Mobile Dev Memo Podcast

This episode focuses on an article titled The perilous mythology of Brand Marketing for digital products⁠, first published in November 2021. The episode proposes a taxonomy of performance marketing tactics, distinguishing between Direct Response, Delayed Response, and Brand marketing. It also outlines a framework for how all three can fit together into a unified strategy.

Thanks to the sponsor of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠INCRMNTAL⁠⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I discuss third-party cookie deprecation in Chrome, as well as Google's Privacy Sandbox suite of tools with Paul Bannister, the Chief Strategy Officer at Raptive.

Over the course of our conversation, we cover:

• The current state of third-party cookie deprecation in Chrome;
• Whether publishers are generally prepared for the full rollout of third-party cookie deprecation;
• Whether any components of the Privacy Sandbox are underrated, or will ultimately perform better than expected;
• Whether the Privacy Sandbox achieves an optimal balance across privacy preservation and advertising efficacy;
• If third-party cookie deprecation benefits the walled gardens;
• How publishers can test Privacy Sandbox;
• Whether Google will limit the functionality of first-party cookies, as Apple has done with ITP.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

My guest on this week's episode of the podcast is Tom Fish, the Head of Public Policy and Research at Gener8, a data empowerment platform for consumers. Tom is also the Director of Policy at the Coalition for Online Data Empowerment, an advocacy group.

But prior to these roles, Tom was an Assistant Director at the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which has taken an active role in competition regulation related to technology firms, which is the subject of our conversation. In our discussion, Tom spoke in a personal capacity that doesn't necessarily reflect the views of the CMA.

In this episode, Tom and I discuss:

• The purpose and role of the CMA;
• How the CMA is able to influence mergers between foreign companies or proposed policy changes from foreign companies;
• Why the CMA has taken on such prominence with situations involving American firms recently;
• Whether any sense of momentum or harmonization goes into decisions from competition authorities;
• How the need for competition regulation in the digital ecosystem changed over time;
• How competition regulators view "success" with respect to competition regulation and whether they have a clear idea of what kind of society-level impact they want to effectuate;
• What competition authorities generally do well when it comes to digital markets and what they do poorly.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Rishabh Jain, the CEO and co-founder of FERMÀT, an eCommerce platform designed to maximize advertising conversions for brands that recently raised a $17MM Series A led by Bain Capital.

In our conversation, Rishabh and I discuss, among other topics:

• The implications for retail and eCommerce from the impending deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome;
• Whether retailers and eCommerce brands are taking third-party cookie deprecation sufficiently seriously;
• Underappreciated knock-on / indirect consequences from the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome;
• The prospects for alternative identifiers;
• Who stands to gain the most from third-party cookie deprecation;
• Shopify's innovations, including Shop Cash and Shopify Audiences;
• Amazon's partnerships with Meta and Snap.

Thanks to the sponsor of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Ryan Anthony, the CEO of DIRT, an emotion analytics platform. Over the course of our conversation, we discuss:

• The science of emotion and the field of emotion analytics;
• The challenges of using focus group feedback to optimize early consumer products;

• The methodologies used to measure a user's emotional state;
• How emotion analytics can be used in a product use case;
• How the value of emotion analytics has changed as the digital privacy environment has grown more restrictive;
• How PMs can use emotion to make product adaptations and decisions.

Thanks to the sponsor of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

I speak with Ty Tinker, the Head of Analytics at AdQuick, on the topic of Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising measurement. Among other things, we discuss:

• The definition of Out-of-Home advertising
• On what timeline advertisers tend to adopt Out-of-Home advertising
• How Out-of-Home fits into a marketing strategy
• Which product categories see the most success with Out-of-Home
• Who in an organization tends to control Out-of-Home budget
• The media buying process for Out-of-Home

Thanks to the sponsor of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact Marketecture.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with ⁠Dr. Grace Kite⁠, the Founder and CEO of two companies: ⁠magic numbers⁠, a consulting and advisory firm that helps companies apply econometric models to their marketing measurement, and ⁠magic works⁠, a company that specializes in training related to the application of econometrics to marketing measurement.

