything into AI. Aurora Digital’s Smitha Mathew described customers appearing less valuable because billing systems had failed. That is a technical problem. Treating it as evidence of poor targeting risks asking the advertising algorithm to solve the wrong thing.
AI can help identify anomalies, examine performance and find patterns. It still needs somebody to establish what those patterns mean. Failed payment, failed service access and a customer choosing to leave are different events.
Google’s participation in the sessions was useful precisely because it connected the industry’s commercial questions to campaign tools. Analytics, audience data and value-based bidding offer ways to improve decisions. They cannot supply missing knowledge about whether the product worked or why the customer stopped paying.
The industry’s next investment should therefore include the plumbing between partners: useful reporting, prompt error alerts and access to information that allows action. Another acquisition channel achieves little if the billing fault remains undiscovered for a fortnight.
In trust we, err, trust
That brings us to trust. Much of the subscription discussion came back to purchase awareness. Espana’s phrase, “The ad is the onboarding”, deserves to stay with us. The customer relationship begins with the promise in the advertisement, including the price and the nature of the commitment.
Compliance can improve that relationship when it makes the purchase clearer. It may reduce headline conversion or increase acquisition cost, but a customer who knowingly buys something useful has a better prospect of becoming a valuable subscriber.
We should also be careful about celebrating retention without examining its basis. Somebody continuing to pay is not automatically somebody satisfied. A subscription that survives because the customer has forgotten it is a weak foundation for an industry trying to strengthen its standing with operators, regulators and consumers.
The aim should be a customer who knows the service, understands the charge and sees a reason to continue.
Header enrichment reassessed
The header-enrichment debate brought these issues into sharp focus. HTTPS creates difficulties for journeys still dependent on an HTTP identification step. Those difficulties are real, but defending the old mechanism indefinitely is unlikely to produce the strongest customer experience.
The solutions presented in Marbella offered useful directions. Amine Ennajih’s MENA experience showed that businesses can adapt when traditional header enrichment is restricted. Frank Arnold’s RCS subscription journey moves acquisition and confirmation into a visible messaging conversation. Frode Alvad’s work around phone number verification aims to combine secure identification with a short payment journey.
These approaches are at different stages. Mobile Business Engine’s German RCS rollout was newly live, without established performance results. Telenor Linx’s proposed browser and payment integration was still being developed. They need testing, integration and commercial proof.
Even so, their significance extends beyond replacing a broken step. Working over Wi-Fi could reach customers previously excluded from preferred acquisition flows. A messaging conversation could connect confirmation, service delivery and support. Secure verification could reduce reliance on copying SMS codes.
Those are reasons to develop better journeys, with operators actively involved in making them possible.
Payments evolution
Payment choice belongs in the same discussion. The subject of the NextGen Payment interview – why cards matter to telemedia payment flows – raises a question every merchant should answer: how much business are we leaving behind when the preferred rail cannot serve the customer?
DCB remains valuable. Cards, wallets and other methods can make the overall proposition more resilient. Our earlier payments discussion also explored how cards can support wider reach and recurring services alongside carrier billing.
Orchestration needs to mean more than displaying several logos at checkout. Each route has its own costs, settlement, failure modes and support demands. The useful combination is the one that lets the intended customer pay reliably while leaving the merchant a viable margin.
Africa showed particularly clearly why that combination must reflect local behaviour. Customers can want a service while keeping their money in a wallet or committing it to a communication bundle. Persistently trying to charge an empty airtime balance does not resolve that mismatch.
The response may be wallet billing, micro-priced access or content packaged with data. Those models alter distribution as well as payment. An operator promoting a bundle can change the merchant’s acquisition cost, making a smaller revenue share commercially workable.
But the Moroccan example discussed by Digital Virgo exposed the danger of assuming inclusion equals usage. If customers struggle to activate the content, the bundle has not delivered its promise.
The topic of Renxo’s interview on LatAm’s complexities belongs alongside that lesson. Regional expansion needs a country-level business case. Language, payment habits, distribution, operator relationships and commercial terms all need attention before a service is exported.
The same advice applies to Africa: visit the market, find a capable local partner and run the numbers.
Content is king
All of this eventually returns to the product. Better billing cannot give customers a reason to want uninteresting content.
The question framed by TuuT’s Gaming 3.0 interview – competing with the mega-platforms – is therefore fundamental. My view is that telemedia’s opportunity lies in knowing particular audiences and serving them well: relevant content, accessible pricing and distribution suited to the devices and connections available.
Short dramas, local entertainment and gaming came through in the Africa discussion because relevance creates demand. “Premium” is a judgement the customer makes.
Likewise, Sam Media’s hyper-personalisation interview topic raises the next challenge. Personalisation should make the service more useful after acquisition, as well as improve the advertisement that brings someone in.
There is little long-term advantage in finding the right person with extraordinary precision and then handing them the same generic experience as everybody else. The businesses best placed after Marbella will connect these disciplines. Their acquisition teams will understand billing and retention. Their payment partners will understand customer behaviour. Their content teams will learn from usage and support. Operators will help develop the journeys on which their shared revenues depend.
Telemedia has repeatedly adapted to technical disruption and changing commercial conditions. The next opportunity is to use that ingenuity to build relationships that last. Getting the first payment matters. Giving the customer a reason to make the next one is where the industry’s future will be earned.
