Mobile Dev Memo Podcast

On this week’s episode of the podcast, I am joined by  Rishabh Jain , the founder of  FERMÀT Commerce . Over the course of our conversation, Rishabh and I explore a potentially seismic shift in consumer behavior toward agentic discovery for e-Commerce and how specialized AI agents are beginning to mediate the relationship between brands and consumers. Among other things, we discuss: Why traditiona...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Adam Epstein , the co-founder and CEO of Gigi , an AI-enabled media manager for the Amazon DSP (disclosure: I'm an investor in Gigi). Adam is one of the foremost experts on the Amazon Gigi, and I invited him back onto the podcast to explore the evolving landscape of agentic commerce and Amazon's strategic positioning within it. We a...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Michael Morton , a Senior Research Analyst at MoffettNathanson who covers E-Commerce and Marketplaces. In our conversation, Michael and I discuss the potential for agentic commerce and why consumer adoption might be more limited than Silicon Valley expects. We explore the data surrounding consumer payment habits and the structural moats tha...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Gareth Glaser to explore the potential for a resurgence of the open web. Gareth is the CEO of Gamera and a long-time operator in the programmatic media space, having spent time at Appnexus and Magnite and having served as the PMC Chair at Prebid.js. We explore why the open web has lagged behind walled gardens like Meta and Google in perform...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Asad Awan , who leads monetization product and engineering at OpenAI. We explore the strategic foundations and product principles behind OpenAI's entry into the advertising space. My conversation with Asad focuses on how conversational AI shifts the advertising paradigm from transactional keyword matching to a deeper understanding of us...

Among the many disastrous consequences predicted of artificial intelligence is a jobs famine: widespread worker displacement that devastates the economy and brings about a second Great Depression. But that hasn't happened. In fact, the US economy is doing well and, with a 4.1% unemployment rate, operating roughly at full employment, despite other headwinds like persistent inflation. And while...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by my friend Nebojsa Radovic , the Senior Director of Mobile User Acquisition at Zynga and a battle-hardened mobile marketing veteran. In the course of our conversation, we discuss the evolution of mobile user acquisition from the era of manual campaign configuration to the contemporary operating environment of automated, AI-driven workflows....

The Conversions API, or CAPI, represents a revolutionary development in the digital economy: it allows any platform with sufficient scale to extend its advertising scope beyond local context into the broader and more commercially valuable function of behavioral advertising, entirely outside of the purview of a browser or operating system. In this episode, I provide a history of the CAPI and its ro...

This week's podcast episode is a long-form companion piece to an article I published last week: The privileged position of chatbot advertising . In this episode, I make the case for why the chatbot advertising model is differentiated from those of both search and social media, feed-based display, and why it benefits from greater targeting scope through the optionality and flexibility it can ut...

For the eighth installment of the MDM Mailbag series , I am joined by independent app growth consultant and advisor Thomas Petit . As a reminder: guests for MDM Mailbag episodes of the podcast are practitioners, and questions are sourced directly from the MDM community. Thomas and I discuss the current state of measurement, the necessity of incrementality testing, and the challenges of scaling cre...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Brian Albrecht , the Chief Economist at the International Center for Law and Economics. We explore the complex intersection of generative AI and labor economics, alongside a deep dive into the regulatory and economic implications of personalized pricing models. The podcast is tethered to two articles that Brian recently published: You are n...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Maor Sadra , the co-founder and CEO of INCRMNTAL , to discuss the current cycle of M&A in digital advertising and the industry-wide shift toward intelligence-based measurement. Maor is well-positioned to discuss this topic, as INCRMNTAL was recently acquired by Smartly . Maor and I analyze how acquisitions are moving away from simple in...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Offer Yehudai , the co-founder of Arya , to discuss the intersection of artificial intelligence and human intimacy. We explore the development of AI-driven companions designed to improve relationship health and the delicate balance between automation and human expertise. Among other things, we discuss: Whether the lack of human judgment in...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Michael Kaminsky , co-founder and co-CEO of Recast . We explore the rise of open-source Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) tools and the challenges of measuring modern ad spend. Among other things, we discuss: Whether open-source MMM libraries like Robyn and Meridian are truly unbiased tools or subtle instruments for big tech self-grading How mar...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Ananya Sen and Saharsh Agarwal to discuss their research on the impact of Google's AI Overviews on web publisher traffic. We explore the results of their field experiment, currently in pre-print , which utilized a custom browser extension to measure how generative search results influence outbound clicks and user satisfaction. The resul...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Tricia Han , CEO of Mistplay, and Sampsa Jaatinen , Chief Data and AI Officer at Mistplay , to explore the rapidly evolving world of rewarded user acquisition. We dive into how the rewarded model has matured from a niche Android-focused strategy into a primary growth engine for mobile gaming across both major platforms. Among other things,...

We discuss the transition of AI-native applications toward ad-supported monetization models. Among other things, we cover: Whether AI-native apps will follow the mobile gaming trajectory by adopting hybrid monetization models to reach massive global audiences How the high operational costs of AI inference necessitate a move toward ad-supported tiers to maintain sustainable profit margins Why the g...

The Prosperous Society is a three-hour, four-part series by Eric Seufert of Mobile Dev Memo that explores the political economy of artificial intelligence, grounded in the liberal tradition of the Western canon. Framed as an extended response to John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society , which serves as the intellectual foil for the series, The Prosperous Society makes the case that AI is...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by  Garrett Johnson  and  Shunto Kobayashi , professors at Boston University who have co-authored a paper titled  "Can privacy technologies replace cookies?  Ad revenue in a field experiment. " The paper quantifies the impact of Google's Privacy Sandbox on publisher revenue, user experience, and market competition through a field...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Olivia Kory , the CMO of Haus , to discuss the recent $1BN investment in AppsFlyer by Meta, Google, Unity, and Moloco, and the shifting landscape of mobile measurement it portends. We explore the strategic motivations behind major ad platforms banding together to ensure measurement neutrality and how the industry is moving toward more sophi...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Venkat Prabhu , Director of Product for Shop Campaigns at Shopify, to discuss the platform's evolution into a comprehensive marketing operating system for eCommerce merchants. We explore the major announcements from Shopify's Spring Editions , specifically focusing on how the platform leverages commerce data and AI to simplify adver...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Peter Stuart , the co-founder of Velora , an AI operating system for specialist publishers. Peter returns to the podcast to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of AI in journalism and to explore how editorial teams are integrating these tools into their daily operations. Among other things, we cover: How AI tools like LLMs can effectivel...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Adam Epstein , the co-founder and CEO of Gigi , to talk about Amazon’s strategic advertising advantages. Among other things, we discuss: The value of Amazon’s deterministic identity spine, which spans ninety percent of US households Whether Amazon can successfully transition its e-commerce data dominance into non-endemic categories like aut...

On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Danny Frankel , the founder of Punchup Live , a digital platform and ticketing ecosystem built for stand-up comedians. We explore how the economics of content distribution and audience building are being fundamentally rewritten. Danny provides a unique perspective on the shifting landscape of social media, the rise of clipping farms, and th...

The Prosperous Society  is a podcast series by Mobile Dev Memo that articulates an AI Bull Thesis for the digital economy. It argues that the pervasive application of AI to the digital economy will be broadly economically expansionary, leading to increased individual prosperity, expanded consumer choice, and greater human agency. In  Episode 4 , the conclusion to the series, I outline the AI-enabl...