In our conversation, we cover:

• The use case of econometrics as a discipline in marketing;
• The ways that econometrics is utilized by marketing teams to make decisions;
• How marketers can navigate the “unknown unknown” problem of shifting from deterministic measurement to probabilistic and/or econometric measurement;
• The added benefit of the more immediate and granular availability of data provided to econometric measurement for digital-first advertisers;
• The specific econometric methods and frameworks that are utilized by marketing economists;
• How the measurement cadence changes when a marketing team transitions from deterministic to econometric measurement;
• What resources exist for a marketer looking to expand their domain knowledge as a marketing economist?

Thanks to the sponsor of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact Marketecture.

This episode focuses on an article titled Why Analytics Teams Fail, first published in June 2016. Specifically, the episode highlights three common issues encountered by analytics teams that can cause them to be ineffective:

1) lack of agency and authority;

2) lack of investment into infrastructure;

3) improper placement in the organization.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact Marketecture.

My guest in this week's episode of the podcast is Russell Ovans, who recently published a book, Game Analytics: Retention and Monetization in Free-to-Play Mobile Games. Russell has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and began his career in academia before transitioning to industry and starting one of the first Western social free-to-play gaming studios.

The topic of my conversation with Russell is the structure and management of successful analytics teams at consumer technology companies. Among other things, we discuss:

• What purpose an analytics team should serve, and what value it should add;
• The optimal way to structure an analytics team;
• The difference between analytics and data science;
• How analytics teams fail;
• and Who should "own" the LTV metric in a consumer tech company.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact Marketecture.

My guests on this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast are Dieter Rappold and Felix Krause, the founders of ContextSDK, a tool that allows app developers to optimize and personalize their products using on-device contextual signals.

Dieter is a serial entrepreneur and investor, and he leads business operations at ContextSDK, and Felix is a well-known security researcher who previously founded Fastlane, which was acquired by Twitter and rolled into the Fabric app development platform, which was then acquired from Twitter by Google.

The topic of my discussion with Dieter and Felix is on-device processing. In our conversation, we cover:

• What on-device processing is and why it is more privacy secure than other methods of personalization
• How personalization should fit into the product development workflow
• What sorts of contextual signals are available to be used in personalizing an in-app user experience
• Where developers can achieve success in personalization
• And how deeply personalization using on-device, contextual signals must be integrated into the product to materially impact its commercial performance.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠⁠⁠INCRMNTAL⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• ⁠Clarisights⁠. Go to⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.

My guest on this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is David Barnard, who is the Growth Advocate at RevenueCat, the app subscription management platform. The subjects of our conversation are the new guidelines that Apple published, in quick succession, for alternative off-platform payments in the United States and alternative in-app and off-platform payments, as well as alternative app stores, in the EU. Fair warning, we get very granular on these guidelines.

I asked David to join the podcast because he is a high-profile independent app developer who has consistently championed the position of independent developers within the mobile ecosystem.

In this episode of the podcast, we discuss the specifics of the new guidelines in both the US and EU, the attractiveness of the new options made available in both regions, the less obvious impediments to implementing these options, and the general sentiment of these new opportunities to independent developers. 

Thanks to the sponsors of this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• Clarisights. Go to clarisights.com/demo to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.

• ⁠⁠INCRMNTAL. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
  

My guest on today's episode is Emmanuel de Maistre, the founder and CEO of Scenario, a generative AI platform for creating game art assets. Before founding Scenario, Emmanuel founded Redbird, a drone analytics company. 

Emmanuel and I discuss the opportunity for generative AI to lead to radical personalization -- the ability of products to tailor content experiences to the tastes and behaviors of individual users. In our conversation, we cover:

1. The ultimate goal of personalization in consumer products;
2. What about gaming makes it a good candidate for radical personalization;
3. How gaming teams are using Generative AI for content production currently;
4. How the job of a game designer changes as personalization tools become more embedded in game production;
5. What happens with gaming when personal value functions are realized.

