Growth Masterminds: mobile growth podcast

Privacy Sandbox is by all accounts more complicated than SKAdNetwork ... even SKAN 4. But Singular says "we will do everything for the UA managers."

The bad news is that to make Privacy Sandbox work, you need to set sources, register triggers, get big aggregated reports from upper funnel activities and much smaller lower funnel reports. You need an aggregation server and the ability to decrypt encrypted data. You need to accept the fact that Google will be adding noise to the data to increase privacy. And much more.

But the good news is that Singular -- and the adtech ecosystem at large -- will handle almost all of this complexity for you.

ALMOST all.

In this Growth Masterminds, host John Koetsier chats with Singular chief architect Yuval Carmel and architect Ron Shub. They all dive into Privacy Sandbox on Android and get you the information you need to start thinking about how you'll handle Privacy Sandbox when it gets fully implemented and deployed.

Tiny X buttons. Phantom clicks. Endless countdowns before you get back to your game.

How can we make mobile ads suck less?

In this Growth Masterminds, host John Koetsier chats with Francesco Renzo, former Googler and current VP at Moloco, the AI-powered performance ad network.

They chat about:

- the mobile ad problem

- the risk factor if mobile ads suck too much

- the causes between ad networks, publishers, and advertisers

- how we fix it

- what advertisers can do

- what publishers can do

- and ... measurement in the era of privacy (and sky-high click-through rates)

What does a DSP do? And how will it change when they no longer have IDFA or GAID to do it with?

In this Growth Masterminds host John Koetsier chats with longtime adtech and martech thought leader and current InMobi head of product marketing, Sara Camden.

They chat about:

- what DSPs even do :-)

- how DSPs work under SKAN (and Privacy Sandbox)

- the transition to SKAN 4

- and much more ...

60% of in-app subscription cancellations happen in the first 60 minutes ... but there's a way to 10% of them back.

In this Growth Masterminds host John Koetsier chats with Apphud cofounder Renat Kurbanov. Every app marketer wants more subscription revenue, but how do you achieve that?

In this episode, we chat about:

- the core challenges to driving subscription revenue

- typical and most successful flows to drive more subscription revenue

- optimizing free trials

- managing auto-renews properly

- ARPAS … what it is, and why it matters

- subscription fatigue in a down economy

Can you make money by running fewer ads? Gaming OG Adam Jaffe says yes.

In this Growth Masterminds, we chat about bad ads, bad ad experiences, and how not to run ads in your games and apps. We also chat about the declining ROI of increasing numbers of ads in your app.

Adam was formerly with Jam City, was the CEO of Tenko Games, is a former CMO of an edtech company, sits on advisory boards for multiple companies including Dataset and INCRMTL ... and is now founder and CEO of Mega Studio, a gaming agency that designs, builds, analyzes, and monetizes games.

SKAN 4 tools are now live in the Singular dashboard. Clients who want to set up and start testing SKAdNetwork 4 compatible campaigns can now do so live in the Singular dashboard.

That means you can now set up conversion details for each postback: postbacks 1, 2, and 3. Both revenue and events models are now available; additional models and mixed conversion models will soon also be live.

And good news: this is fully backwards compatible with SKAN 3, so it won’t interfere with any ongoing live campaigns.

What if you could take a microscope to some of the biggest and best companies in your space, peer inside, and see exactly what they spend for user acquisition and marketing? Would that be useful data? That's exactly what Clement Favier, Chief Operating Officer at Adikteev has been doing for massive gaming companies like Netmarble, SciPlay, and Aristocrat, owner of Product Madness and Big Fish Games. In this Growth Masterminds, we chat about UA spend, how to find it across verticals and companies you care about, and why UA cost is more than just the dollars you spend directly on app installs.

What does it take to win in user acquisition in 2023? In this episode of Growth Masterminds we chat with Misplay chief growth officer Jason Heller about the new world of mobile user acquisition on iOS in 2023: - what works - what's changed - how marketers should navigate these new waters - how ad networks need to adapt as well We also learn a little bit more about Misplay, which was a surprise strong finisher in multiple categories of the 2023 Singular ROI Index, but is still (relatively) small and (relatively) unknown.

Mobile marketers have largely lost the IDFA, and are going to lose the GAID. But on the web, the 3rd-party cookie -- which will also go away -- is getting more investment.

