Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Effective Mobile Marketing & Attribution About this episode President and GM - North America at AppsFlyer, Brian Quinn, delves into effective mobile marketing and attribution strategies. By leveraging advanced measurement, data analytics, and privacy-preserving technologies, AppsFlyer assists brands in making informed decisions for their business and customers. Explore more about AppsFlyer's innovative solutions and how they empower creators and technology partners to enhance customer relationships at www.appsflyer.com. Show NotesConnect With: Brian Quinn: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
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0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and today we're going to discuss AI-driven marketing and attribution. Joining us is Brian Quinn, who is the President and GM of North America at AppsFlyer, which provides advanced measurement, deep engagement and privacy-preserving technologies, empowering creators and technology partners to enhance customer relationships. Brian, I want to continue our conversation where earlier we talked about the use and effective nature of artificial intelligence for marketers. And today I want to focus a little bit more on AppsFlyer and your core business, learning a little bit more about effective mobile marketing and attribution. We live in this brand-new world where marketers are launching features faster than ever.
2:00 Speaker 04 I'm assuming that also means that there are more products that are coming out. What are you seeing in terms of how marketers are measuring their mobile marketing and attribution?
2:09 Speaker 05 You're right in that there's a lot of new products and capabilities that apps and all digital products are coming out with. I think it's only one of many dynamics that marketers are contending. You have lots of consumer privacy related changes to grapple with. You have regulation and regulatory bodies enacting laws to protect consumer privacy. You have technical and policy platform shifts by big walled gardens and big technology companies to learn and contend to and adopt. So there's so much changing in multiple directions. I think the last several years have been very difficult in general for mobile marketers.
2:50 Speaker 05 There's so much change from every direction and it's constant. And I don't think there's any reason to think that it's going to slow down. So I think the general state of mobile marketers is one of lots of resiliency and adaptation to a very drastically changing environment, all while there are high expectations of growth. I think a lot of executives, they understand that the world of digital marketing is going through a lot of changes, but they still place very high expectations for growth on the marketing teams. And so you see challenges related to fragmentation. You see challenges related to signal loss, all of which makes the marketer's job harder while they still have to provide a single point of view of
3:34 Speaker 05 their business and to grow in an increasingly competitive space. And so there's a lot of challenges. And I think this is really where AppsFlyer is positioned and investing heavily to help this part of the market.
3:45 Speaker 04 I need a sanity check from you because my intuition says that mobile marketing is a relatively mature, or at least a maturing phenomenon. I mentioned before that artificial intelligence is kind of this generation's iPhone moment. Mobile apps have been around, has it been 15 years now since the launch of the App Store? I'm kind of rounding. I'm not exactly sure. Somewhere around there?
4:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:09 Speaker 04 And now, mobile apps were the sexiest thing last decade and mobile marketing and attribution. And that's where everybody's attention is. And now, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, you got an app. Great. But does it have an LLM connected to it? Are mobile marketers feeling like the middle child now?
4:25 Speaker 05 I haven't thought about mobile marketers in that sense. I think that you're right. There's a maturity in mobile apps in a way that the App Store is now been around for a while. But in the last three years, everything has been thrown up in the air. Really with the advent of Apple's iOS 14 operating system, it really changed the game for marketers. If you're on iOS, this is probably pretty familiar to you, but you're now asked to consent for apps and websites to track you at an app level every time you download an app. That used to be defaulted on and buried in settings.
5:02 Speaker 04 Then, of course, now everybody says no.
5:04 Speaker 05 Well, you'd be surprised. Most for sure, but every year 10% more people say yes to that. It's growing.
5:11 Speaker 04 Really?
5:11 Speaker 05 It's increasing. Couple hypotheses. I think apps, developers, marketers are getting savvier and smarter about how and when to present that. Consumers are getting more educated on the value exchange of providing that information when it comes to the content and the experiences they get. I think there's some apathy that's natural kind of in the world. We just kind of default to a mode, you've seen this on the web with accepting cookies and whatnot. But the point is, this era is brand new for marketers. So while apps aren't new, time spent in apps continues to go up. We spend a huge amount of our waking lives in apps on phones. They are still by far the most intimate and personal digital experiences we have.