My guest on this week's episode is Eran Friendinger, the CTO and Co-Founder of Voyantis, an advertising optimization platform that calculates user-level predicted LTV in real time for targeting and conversion improvements.

The topic of our discussion is conversion optimization and customer lifetime value. Among other topics, we talk about:

• The primary pitfalls that marketing teams encounter when building LTV models?;
• How to avoid (or accommodate) the curse of dimensionality when estimating LTV;
• How VO bidding has changed since ATT and the nuances of the different platforms that marketers should consider when using VO bidding;
• Synthetic signals and whether or how they should be incorporated into an advertiser's conversion optimization process;
• The specific campaign strategies that work differently across verticals.

My guest on this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is David Philippson. David is the CEO of Dataseat, a mobile DSP that uses contextual signals for targeting and which was acquired by the Verve Group in 2022. Before Dataseat, David was the founder of AdX, the first mobile attribution platform.

I originally invited David to the podcast to discuss the significance of the soon-to-be-released iOS privacy features that were announced by Apple at WWDC this year. But our conversation ultimately ended up being focused on the list of SDKs that Apple had recently released before we recorded our podcast. Throughout our conversation, David and I discuss, among other topics:

• The significance of the new privacy features that Apple announced at WWDC '23, including Privacy Manifests, the use of Required Reasons APIs, and tracking domains;
• The viability of fingerprinting when nothing but an IP address is available for use, and whether IP address-based fingerprinting will persist;
• What potential privacy changes Apple might introduce WWDC '24;
• How DSPs are adapting to ATT;
• Whether and how brands are adopting programmatic on mobile.

My guest on this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Matthew Kanterman, a respected gaming analyst who spent 8 years at Bloomberg covering companies in the interactive entertainment space, and who also spent time at Roundhill Investments covering the Metaverse.

I invited Matthew onto the podcast to consider the prospects for mobile gaming in 2024. In the episode, among other things, Matt and I discuss:

• Alternative in-app and off-platform mobile gaming payments;
• Further consolidation in mobile gaming;
• Microsoft's mobile gaming ambitions;
• and Netflix's strategy concerning mobile games.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Alan Chapell, an attorney who specializes in digital privacy through his law firm and consultancy, Chapell & Associates. In the episode, Alan and I discuss, among other things:

- The current state of a potential national privacy law in the United States;

- What role, if any, the FTC can have in regulating digital privacy;

- Google's Privacy Sandbox initiative and its impact on the digital advertising ecosystem.

My guest on this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Mikołaj Barczentewicz, a law professor at, and the research director of, the Law and Technology Hub at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom.

Mikolaj is an expert on European data privacy law and this is his fourth time appearing on the podcast: in previous episodes, we discussed the European digital privacy environment broadly, the future of EU-US data transfers, and the specifics of the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.

In this episode of the podcast, Mikolaj unpacks the realities of "pay or okay," which is the business model that Meta has decided to apply for its users in the EU, the EEA, and Switzerland after various rulings and commentary by EU courts, regulatory bodies, privacy boards, and privacy authorities.

Under this model, a user is provided with a choice that dictates their ability to access a product: they can pay, or consent to having various forms of their data processed, often for digital advertising purposes (which is the "okay" component of the model's name). Several companies have applied this model in the EU in the face of the GDPR's restrictions related to data processing, as we discussed.

Specific topics of our conversation include:

• Background on Meta's pay or okay subscription offering;
• Norway's banning of Meta's targeted advertising;
• and the European Data Protection Board's recent guidance on the ePrivacy Directive.

The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Ben Savage, who works at the intersection of advertising and privacy at Meta. Ben is Meta's representative to the W3C in forums like the Private Advertising Technology Community Group and the Privacy Community Group.

