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: The ultimate goal of personalization in consumer products; What about gaming makes it a good candidate for radical personalization; How gaming teams are using Generative AI for content production currently; How the job of a game designer changes as personalization tools become more embedded in game production; 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.

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.

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.

This episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast focuses on The Future of Digital Advertising Measurement. I am joined by two very esteemed guests, Maor Sadra and Dr. Julian Runge: 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.

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.

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.

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.

In this episode of the MDM podcast, I try to unpack the underlying mechanics of the accusations being made against Google from a commercial perspective (in 13 minutes)

In Episode 8 of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Conrad McGee-Stocks, the Director of Growth at Uken Games, which is the Toronto-based studio behind mobile hits like Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and Jeopardy World Tour. In the podcast, we talk about what it means to be a quantitative marketer, and how that role is evolving, especially on mobile, as product and user acquisition converge.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Maor Sadra about why the deprecation of the IDFA (announced at this year's WWDC event) should not have been surprising to people who follow the mobile ecosystem, why deterministic app install attribution wasn't as reliable as people thought in the first place, and what the future of mobile looks like without the IDFA.

In this podcast, I speak with David Philippson, the CEO of Dataseat and former co-founder of Ad-X, which was acquired by Criteo, about the underlying mechanics of mobile advertising. David walks through the process of How a Bid Becomes a DAU (inspired by the Schoolhouse Rock animation, How a Bid becomes a Law). We also talk about the future of advertising identifiers and programmatic in-housing.

In this episode of the MDM Podcast, I speak with David Barnard, a vocal developer advocate on Twitter, about whether the App Store's closed nature and its treatment of developers is fair.

A conversation with Dr. Sandra Matz of Columbia Business School about ad targeting, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and how to protect our Democratic institutions from algorithmic content serving

In the second episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with mobile growth expert Andy Carvell about the difficulty of hiring people into mobile growth roles and what might be the cause of that.

In this interview, Mobile Dev Memo's Eric Seufert speaks with Adam Hadi, a mobile influencer marketing expert, about growing a mobile user base with influencer marketing.