Data: exploration vs exploitation | Joseph Iris from Persona.ly

[Music] I am now joined by Joseph iris from personally how's the show going for you so far pretty good pretty good we love Pocket Gamer to be honest good business here usually this year is no different huge crowd good to see the same faces as last year yes all good yeah it's a nice one to kick off the year right everyone's ready to go after the break exactly you did a talk is that right so what was that about so I was talking about creative selection uh and how machine learning is used to do that you know everyone talks about generative AI but obviously machine learning is used for other things uh and when we talk with UA managers when we provide them with these services for UA targeting that's a big part of the conversation the all these companies have huge creative team they generate new variations all the time and you're trusting the platforms to test them for you uh and there's always this balance between exploring making sure you are

really running the best thing you can and exploiting what you know is already the best thing right now so there's a lot of uh checkel battles say in this process and we use machine learning to try and take care of more and we've talked to you folks in the past but I'll assume they've watched some of the videos but if not just what's the one sentence summary of what personally does personally does user acquisition and retargeting using uh machine learning in order to classify users and uh make sure we bid according to the predicted life and V right so it's been a tough year or so for everybody in 2023 especially if you're a developer and it looks like Trends are continuing a little bit VC spend is down there are going to be fewer games in 2024 which potentially means fewer people you know approaching you folks for business but what are you hearing from your clients and customers are they asking for different kinds of services are they asking for different kinds of help to manage this this slight uh like storm so we've been seeing a

shift towards retargeting in general budgets that used to go to UA went to retargeting now either way it's money on the floor if you haven't been doing it you just need to do it correctly and make sure you measure incrementality people are starting to think about incrementality other than just the buzz world so that's important uh and we've just been seeing this these cutdowns of uh what you would usually call Fat less experimentation more exploitation of what you already know so as a company doing user acquisition we actually saw growth in 2023 when all of this was happening but because usually when you go into programmatic you're working with the biggest developers that already have titles that are established and they generate money so we just grew with them uh and yeah I me it's a definitely a tough thing to navigate for new developers but the studios are still like honing their skills even further with with every dollar they spend and

they're actually knocking the competition out so for them I mean it's bad for a lot of people trying to emerge but the big guys are continuing to own it and they're doing it pretty well how important do you think it is if there are fewer games being made and fewer appearing obviously the ones that do will really need to double down on the UA but what about retention what about reactivating old users who have maybe you know fallen out of love or not logged on for a little while how much of a focus is on that and do you feel that people ignore that aspect of it in favor just the brand new UA BR so you have the type of developers that are KNE deep into retargeting because they know they're competing in a in a genre that has so many Alternatives they have to pull people back in you have others that don't necessarily have a Content schedule so it doesn't feel intuitive for them to pull people back in so we encourage them to think that way obviously it helps the users in user acquisition but if you want to I talk to

a developer today that has 200 million downloads right but uh 1 million monthly active users which is impressive either way but you have 199 million people that showed intent and probably played some of them played a significant amount so being able to segment them correctly making sure they really weren't active any time recently and pulling them back in in a cost effective way worse you just need to be careful because measurement is always key attribution can be confusing especially when it comes to R targeting so there's some key things you should know but as soon as you figure them out and you can measure correctly you should be good to go and managing the data has become even more difficult in the last few years with apple locking down what you can and cannot connect collect had the same thing from Google to some degree and now recently China's preventing things like daily login rewards and stuff like that so for a company like yourself which relies on Gathering and analyzing data

how do you make the most out of the signals you still have access to yes so when it all started with ATT uh we understood the only thing that's really left is context and we've made a lot of work using natural language processing in order to capture this context to the fullest extent so we have Vector representations of apps based on their store descriptions and this way we can measure the distance between each and every app in the store this allows us to bid accordingly because usually you'll see in game that closer contexts ship the more s STS because you're playing a match free game you're getting sick of it you're going to want to try a new one uh that's an iOS attribution there is still a mess everyone's still doing po ballistic uh I don't know if scan in the future is going to be different but when it comes to Android uh back then I was scared with iOS first because I was less experien and it's a major change on the other it's head Tech it happens every couple of years but an Android because

uh Google has their finger in both pies right they're making this much more accessible for the buy side they want us to retain as much signal as possible so you're going to have topics that are supposed to replace the user presentation it seems to be legit H there are really specific things there and it's still all done on the user device so there's no risk of you know any identity leaking or anything like that and even for retargeting you're going to have the it's called Puppy which is a very funny acronym but it's like the Privacy audiences for so they're thinking ahead it's easy to adapt to it uh and half of this machine learning thing is learning like by Nature we have to adapt so we're ready for all of it we're not too excited the the last thing about this is that as single signal decreases so do the prices in the market so everything balances it out we saw it happening on iOS

so aggressively it was insane like prices like one day to the next you kept dropping and and drop so I'm sure the same thing is going to happen here budgets are going to shift between platforms back and forth but we'll waver the storm as we usually do with set you know gotcha well you've come to the show today what is the benefit from your perspective for actually coming to physical events and looking up with people face to face are you here to check out the competition or just meet clients or what's it's mostly to meet clients and Prospects uh there's there's something to it you know I mean we're I think everyone is kind of still in this like postco mindset uh and people are still kind of shelled up uh but I can break the ice pretty easily and like somehow it's the only way to establish trust in in in an industry where trust is not so well established in general so it's really good

specifically Pocket Gamer is uh and this uh venue is amazing it's like really the best spot for talking and still hanging out and having fun so yeah it's really good we we're fun there are so many places that are kind of anonymous Warehouse type buildings and this is way more character it's why we've kept it it's a bit full but we like it nonetheless it's great well thank you ever so much for talking to me today and we looking forward to seeing you at future events show thank [Music]