At Meta, Ben has been heavily involved with a framework called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA, which is a distributed attribution and aggregation protocol that exists as a joint proposal between Meta and Mozilla. IPA has gained a great deal of attention as a potential solution for privacy-safe advertising attribution, and it is the subject of this episode. Ben and I go deep on several topics related to IPA and digital advertising privacy more broadly, including:

• A high-level conceptual overview of Interoperable Private Attribution;
• The origin of IPA as a joint proposal from Mozilla and Meta;
• The importance of the ease of adoption by advertisers and publishers for any privacy-enhancing technology;
• The degree of buy-in required from consumers to advance privacy-safe advertising solutions;
• And the process of establishing standards within W3C working groups

For more information about Interoperable Private Attribution and the broader subject of Multi-Party Computation, I suggest this YouTube series developed by Ben that is designed to explain these concepts to non-technical audiences.

My guest on this episode is Olivia Kory, the Head of Go-To-Market at Haus, a marketing decision science platform. Before Haus, Olivia held senior marketing roles at Netflix, Quibi, and Sonos.

Olivia and I discuss a wide range of topics within the subject of advertising measurement in this episode, including:

• The role of causal inference in marketing measurement;
• The common skillset gaps that Olivia witnesses when observing companies making the transition to probabilistic measurement;
• The unforeseen challenges in transitioning to probabilistic measurement for marketing teams;
• The amount of coaching required for the non-marketing teams within the organization to socialize the concept of probabilistic measurement.

The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

About Olivia:

Olivia leads customer support, marketing, and partnerships at Haus, which is productizing incrementality, experimentation, and econometrics to help brands quantify marketing ROI. Before Haus, Olivia was the Director of Growth Marketing at Sonos and has held marketing positions at Quibi and Netflix.

My guest on Episode 4 of Season 2 of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Joy Howard. Joy is the CEO of Early Majority and is a remarkably accomplished marketer, having held CMO and other executive-level marketing positions at some of the world's most recognized brands, including Sonos, Patagonia, and the Coca-Cola Company, among others. I invited Joy onto the podcast to discuss all things Brand Marketing, including:

• What constitutes a brand;
• How a company builds a brand;
• The difference between brand development and brand advertising;
• How a company measures the value of its brand;
• Also: some of my tweets.

About Joy:

Joy Howard has scaled disruptive technologies and led two unicorns through the transformation required to thrive in the public markets. She's been recognized by Forbes and Fast Company as one of the most influential and creative global business leaders and was profiled by Bloomberg for her unconventional journey to the C-suite. In 2021, Joy founded Early Majority, a community that makes gear for getting outside, where she serves as CEO.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Peter Hamilton, the Senior Director of Ad Innovation at Roku, about the digital advertising opportunity on CTV. Among other topics, Peter and I discuss:

1. The high-level promise of CTV for advertisers
2. Creative strategy for CTV
3. The availability and efficacy of targeting on CTV
4. The verticals that tend to experience the most success with CTV
5. And the most common ways in which CTV inventory is purchased.

The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

About Peter:

Peter Hamilton is the Senior Director of Ad Innovation at Roku, where he leads consumer-facing ad experiences across Roku's OS, The Roku Channel, Mobile, Commerce, and Interactive. Prior to Roku, Peter was the CEO of TUNE, an early mobile advertising attribution company, which exited its mobile measurement business to Constellation Software in 2020.

Alex Collmer is the Founder and CEO of VidMob, the world’s leading AI creative performance platform. Since founding the company in 2015, Collmer has raised more than $220M and led initiatives that earned VidMob official marketing partner badges from Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Hulu. Today, VidMob provides its software to a majority of agency-holding companies and counts many top global brands as clients.

In Episode 2 of Season 2 of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Michael Kaminsky, the co-founder and CEO of Recast, on the topic of media mix modeling and probabilistic marketing measurement more broadly. Among other things, our conversation touches upon:

• How a marketing team can get started with adopting probabilistic measurement;
• The unforeseen difficulties that teams face when adopting probabilistic measurement methodologies;
• How much longer pseudo-deterministic solutions can be relied upon;
• How the measurement methodology utilized by a marketing team changes its media buying behavior.

