Growth Masterminds: mobile growth podcast

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...

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 da...

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 d...

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, a...

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 balanc...

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 Androi...

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...

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 kid...

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 t...

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...

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 accelera...

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 dec...

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 Mast...

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 Jonath...

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, CT...

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...

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...

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 SKAdNet...

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....

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 Attribut...

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 abou...

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...