In fact, according to Adobe, 64% of marketers actually plan to increase spending on 3rd-party cookie marketing this year. In this Growth Masterminds, we chat with Ryan Fleisch, Head of Product Marketing, Real-Time CDP & Audience Manager at Adobe about privacy and marketing.

That includes 3rd-party cookies, of course, but also device identifiers on mobile.

The question we pose for him: what is the solution to the post-identifier world of advertising and marketing?

Apple Search Ads is now in second place among top ad networks apps choose for user acquisition campaigns, at least for Singular clients. And according to Splitmetrics CMO Olga Noha, ASA campaigns help drive organic App Store optimization by as much as 4X.

In this Growth Masterminds, John Koetsier chats with Noha about:

- how important ASA is

- how important ASO is

- how ASA and ASO are related

- how Apple's newest ad units are performing

- what percentage of apps are running Custom Product Pages

- where in an app's lifecycle marketers should think about ASA

Why does livestream shopping work in China but not in the U.S. or Europe? And what is one big obvious opportunity that big brands are missing?

In this Growth Masterminds, host John Koetsier chats with MoEngage's VP of Strategy Vassil Mladjov. We chat about where livestream commerce is actually working, could work, and isn't. We also chat about what's different and why livestream commerce does work in China.

Key topics we cover:

1:27 3 minutes about Vassil

4:34 Livestream shopping: east vs west

8:57 Southeast Asia skipped the web

11:55 Cultural differences

12:28 Much bigger influencers in China

14:14 A massive opportunity for brands

14:38 Steph Curry's kicks

16:42 Siloed shopping

18:39 The huge Facebook opportunity

22:44 Live shopping with American characteristics

24:51 Amazon Live

29:29 Livestream commerce won't happen overnight

31:38 The bricks-and-mortar retail opportunity

With over a billion people on TikTok, there’s a lot going on. In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with M&C Saatchi’s Jennifer Sudo, who just completed a study on TikTok users.

What she found:

 Over 90% of TikTokkers buy or are willing to buy products they see on TikTok

TikTok can make the most mundane product go viral

TikTok ads shouldn’t really be ads at all

Authenticity wins

TikTok is evolving into something like Home Shopping Network or QVC

TikTok is the new Google for millions of young people

How do you pick the right MMP? Are there major differences between MMPs? Do you even need a mobile measurement partner in the age of SKAN and (soon) Privacy Sandbox on Android?

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with UA expert and consultant Matej Lancaric about the evolving role of MMPs and things to look for when you need one.

(And yes, we also chat about when you need to get an MMP.)

Whole generations of mobile marketers have cut their teeth on growth in the grand old times of (nearly) free money from venture capitalists, resulting in huge budgets that could be deployed and deterministically measured. Those times are over, so how do you grow when growth is hard? You become a cockroach app.

Cockroach apps survive the nuclear apocalypse when nothing else does because they focus on the fundamentals, says Tynker chief growth officer Lomit Patel.

“If you look at the past 5, 6, 7 years, there was such an over-index emphasis on growth at all costs, right?” Patel, who is the former VP for growth at IMVU and led direct marketing at Roku, says. “It was really cheap to get money at that time, especially in startups. So it was really about just buying your way to growing as quickly as possible.”

So what do you do?

Well, for starters, listen to (or watch) this episode of Growth Masterminds, brought to you by Singular.

Where is location-based gaming right now? Pokemon Go is a massive hit, and Niantic is trying to follow it up with NBA All World, but what else is happening?

And, are we going to turn the world into a laser tag theme park?

In this episode of Growth Masterminds we chat with Beau Button, the president and CTO of Atlas Reality. Button is making a location-based game with play-to-earn mechanics that incorporates web3 thinking without blockchain. 

We also chat about growth, user acquisition, and much more ...

CTV. OTT. Streaming media. Connected TV. Whatever you want to call it, there's a huge amount of growth in CTV.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with Guillaume Lelait, managing director Americas at M&C Saatchi Performance about the growth to date, future growth, and advertiser opportunities in CTV.

Along the way, we hit the biggest players, the industry structure, how advertisers are structuring calls to action, and how to measure ad impact and results on connected TV. Players we chat about include Disney+Netflix, HBO Max, YouTube TV, Roku, Amazon Prime Video, Apple, Hulu, Crackle, and more ...