About Michael:

Michael Kaminsky is a co-founder and co-CEO of Recast, a startup that is re-inventing Marketing Mix Modeling for modern marketers. Michael was trained as a statistician and econometrician focused on helping people make better decisions. He's passionate about taking cutting edge statistical techniques and using those to build tools that help marketers drive better performance for their businesses.

• Maor Sadra is the CEO of INCRMNTAL, an incrementality testing platform. Prior to INCRMNTAL, Maor was the CEO of Applift and held executive positions at a number of digital advertising and interactive media firms before that. As a disclaimer: I am an investor in INCRMNTAL;
• Dr. Julian Runge is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and before that was a Visiting Scholar at Duke University. Julian's research focuses on behavioral economics and marketing analytics. Julian and I recently co-authored a paper with Dr. Garrett Johnson of Boston University titled Privacy-Centric Digital Advertising: Implications for Research for the Customer Needs and Solutions Journal.

In this episode of the podcast, Julian, Maor, and I explore the future of digital advertising attribution in an increasingly privacy-sensitive operating environment by exploring the topic from two angles:

• What approaches to advertising measurement are future-proofed?
• How can companies implement probabilistic methods for advertising measurement -- and, more importantly, how can they attain buy-in for those methods across the entirety of a firm?

We also discuss the nature of brand advertising and how it fits into a performance marketing framework and the skillsets needed for digital marketers as the demands for quantitative rigor increase.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with returning guest Mikołaj Barczentewicz, an expert on European data privacy law, about the recent $1.3BN fine that the Irish DPC issued to Meta over its transmission of EU residents' data to the United States. We discuss the history of data transfer frameworks between the EU and the US and why they've all been invalidated, the core motivations of EU protectionism related to data transfer, and the implications for all technology companies of the Irish DPC's decision.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Shamanth Rao, the CEO of Rocketship HQ, a mobile performance marketing agency. We discuss Shamanth's practical approach to integrating probabilistic marketing measurement, and especially media mix modeling, into his clients' reporting workflows:

• How to sell probabilistic measurement to key stakeholders;
• How to use probabilistic measurement to guide marketing investment decisions;
• How to adapt the media buying approach to be best captured with probabilistic measurement methods.

Our discussion touches on many of the topics I have covered recently in essays like The Emerging Marketing Economist and Reprogramming the Broken Marketing Brain.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Rishabh Jain, the CEO and co-founder of FERMÀT, an eCommerce platform designed to maximize advertising conversions for brands. Prior to FERMÀT, Rishabh spent nearly six years at Liveramp, most recently as its Vice President of Innovation.

In our conversation, Rishabh and I discuss, among other topics:

• Rishabh's journey from a PhD in solid state physics to ad tech;
• The necessity of financial literacy for eCommerce media buying;
• How the media buyer role has changed following ATT, and the optimal marketing channel mix;
• Why more consolidation and roll-up efforts haven't occurred within DTC;
• The viability of a product like Shopify Audiences.

My guest on this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Mikołaj Barczentewicz, an expert on European data privacy law. Mikołaj is a law professor at, and the research director of, the Law and Technology Hub at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, and he joined me just a few weeks ago in A deep dive on European data privacy law to discuss recent developments in Europe related to data privacy and GDPR enforcement.

In this episode, Mikołaj outlines the legal impact of both of these pieces of legislation in detail, with specific attention paid to the digital advertising market. We also discuss the latest news related to Meta's recent fine by the Irish DPC for using first-party data without consent to empower personalized advertising, as well as the temporary ban that the Italian DPA enforced on OpenAI's ChatGPT.

My guest in this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Brad Richards, the Managing Director & Chief Product Officer at LOVOO, the most popular dating app in the German-speaking world.

Brad and I discuss the Product Management role for mobile-first companies:

• What a product manager does;
• The path to becoming a product manager;
• The role of A/B testing in product management, and how it can do more harm than good.