5:52 Speaker 05 And with a lot of signal loss that I referenced earlier, a lot of businesses realize that the data they can get through apps, the first party deep engagement data is very, very valuable to a business. So there's a lot of investment, more than ever, in apps. The competition in apps is fiercer than ever. There are something like 5 million apps at any given time in the world, and there's basically two stores in most countries. And it is incredibly competitive. Have consumers discover your app, remind consumers to come back to it, and there's a lot at stake. So while apps themselves aren't new, given privacy changes, given AI, given competition, it's incredibly complicated and it's incredibly competitive. So the game stays fresh.
6:36 Speaker 04 It's interesting to me that the first thing you said when it talked about the changes in mobile marketing wasn't, all right, the LLMs are here, the Terminator is coming down from the sky to take over. It was, it's actually the privacy changes. And I'm assuming GDPR, CCPA, restriction of access to data for third-party cookies. Am I getting it right in terms of what is the major restrictions of data that are impacting mobile marketing specifically?
7:02 Speaker 05 Yes. I think GDPR, CCPA, there's about a dozen states in the US that have their kind of version of that. In the US market, you know that we don't have a national consumer privacy law. So it's very fragmented. Changes that Apple made, changes that Google sort of is in the process of making. And these are very, very big platforms, walled gardens that drive a lot of how the ecosystem in mobile sort of operates. You see different companies adopt different privacy thresholds. So some businesses are very conscious of consumer privacy, and they will choose not to collect certain data, not to use certain data. And that limits the ability of the marketing team to perform operations like
7:43 Speaker 05 targeting, optimizations, measurement. So you see a wide spectrum. But yeah, these are some of the forces. And I would say LLMs are very exciting. A lot of apps are leveraging them. Certainly, the major LLMs are now in the consumer app business themselves. But I would say, from the many marketers that I talk to you, if you ask them, what's top of mind? What's keeping you up? What are the challenges you're really trying to solve? I think fragmentation across operating systems, devices, platforms, channels, as well as signal loss are going to be the two major forces that are challenges for them.
8:18 Speaker 04 I didn't realize it, but I think I totally have buried the lead here. We didn't talk about Google and third-party cookie deprecation. How that wasn't the first thing I brought up when we're talking about mobile attribution? I don't know. Total brain fart. But we had the big announcement last week that Google is not going to be deprecating third-party cookies, which means, hey marketers, celebrate, we still get access to the data sources we're used to. It's the tsunami that never came. What do you think the impact of Google doing an about-face on the deprecation of third-party cookies means to mobile marketers?
8:53 Speaker 05 First off, let me say this. From a technical perspective, cookies aren't a major factor in most pure mobile marketing campaigns. You know, cookies don't operate in app stores, so hence the entire reason why mobile marketing is its kind of own category. So in one sense, it doesn't have a major direct impact. I think a lot of those businesses, you're going to see a range of reactions. Some are sort of wiping the sweat off their forehead and taking a deep breath and maybe not panicking. Others are continuing to sort of lean in. Whether they deprecate cookies all in one day or it happens over an elongated period, which is, I think, what you're going to see. The general trend continues. More and more signal and data, device level data, user level data,
9:38 Speaker 05 is being eroded, and that's going to continue. And for the most part, I think that's a very good thing for consumer privacy, and it's a big challenge for marketers. And I think this is just another chapter in it. So when Google does what Google does, both to Chrome and Android, I think you're going to continue to see brands increasingly try to adopt capabilities and modify their operations that allow them to operate with less and less signal, building up first-party data sets, unifying those data sets, trying to find new signal in the market that wasn't there today. So while it was a big announcement last week, a lot of chatter about when and if it's an about face or not, I think it's just one more milestone in a long trend that we see towards further signal loss.
10:21 Speaker 04 Why do you think that the trend is going to continue? And why isn't this a pivotal moment where we've kind of hit the end of the data collection restrictions? What makes you think that everybody is going to continue to tighten their belt when it comes to access to third-party data?
10:38 Speaker 05 I don't think that we're done seeing regulation pass to protect consumer privacy. I don't think that we're done in seeing platform changes make changes under the umbrella of privacy. I don't think we are done seeing each and individual brand arrive at their own perspective of the value of privacy and the exchange they want to present to their users. So I don't think we're anywhere near that period of time. I think this is a winding and a very complicated road. I've been in AppsFlyer now for five and a half years and there are so many news events where you could stop and say, wow, things just really change. But when you have a perspective of looking back, the dots kind of all connect together and you see we're on this sort of continuum.