How do you build web3 in 2023, after the boom and after the bust? 

In this Growth Masterminds host John Koetsier chats with Dan Reynolds from  First Light Games, Jon Hook, the CMO of PlayEmber, and Quinn Campbell, the VP Growth at Sky Mavis, makers of Axie Infinity.

After the hype, after the Discord and Telegram, after the influencers ... where do you go for growth? And what is the emerging web3 growth stack?

We chat about:

- new web3 growth strategies

- old web2 growth strategies

- wallet relationship management

- web3 attribution

- and different kinds of users/owners/players in web3 environments

Mobile user acquisition is great. But for many apps it's not the problem.

The problem: most apps’ retention rates are the bad news. If your app is a leaky bucket, pouring users out as fast as you dump them in, you're wasting tons of marketing dollars.

But what if you could double retention, 2Xing standard industry mobile app user retention rates? How would that change your UA strategy?

In this Growth Masterminds, host John Koetsier chats with Storyly VP Daniele di Nunzio. Storyly works with McDonalds, Domino’s, SoulCycle, and many more brands to drive deep user engagement.

And, of course, to improve in-app user retention.

Apple just released SKAdNetwork 4, or SKAN 4. In this special episode of Growth Masterminds, Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv walks us through all the details released so far AND, crucially, what they mean for mobile marketers on iOS.

More postbacks - good!

More complexity - true.

More opportunity - also true.

Gadi and host John Koetsier chat about SKAdNetwork version 4's new postbacks, new lockable conversions, new random timer delays for postbacks 2 and 3, and how Apple's crowd anonymity works.

They then take questions from a LinkedIn Live audience on what this all means, how it will all work, and how the ecosystem will adjust, adapt, and implement everything in SKAN 4.

In this crosspost from the TechFirst podcast, we chat with Unity CEO John Riccitiello about Unity's latest gaming report. 

Riccitiello talks about monetization of multiplayer games, which have much higher paying player rates than just about any other kind of games or apps. We also chat about the ironSource acquisition, the first game he played, and how he sees the metaverse evolving.

In addition, we touch on 2022: what's happening now after 2 years of explosion in the global gaming industry.

Somewhere around 2016 someone created the first playable ad ... a mini-game you could enjoy, and an ad that didn’t suck.

Last year, according to a Liftoff report, “playable ads were the most effective ad format” in every month other than September, when they tied with another format.

That makes sense: you're generating engagement with the ad. It's fun. Sometimes it's tied to a reward, and a playable ad often shows something of what the advertised app is all about.

BUT there's been a big problem

Playables have been hard to create. Slow. Expensive. Inflexible. Hard to use with user-generated content. Hard to use with influencers.

Could there be a solution for that? Should you be looking harder at playables? Could they even solve for some of the targeting that privacy is removing?

In this Growth Masterminds, we're sharing a LinkedIn Live host John Koetsier did with CRAFTSMAN+ CEO Alex Merutka.

In the mobile app world … how do you know who’s winning? It is number of installs?

We know that can be a faulty measurement: one that's easy to game, and easily misleading. Apptopia knows this. Their job is providing competitive intelligence across the digital ecosystem, and isolated install counts won’t cut it. So they’ve teamed up with Digital Turbine to do something different

They’ve just released v2 of that “something different," the BRAG index. In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with 2 experts about what that is ... and what they’ve learned:

 - Tara Kirkpatrick, analyst for Apptopia

 - Gregory Wester, SVP and CMO for Digital Turbine

Behavioral targeting is dying. But how good can contextual targeting get?

In this episode of Growth Masterminds we chat with Remerge CEO Pan Katsukis about context advertising: where it works, where it's strong, and where it is weak.

We also chat about the psychology of contextual versus behaviorally targeted ads, the future of targeting, and how in some cases contextual target can use up to 100 parameters to get even better than behavioral targeting.

ingular just released Optimized Conversion Models for SKAN. Essentially, it's automated tech that continuously analyzes your SKAdNetwork set-up and tells you if it finds a better model that will get you more accurate data.

30-35% of marketers aren't using the most optimized SKAN conversion models, and in testing Singular has seen cases where a better model provides 60% better data.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds host John Koetsier chats with Singular product manager Evyatar Ram about the new feature, how it works, why it's important, and how it can help mobile marketers who are running mobile app growth campaigns for iOS.