We also discuss the Dating App Dilemma: how the success of the product's core use case actually creates churn for the product.

If you enjoy the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, please remember to rate it with 5 stars!

My guest in this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Mikołaj Barczentewicz, an expert on EU digital privacy law. Mikołaj is a law professor at, and the research director of, the Law and Technology Hub at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, and he has research affiliations with the Stanford Law School and the University of Oxford, from which he received his Ph.D.

I learned of Mikołaj after reading a piece he co-wrote titled GDPR Decision Against Meta Highlights that Privacy Regulators Don’t Understand ‘Necessity’. I invited Mikołaj onto the podcast to discuss the recent spate of decisions in the EU related to digital privacy, including:

• The Irish DPC's ruling against Meta over the company's use of the contractual basis for processing user data related to personalized advertising;
• The French CNIL's recent sanctions of Apple and Voodoo Games;

In the episode, Mikołaj and I discuss a wide range of topics:

• Consent as a mechanism for collecting and processing first-party data in the EU;
• The difference between the necessity and legitimate interest bases under GDPR;
• The dynamics between the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the data protection agencies within the various EU states;
• The future of trans-Atlantic data flows.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I discuss the promise of Generative AI for marketing and product development with Thomas Petit and Ketty Slonimsky. Thomas is a well-known consultant and the author of the MADV newsletter, and Ketty Slonimsky is the Chief Growth Officer of Palta, the publisher of the popular Lensa app. The subject of the episode was intended to be predictions across the mobile space for 2023, but we ended up hovering over the topic of Generative AI for most of the conversation. In the episode, we unpack the potential for Generative AI across a number of different functions related to marketing, publishing, and optimizing apps, as well as the ways in which Generative AI technology can be practically implemented into these various workflows.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Jessica Lee on the topic of digital privacy legislation. Jessica is a Partner and serves as the Chair of the Privacy, Security, and Data Innovations practice at Loeb & Loeb, a New York-based law firm. Jessica’s practice focuses on emerging media, technology, advertising and promotions, privacy, and intellectual property, and she has represented clients in a variety of fields, including Internet, film, music, sports, telecommunications, and consumer products.

Over the course of the podcast, Jessica and I discuss the history of digital privacy, the prospect of a federal privacy law in the US and how the recent midterm election results impact that, why Europe leads the United States in codifying privacy protections into law, and the efficacy of self-regulation, among other topics.

For a full transcript of the interview, see this post on Mobile Dev Memo.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Taylor Holiday, the CEO and founder of the Common Thread Collective, an eCommerce growth agency. Taylor and I discuss the general state of eCommerce advertising, what happened within the eCommerce category in Q3 and what he sees happening now in Q4.

We also speak about the coming reckoning in the eCommerce advertising debt market (with background on what this is!), misconceptions about how Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy impacts eCommerce advertising, and the nature of setting direct response advertising budgets.

Common Thread company publishes a regular newsletter containing recent eCommerce advertising performance data.

My guest for this episode is Alex Bauer, the Head of Product and Market Strategy at Branch. On Monday, October 24th, alongside the release of iOS version 16.1, Apple released its long-awaited major update to SKAdNetwork, its privacy-safe app advertising attribution framework for iOS, with SKAdNetwork 4.0. The industry was first made aware of SKAdNetwork 4.0 at WWDC this summer and we only saw public documentation for this fundamental and substantial upgrade to the framework with the release of iOS 16.1. 

In this episode, Alex and I cover four major topics related to SKAdNetwork 4.0:

First, the new timer system that accompanies the two additional attribution windows that have been made available;

Second, the ability for advertisers to lock conversion values within those attribution windows;

Third, the concept of crowd anonymity that has been introduced to SKAdNetwork and how the four tiers of crowd anonymity regulate the information that is transmitted within postbacks;

and Fourth, how ad networks will adapt to SKAdNetwork 4.0, and on what potential timeline.

