Growth Masterminds: mobile growth podcast

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...

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 & Audi...

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 - h...

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...

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...

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...

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 in...

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...

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 emerg...

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 Gro...

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 con...

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 addit...

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 playab...

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 relea...

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 p...

Singular 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 episod...

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...

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 the...

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...

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 neve...

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 ge...

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: &nbsp...

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 n...

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 o...