In mobile adtech you have two giants (Google and Facebook) and 5-7 major competitors, which we've called titans, and then hundreds if not thousands of additional ad networks.

Unity shook up the adtech space yesterday by announcing a merger with ironSource, largely to get its mediation and publishing platforms, and to get access to more data.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, cross-posted from TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Unity CEO John Riccitiello about why he pulled the trigger, and what Unity expects to gain by acquiring ironSource.

We have SKAdNetwork from Apple. We have Privacy Sandbox from Google. We have ID5 and Unified ID 2.0 and the IAB's Project Rearc.

In short, we have many diverse solutions now competing for the future of marketing measurement. Plus, of course, IPA, or Interoperable Private Attribution from Facebook ... errr ... Meta.

What is it?

How does it work?

Should you be thinking about it?

And ... with all these different methodologies, how can marketers actually measure results across the board? Don't we need a United Nations of measurement to make this all make sense?

We chat about all these questions with Singular CTO Eran Friedman.

Privacy Sandbox on Android is out and it looks good. But there's still a lot of questions about how advertisers, ad networks, and MMPs will work together. 

If the industry can't find a way to innovate in tandem, we risk having confusing data and unclear insights from marketing campaigns that won't enable proper measurement or optimization.

In this episode of the Growth Masterminds podcast, we chat with Singular product manager Jonathan Chen, who's working on ways of solving Privacy Sandbox on Android for the industry, including how we can ensure that we don't get siloed attribution (where multiple ad networks claim credit for a conversion and advertisers don't know whether they should credit one, or both, or neither) and coordinating aggregation keys so that advertisers, ad networks, and measurement partners can make sense of the aggregated privacy-safe data Google will be releasing.

We chat solutions, integrations, results ... and what still needs to be figured out.

A level playing field for ad channels? Retargeting built into the OS? Multi-touch attribution (very) light? 

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with ironSource VP Yevgeny Peres about Privacy Sandbox for Android. There's plenty we don't know yet, but Peres has already seen multiple things in the new mobile marketing measurement framework from Google to get excited.

There's new never-seen-before functionality for marketers. There's a level playing field for ad networks, Peres says, and much more ...

SKAN or SKAdNetwork has a major problem. Less data, less timely data, less granular data ... OK, it has many problems.

One particular issue: zeroed-out conversion values because there's simply no revenue data to report.

Singular's mixed models for SKAN fixes that, by allowing mobile marketers measure revenue and a combination of other conversion models to ensure that no matter what happens, you get data back.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we do a deep dive into what the problem is, and how mixed models fixes. In other words, how to make SKAdNetwork ... work.

In this special episode of Growth Masterminds, Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv and John Koetsier connect for an in-depth discussion on Google’s Android Privacy Sandbox announcement. What we cover:

✅ A breakdown of what exactly Google announced
✅ Details of how mobile attribution will work with Privacy Sandbox
✅ Predictions on the future impact on the ecosystem and app marketers

Topics include:

 - the biggest change
- how this ranks next to Apple's ATT
- is the sky falling?
- attribution under Privacy Sandbox
- SDK Runtime
- Google Referrer
- Lack of user consent
- Topics and Fledge
- and ... the future of mobile marketing measurement

Why does a game publisher buy an ad network? What does it bring them? And what is behind this current frenzy of mergers and acquisitions that we're seeing in mobile adtech?

Good questions!

So I asked Zynga and Chartboost. Our conversation happened to be a couple of weeks before the news broke that Take-Two Interactive was buying (errr, acqui-merging) Zynga, and the answers are even more relevant now that that's happened. In this Growth Masterminds we chat with  Zynga Chief Product Officer Scott Koenigsberg and Chartboost CEO Rich Izzo.

Your host, of course, is John Koetsier.

Mobile marketers can live with many of the deficiencies of SKAdNetwork: lack of granularity, lack of immediacy, lack of data richness. But they can't live without predictability. Predictability enables confidence in campaigns and massive capital deployment.

BUT ...

Mobile growth experts have had major challenges making SKAN predictable. As many as 90% of mobile marketers can't get what they need out of SKAdNetwork.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with Singular CTO Eran Friedman, who has worked with many massive clients on SKAN and iOS campaigns, on how to achieve predictability with SKAdNetwork.