We additionally briefly touch upon fingerprinting and whether or not Apple begins to police that behavior anytime soon.

My guest on this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Liat Barer, the VP of Product at Odeeo, an audio SSP. Liat has deep expertise in mobile ad tech, having worked at Yahoo and StartApp prior to Odeeo. I invited Liat on the podcast to discuss a topic that has taken on increased importance within mobile ad tech since the introduction of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which is yield management, and how SSPs assist app publishers with maximizing the revenue they derive from in-app advertising.

Liat provides an expert overview of the way in which SSPs -- the acronym SSP stands for Supply Side Platform -- interface with demand sources and in-app inventory to generate revenue for publishers.

I had the great pleasure last week of speaking with Matthew Ball, a prolific writer, investor, and respected thinker in the interactive media space. The backdrop of our discussion is Matthew's upcoming book, The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything, which is currently available for pre-order and will be available for sale on July 19th.

In this podcast, I speak with Matthew about the economics of the Metaverse: what are the parameters of commerce when resources are infinite and the only constraints to production and economic output are human ingenuity? In our conversation, we also discuss Apple and the path to open economic systems, the role that games play in making new technologies ubiquitous, and how absolute replicability impacts our understanding of legal protections, among other topics. The interview is transcribed below, and it has been edited slightly for clarity.

In this episode of the podcast, I discuss the future of alternative payments on mobile with Allison Schiff, the Managing Editor of AdExchanger; David Barnard, Developer Advocate at RevenueCat; and Josh Burns, the Senior Director of Business Development at FunPlus. We consider how the platform operators will adapt to regulatory and legal intervention into their payments policies, whether alternative payments systems can ever gain traction over the native systems, and how developers can best focus their efforts on driving users into alternative purchasing environments. 

In this episode of the MDM podcast, I speak with Maor Sadra, the CEO of INCRMNTAL and a returning guest to the show, about how advertisers should respond to the slowdown in growth across mobile that is being experienced as a result of the combined effects of:

• Apple's ATT privacy policy, which has deteriorated the efficiency of mobile advertising;
• a COVID overhang, which is producing altered consumer behaviors relative to what advertisers had grown accustomed over the past two years;
• a potential economic slowdown.

My guest for this episode of the MDM Podcast is Alex Bauer, the Head of Product and Market Strategy at Branch, the mobile measurement and linking company. We speak about the revelations from Apple's WWDC conference last week that are most important for mobile advertisers: 1) the expansion of Apple's SKAdNetwork measurement framework, 2) Apple's prohibition of aggregated measurement solutions, and 3) Apple's very clear and strident proclamation that Fingerprinting is Never Allowed.

This interview assumes quite a bit of knowledge on the part of the listener. For background, see these articles:

Dear Apple: These changes will improve SKAdNetwork for advertisers (background on SKAdNetwork)

How to scale and optimize marketing spend with SKAdNetwork (background on SKAdNetwork)

Apple to Ad Tech: “Fingerprinting is Never Allowed” (overview of Apple's stance on Fingerprinting as stated at WWDC 2022)

Is SKAdNetwork 4.0 a turning point for mobile advertising: Privacy with Purpose? (overview of Apple's expansion of SKAdNetwork as revealed at WWDC 2022)

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Rameez Tase about the applicability of panel data in the new advertising environment in which device-level and user-level identifiers are not available for use in creating behavioral profiles. Rameez and I speak about the use case for panel data in developing marketing audiences for both product testing and development (for whom is this product being built?) and advertising targeting (to whom should we show this product's ads?). Without the direct feedback loop of behavioral targeting and conversions measurement, both product managers and marketers must rely on much more broadly conceived audiences for input into the tough balancing problems they face in scaling a product. We discuss what panel data is, how it has been used historically, and why it is becoming more critical as a product development and marketing tool in the new digital privacy landscape. Rameez Tase is the co-founder & President of Antenna, a subscription services insights platform.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, Adam Lieb and I discuss the prospects for advertising in console games, following news that both Microsoft and Sony will pursue advertising programs for their game consoles. In our conversation, we consider what ads might look like in console games, what types of developers and games are capable of integrating ads in a way that is gratifying for players, and how advertising might transform the commercial landscape of console gaming. Adam Lieb is the CEO of Gamesight, a Seattle-based marketing platform for PC, console, and web3 games.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Yevgeny Peres, the VP of Growth at ironSource, about Google's announcement that it will deprecate the GAID as well as its introduction of the Privacy Sandbox for Android. I unpacked Google's announcement of its Privacy Sandbox and the deprecation of the GAID in a post that was published shortly after the announcement. 