11:24 Speaker 05 And I think the trend will be, at the end of the day, us as consumers or users of devices or human beings, our understanding of our data, our digital data and the value of that and who we interact with, who deserves to have access to that and what am I going to get in exchange? And I think there's a lot of education and awareness that will continue along that front.
11:45 Speaker 04 I want to hash this out with you because I agree that consumers are becoming more educated in terms of how their data is being used. And we've seen some very prominent cases of how it's been abused. I also think that there's another factor at play, which is the platforms. We've seen Apple at least publicly brand themselves about being the privacy centric operating system and browser. And on the backend, they're also creating their own ad network. We've seen Google be an advertising platform, which is kind of getting pushed into restricting data and maybe hesitantly. What do you think the role is of the platforms? And I'll throw that out being the primary operating systems have in the impact on the usage of data?
12:29 Speaker 05 Those two companies have a huge role in consumer privacy. In any changes that they make have a major impact on how marketing professionals, digital marketing professionals, mobile marketers, how they run their day to day. So I think that looking at what they're doing, understanding their frameworks and their products, working with companies like AppsFlyer who are deeply partnered with those businesses to roll out and implement their frameworks is a smart thing to do because they have such an important role in this industry.
13:03 Speaker 04 Last question I have for you. This gets into more operational effective mobile marketing strategies. Obviously, the answer is AppsFlyer. But if you are working on building out better marketing attribution specifically for mobile, what's the best in class, knowing that we are going to have continued deprecation of access to data? What should marketers be looking at in terms of what their stack is and how they think about data?
13:30 Speaker 05 You're right with your answer, but let me kind of walk you through how we think about advising customers and some of the best practices and thinking we see from some cutting-edge marketers. Number one is with signal loss, it's critical to collect and unify all the first-party data that the business has and will continue to collect and gather. So a unified sort of first-party data strategy is a really, really critical first step for all these businesses. Secondly, I would say while we're losing some signal in some aspects of the ecosystem, we're seeing new ways to arrive at gathering new signal. I'll give you two examples. One, I mentioned this earlier, we are investing a lot in mid-funnel and upper funnel creative
14:15 Speaker 05 analytics, allowing businesses to understand how creatives are performing at the campaign level. This is more upper funnel than some of the signal that's captured more down funnel, which we're quote-unquote losing. So getting upper funnel signal and feeding that into the data sets, the unified data strategy is a good practice. Another example is AppsFlyer is leading the charge in the mobile industry to roll out new standard of mobile measurement and new engagement types. We're sort of still operating mostly on clicks and impressions. We believe that there's a richer set of engagement types, given all the innovation in social networks and media companies, and that will provide more signal, more richer signal, again, higher in the funnel.
14:58 Speaker 05 So there is signal out there, there's new ways to get it, and businesses need to think about how to bring new signal that they can get into the environment. I think the last point I would say is in a world of less signal, we will rely more on modeling. This is data science-driven modeling and algorithms. They're going to be in-house. Brands are going to develop their own proprietary models. They're going to buy services and products from companies like AppsFlyer, which we're having our models. They're going to look at a marketplace through AppsFlyer and look at an entire industry of startups with new models. But the accuracy of data, the amount of data that we can feed these models is what's going to drive the right results. So as I think about best practices in the world of signal loss, I think about it in
15:43 Speaker 05 sort of these three buckets.
15:45 Speaker 04 Fundamentally, when you're thinking about your mobile marketing efforts, it's a more mature market than most of what we've been focused on. If the world is getting distracted by the shiny object of artificial intelligence, mobile marketing is your, not an infant, it's not a preschooler. Maybe this is a sixth or a seventh grader, something that's a little bit more mature and therefore has more responsibility. I tend to put everything in kid metaphors because we have two young kids at home. But the parallel makes a lot of sense to me in the sense of it's a mature market and it's changing and it's evolving in its own. And now there's this other big influence that's happening, not only with the rise of artificial intelligence, but also the signal loss.
16:27 Speaker 04 All the regulations and privacy concerns we've seen are probably a bigger impact on mobile marketing and your attribution than things like artificial intelligence, even if that's what we all tend to be really focused on. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Brian Quinn, the president and GM of North America for AppsFlyer for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Brian, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you could visit his company's website, which is appsflyer.com. Just one more link I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martechpod.com where we have summary of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even apply to be a guest on
17:12 Speaker 04 the Martech Podcast. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is @martechpod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or you can contact me directly on LinkedIn. My handle is Ben J. Shap. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day this year. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
18:06 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iHearEverything.com.
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