There's been a ton of change in adtech in 2021. I'm not even sure we know precisely what an ad network is anymore, but we're certainly seeing the rise of a set of new titans of adtech in mobile, companies like Liftoff+Vungle, ironSource, Unity, Applovin, Digital Turbine, and InMobi.

What's driving the growth?

Is it good for mobile marketers?

And, what should we expect from mobile adtech companies in 2022?

To dig into all these questions, we chat with the CEO of Liftoff, Mark Ellis. Of course, since the merger with Vungle, he's now the CEO of Liftoff+Vungle, or whatever they're going to call the new company, Mark's not just the CEO, he's also the founder, and has a deep history in adtech and mobile.

NOTE:

This episode of Growth Masterminds is cross-posted from another podcast: TechFirst by John Koetsier.

If you’re doing mobile marketing on iOS, you pretty much have to use Apple’s SKAdNetwork. But SKAN has serious issues, including privacy-focused censorship thresholds: You don’t get all the data, so you can’t determine device-level granular marketing performance.

That means you can’t get great ROAS and ROI data ... and that makes optimizing advertising hard.

Now, there might be a solution using data science and machine learning to model the missing conversions and re-surface the missing data.

To check it out, we’re chatting with Singular product manager Evyatar Ram.

What can we learn about the future of mobile from China?

The Chinese mobile market is the largest on the planet, and has uniquely Chinese characteristics: super apps, social livestream shopping, key opinion leaders and fan economies, and more.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with Moonie Zhu, co-founder of ETOC (E-commerce to China) about the Chinese market, how to enter it, what's different, what we can learn from it, and more ...

We chat with InMobi CEO Abhay Singhal on Epic vs Apple, IDFA and iOS 14.5, and especially the company's new InMobi Telco on-device platform.

"There are over 800 telcos in the world and each one, if you talk to them today, has an ambition of becoming a large media company," Singhal says.

We're seeing on-device ad platforms achieve significant success, with companies like ironSource Aura, AppNext, and Digital Turbine scoring very high on the 2021 Singular ROI Index. Most of them include on-device app discovery via a persistent experience on new devices and a set-up wizard upon activation. They can tie into the home and/or lock screens, and offer live updates on new apps to try.

We also chat about IDFA and iOS 14.5, the Epic Games vs Apple legal settlement impacting third-party payment options on iOS, and much more ...

0:00 On-device app discovery

3:10 Lock screen and home screen ads

5:09 Telcos as media companies

8:11 Custom version of Android?

9:32 iOS 14 and IDFA

14:40 Apple vs Epic Games

Monetization and retention can seem like the opposite ends of a continuum ... a zero-sum game where focusing on monetization kills retention.

Not necessarily, says AppLike CEO Jonas Thiemann. AdJoe, one of their brands, has a unique ad placement that earns players money for installing and playing games they're interested in ... including the game they saw the ad in.

He says it's the perfect balancing of incentives between users, publishers, and advertisers, and that's why 80 out of the top 100 grossing apps on Android are using AdJoe, users are making $20-20 a month, and some publishers are taking home six-figure paydays daily.

First-party data? Content fortresses? Incrementality?

2020 was crazy for everyone. 2021 is crazier for mobile marketers, who are facing complete disruption in how they keep score, measure success, and report on growth.

Attribution's not gone, but it is changing. You still get some last-click data in iOS with SKAdNetwork, and of course on Android, but it's less clear, less direct, and -- for Android -- probably not long-lived. What other data do you have to measure the impact of your marketing?

That exactly what we chat about with Tinuiti's Liz Emery ... possibly the smartest agency-based marketer. We chat about iOS 14.5, Android 12, Facebook AMM (advanced mobile measurement) deprecation, opportunities, media mix modeling, incrementality, first-party data, mergers & acquisitions, and much, much more.

We end with this: what will remain true in marketing ... regardless of technology, data, and regulation changes?

0:00 Everything is broken

1:49 Attribution + more data

5:04 In-app analytics for marketers

6:28 Historical data for marketers

8:28 Flight to Android?

10:39 Facebook Advanced Mobile Measurement (AMM)

14:02 Android app set ID and more

16:19 First party data

18:12 Mergers & acquisitions & content fortresses

22:06 Owned media, lifecycle marketing, social

23:52 Agencies and mobile marketing

27:37 Liz rocks

We’ve had more billion-dollar adtech acquisitions in the first quarter of 2021than in the previous several years combined, according to LUMA.