But my thinking was mostly out of alignment with the commentary delivered by other outlets. Popular sentiment following the announcement characterized the deprecation of the GAID as the Android equivalent of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, and the coverage generally surmised that the changes would catalyze another disaster for mobile advertising performance. But I believe the Privacy Sandbox, which is a collaborative environment for proposing and evaluating Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) concepts, is a positive and optimism-inducing development for the mobile advertising ecosystem. In the episode, Yevgeny and I discuss the three tools proposed in the Privacy Sandbox for Android, as well as the new SDK Runtime that Google revealed.

In this week's episode, I speak with Canaan Linder and Atif Khan, the CEO and Head of Operations, respectively, at Stardust, a platform that allows game developers to incorporate crypto assets into their games. In this episode, we talk about the challenge of some of the various foundational notions underpinning web3 gaming -- such as the interoperability of in-game items expressed as NFTs -- as well as the potential promise in terms of expanded gameplay and player enjoyment that they present. We also talk about the skillsets needed to build web3 games, the correct way to bring a web3 game to market, and what kind of infrastructure these games require to thrive.

In this new episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Maor Sadra, the CEO of INCRMNTAL, about probabilistic attribution for mobile advertising and why bad incentives prevent advertisers from rejecting it. We also talk about Media Mix Models and Facebook's efforts to drive adoption for Robyn, its open-sourced measurement product, and budget diversification post-ATT.

In this third and final episode of ATT, One Month In, I speak with Alex Bauer of Branch about the iOS 14.6 adoption rate curve, why it's unfortunate that misleading opt-in rate measurements proliferated throughout the mainstream media so quickly after the release of iOS 14.5, device fingerprinting and whether or for how long Apple will tolerate it, and Apple's PR campaign around ATT.

The previous episodes in the series are:

Episode 1: ATT, one month in: privacy thresholds with Rich Jones of Dataseat (ep. 1 of 3)
Episode 2: ATT, one month in: SKAdNetwork standards with Paul Bowen of AlgoLift (ep. 2 of 3)

In conjunction with the podcast series, I am offering a 20% discount on my iOS 14: How to prevail in Q2 2021 course which can be accessed with the code MDM_4325_OMI_20PCT or through this link. The discount will only be available through June 4th, 2021.

As always, the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

The first episode in the series can be found here: ATT, one month in: privacy thresholds with Rich Jones of Dataseat (ep. 1 of 3)

In this episode, I speak with Paul Bowen, the GM of AlgoLift, a mobile marketing analytics and campaign automation company that was acquired by Vungle last year. We discuss SKAdNetwork conversion value standards, the conversion value window, and why and for how long fingerprinting will be tolerated.

These episodes are not expected to age well: they are snapshots of what is happening right now -- in this very transformative moment -- in the mobile ecosystem. In conjunction with the podcast series, I am offering a 20% discount on my iOS 14: How to prevail in Q2 2021 course which can be accessed with the code MDM_4325_OMI_20PCT or through this link. The discount will only be available through June 4th, 2021.

In today's episode, I speak with Rich Jones, the Head of Product at Dataseat, a mobile DSP. Rich and I discuss the nature of Apple's privacy threshold and what we've learned about it since ATT was first announced. Rich yesterday posted a very provocative graph (above) of the prevalence of conversion values in the postbacks that Dataseat is seeing across its network, which precipitated the conversation.