What’s going on?

Could it be … all the talk of third-party cookie deprecation? The reality of the IDFA apocalypse? New levels of competition? Changing marketing channels and opportunities? Or … a new emphasis on platform services and first-party data?

We’re going to find out.

Vungle is part of this acquisition frenzy. Vungle has acquired no fewer than 4 companies in the past 9 months, including, most recently, JefFuel, an influencer marketing platform. Today we’re chatting with Vungle’s SVP of Revenue, Scott Silverman, about why.

Many mobile marketers are less than happy with Apple's new iOS 14.5 and SKAdNetwork, Apple's privacy-safe mobile advertising attribution framework. 

But developers and publishers of kids' apps are not among them.

In fact, SKAdNetwork might just be the best thing that's happened to kids' apps. Now, as Kidoz co-CEO Eldad Ben Tora says, marketers can actually do user acquisition at scale for kids' apps. And publishers can monetize safely via ads.

In this podcast ...

0:00 Intro

0:44 Kids' apps market size

5:17 What is Kidoz?

11:38 User acquisition for kids apps

15:01 Marketing to kids vs parents

17:38 Monetization of kids' apps

23:06 Integration with Singular

25:00 Why focus on kids?

Now.gg is launching a new cloud gaming service. And while there are dozens of startups and giant tech companies doing the same, Now.gg is from Bluestacks, which has over 500 million users play Android games on the web.

Now gaming is moving to the cloud.

And that means huge changes for marketers and user acquisition specialists. While it's early days, being able to market a game by sharing a link that someone can start playing a game with instantly is an entirely different ball game than marketing an Android or iOS app.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds (check out the audio podcast!) I chat with Ben Armstrong, a Bluestacks and Now.gg VP, about the new service, about what it means for mobile, and about how marketers can take advantage of it.

Check the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXJmxzOOaFk

Check the story here: https://www.singular.net/blog/cloud-gaming-user-acquisition/

The list of Western apps that have made it big in China is not long. There are some great games on that list, including ones from major studios Supercell and Riot Games. Games like Cut the Rope and Fruit Ninja made the cut, and Subway Surfers and PUBG are big globally as well as in China.

But as Josh Burns explains, it’s probably easier to list the apps that failed.

He has a lot of experience with apps in general and China in particular. 

As a former exec at 6waves and EA and founder of DigitalDevConnect, Burns has helped launch games for Kabam, Nexon, and Atari. He’s managed games with IP from Disney, Starz, Eminem, and the BBC. Now, among a few other things, Burns helps top grossing mobile games enter the China market.

I chatted with him recently, and along with a lot of advice about what NOT to do, he shared 12 keys to success in bringing mobile apps to China. 

Here’s his best insight about taking apps and games from the west and bringing them east. If you'd prefer to read this than watch this, the 12 keys are available on the Singular blog:

https://www.singular.net/blog/mobile-app-success-in-china/

What is happening in the mobile adtech ecosystem?

Is it the rise of platforms? The need for size to fight the heavyweight contenders of mobile advertising? Consolidation to accumulate and stockpile more first-party data in an era of increasingly scarce second and third party information? Or just a need to acquire revenue on the path to going public?

Whatever it is, we are seeing a massive acceleration in mergers and acquisitions in the mobile marketing and adtech ecosystems. Applovin bought Adjust, Vungle bought GameRefinery, Verve bought Nexstar. District M and Sharethrough. Magnite (formerly Rubicon) bought SpotX just a few months ago … and, of course, the ink has barely dried on the $400 million Digital Turbine acquisition of AdColony.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with Offer Yehudai, president at Fyber, and Matt Tubergen, EVP corporate development and strategy at Digital Turbine about their deal ... and the wider implications in the ecosystem.

SKAdNetwork-compatible mobile ad inventory is hard to come by these days. Fortunately, Snap is ready, and Singular and Snap are announcing a joint solution for SKAdNetwork campaign measurement. 

For all the details, we check in with Singular product marketing manager Saadi Muslu in this episode of Growth Masterminds.

Perhaps even more interesting?

Like Facebook but unlike Google, Snap has decided to show the App Tracking Transparency prompt. And the results, according to our recent IDFA survey data, could be extremely important for the ecosystem as a whole.

All the details in the episode, or here in the blog post:

https://www.singular.net/blog/snapchat-skadnetwork/

Facebook automated app ads are smart and useful ads that take elements of creative you supply, mix and match them according to Facebook’s secret alchemy of advertising success, and automate the process of targeting, delivery, customization, and even — if you wish — setting budgets.

There’s one small problem.

You can’t analyze everything you might want to. 

In this brief episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with Singular product manager Evyatar Ram about how you actually can analyze Facebook AAA ads by country and creative assets simultaneously.

We are down to the short strokes now: Apple’s iOS 14.5 will roar in next week or soon after, changing mobile marketing on iPhone and iPad forever. But is the mobile advertising ecosystem ready? Is there SKAdNetwork-ready ad supply from mobile publishers? And how will MMPs, mobile web customer journeys, and deep links work?

In short: there are still a lot of questions.

I spent some time with Jonathan Chen, who leads Singular’s attribution product and manages integration with top partners, to answer these questions.

Can you fingerprint users in iOS 14? Or, in other words, use probabilistic attribution?

There’s been a ton of questions about this. Some vendors have said yes, and in fact there are some circumstances where fingerprinting is OK. But Apple has said fingerprinting is not OK in cases where people have not granted tracking permission.

So what’s OK, and what’s not?

We’re chatting with Eran Friedman, CTO of Singular, who’s been working with SKAdNetwork for the past six to nine months

What is App Tracking Transparency? When do you need to use it? Can you measure marketing effectiveness without it? How can you ensure you are ATT compliant?

Welcome to Growth Masterminds, with John Koetsier

There are a ton of questions about iOS 14 and Apple’s new IDFA rules, and ATT is at the heart of them. Today we are going to ask Singular CTO Eran Friedman all of them :-)

If you’re a marketer who is wondering how to navigate the new privacy-safe reality in Apple environments, Mixtiles is a good company to look to for insight:

 - Super-fast growth over the past few years

 - Hot D2C (direct to consumer) category

 - Heavily focused on iOS

 - Overwhelmingly multi-channel and multi-platform user journeys

 - Not dependent on IDFA

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with Mixtiles co-founder Eytan Levit, who shares his insight on mobile marketing now.

Singular CTO Eran Friedman talks about challenges with SKAdNetwork: getting enough supply side data, and ensuring you hit privacy thresholds to get data not just in number of total instals, but also total installs for each of several key parameters ...

In other words ... it’s about much more than getting, or not getting, the IDFA.

How do you get from Hello World to Clash of Clans?

Marketing analytics help you grow, but there’s different needs at different stages of development ... from just starting out ... to having a global big-money winner.

To dive into how those needs change over time, we’re chatting with Claire Rozain.

She leads UA at Product Madness, and has been at Match, Mappy, and multiple other brands before. And she's managed marketing from bare-bones in-the-garage all the way up to the biggest brands and the largest scale.

ROAS is perhaps the most foundational KPI in mobile marketing. The big question for 2021 is: can you still calculate ROAS in iOS 14?

“First and foremost, I think we should recognize that there is still … IDFA, because users might opt-in,” says Singular VP of product Alon Nafta. “But if we go to SKAdNetwork — which let’s assume is the common case — it’s not like you don’t have anything. The SKAdNetwork framework does give you a few elements that if used correctly ... advertisers can expect to get something sensible.”

Short version: yes.

Slightly longer version: there are some challenges.

True ROI calculation requires complete data. You've got data on your In-app purchase, of course. But most mobile publishers also have ad monetization data. The question is: how do you get all of it together … match it up … and figure out true ROI based on your actual cost of user acquisition?

To get more details, we’re chatting with Lisi Gardiner, Senior Product Manager for Analytics for Singular. And we'd better be fast: we're keeping her from weekend pizza and wine.

Every marketer would love to have a single source of truth. With iOS 14, SKAdNetwork is yet another source of marketing data to add to the long list.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with Singular's director of product marketing Saadi Muslu, who shares what Singular is doing to integrate this new data source with all the others.

One of the things Saadi mentions is the Mobile Attribution Privacy Group, a Slack group dedicated to plotting a privacy-safe path through all the new mobile attribution minefields. She also invites all listeners to join it.

Here's the link:
https://join.slack.com/t/mapworkinggroup/shared_invite/zt-9vlvhtzn-bqUVQ1zn3o1UorDNIodvZg

What does fraud look like in iOS 14 with SK ad network?

In this episode of Growth Masterminds we chat with Yonatan Komornik, the head of fraud prevention at Singular. You might think that since Apple cryptographically signs every install that is attributed via SKAdNetwork that iOS 14 could be fraud-free, but there are at least 3 ways fraudsters can still cheat app install advertisers.

We chat about each one, and then how to solve them ...

How do you manage, monitor, and optimize conversions in iOS 14 with SKAdNetwork?

Welcome to a special version of Growth Masterminds. Today, we're chatting with Ron Koenigsberg, the chief architect at Singular 

Our topic: customized conversions in iOS 14. In brief, we're talking about how to optimize for growth with SKAdNetwork by implementing Singular's smart conversion management.

We chat with Singular CTO Eran Friedman about SKAN, Singular's open-source framework for SKAdNetwork.

The key goals: 

 - identify the top challenges

 - maximize use of your 100 campaign IDs

 - manage the data from SKAdNetwork and bring it all together

 - reduce fraud

 - simplify conversion management ... and optimize conversion methodologies on the fly

 - combine SKAdNetwork data with IDFA data and data from other sources

 - and more!

How do pink cows, purple velvet shoes, and stone pillows help you beat the competition?

Well, they probably don't. But creativity will.

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with Lee Eisenhuth, who leads design at PeopleFun. They make games like Wordscapes. We also chat with Alice Guillaume, the Senior Director of Marketing at Applovin. She left a Wall Street job with Morgan Stanley to do something much more interesting: mobile marketing.

We chat about:

 - magic in marketing

 - process

 - A/B testing

 - luck

 - what ads work for clicks, and what ads work for conversions, and why they're different

 ... and much more!

Lomit Patel leads growth at IMVU. Before that, he led performance and digital marketing for Roku. He also ran customer acquisition at Texture, which Apple acquired and turned into Apple News+

At IMVU, Lomit cut customer acquisition cost by a factor of three. And, he's now recouping the cost of advertising 3X faster than before.

How?

Artificial intelligence, intelligently applied.

In this podcast episode, we'll chat with Lomit to learn what he did, how he did it, and what the results are. 

You've heard of walking softly and carrying a big stick? Allison Schiff talks softly and carries a massive stick ... with a great sense of humor. 

In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we take a peek behind the martech and adtech curtain with a reporter who's covering all the biggest stories in the space.

What we talk about:

 - You have a very broad view of the martech and adtech ecosystem, and what’s happening in it. It really feels like an era of major change right now with lots up in the air … the death of cookies, the threat to IDFA, increased legislation and demand for privacy … what are the major changes happening right now in your opinion?

- I want to chat about the ROI Index Singular just released. I’ll mention the name of a platform … you tell me what comes to mind ...
- TikTok
- Facebook & Google
- Apple Search Ads
- Amazon
- Twitter, Snap
- AdColony … Vungle … Liftoff … Applovin
- Unity

 - Sometimes you get to see behind the curtain of some major marketing platforms or ad networks. Tell us something we don’t know …

 - We’ve seen plenty of startups worshipping the goddess of growth-at-all-costs in the super-funded startups of the last few years, perhaps thanks to a cash-as-a-strategy effort by Softbank and others pouring money into a leading contender in the space. That seems to be changing now .. how do you think that will impact advertising and marketing?

 - What kind of advertising do you personally like? What works on you?

 - How do you see the marketing world changing in the next few years? And how do you want it to change?

Show notes and a transcript will be available at Singular's blog shortly.

Jayne Peressini started her career with Glu Mobile in London, then worked for Cisco, Razorfish, Reddit, and Machine Zone. She is now the senior director of growth marketing for DraftKings.

We talk about:

The state of adtech ... what's changing, what’s working, and what’s broken.

Fraud

Scaling ad spend

Safe ways to grow fast

Measurement and privacy

Attribution and incrementality

Metrics that matter

And ... her best advice for growth marketers … on messaging, advertising campaigns, building a team, when to scale, and how to scale.

We talk to Lauren Clinnick and Christina Chen of Lumi Interactive, a small games studio in Melbourne Australia about how they got the apps featured by Apple and Google six times ... and what that did for their business.

We also talk about growing a small studio, being a women in tech and in games, and how to know when it's time to scale your app.