Death of Performance Marketing: End of a Career in UA?

you hey folks welcome to our next you a coffee talk today we're joined by Montel ostrich and Phillip Potro's welcome guys today we're going to be talking about two very different perspectives on the future of performance marketing the positive view the changes currently impacting you a will shift the role of a you a marketer but ultimately the changes will not be so dramatic so the changes will be more of a shift rather than a fundamental change and then there is the negative you the basic role of performance marketing and having a career as a you a marketer is basically dead that's it one and the role is fundamentally gone or will be nothing like what it is today and to provide our audience here with some context I wrote a Gigi Digest newsletter and medium post titled the death of performance marketing the secret

interview in that post I wrote about some of the big changes happening that will impact the you a marketing role and in that post we'd in an interview both with Ma Tei who we have on here today as well as a confidential interviewee and we discussed both sides of the arguments from what will happen and we will reprise that debate again here today and just to say you know I asked Philip o2b to take on the negative view as much as possible so he's here both to represent his own views but to also as you know for for intellectual debate and discussion purposes to explore that negative side a little bit more as well but before we dive in could we just kind of get an update from you guys so Phillip oh can you tell us a little bit about yourself in your career and then after that Monta it'd be great to see what your most recently doing as well so the short version because I have a bit

of white hair unfortunately is I have a technical background failed entrepreneur and and I I flew around with satellites and did all sorts of funky stuff in aerospace and then I kind of switched careers and came to the US and as a gamer obviously wanted to get into games but the path to that went through the dark side of the force working for ad networks and then I tried to migrate to the good side of the forest a little bit where I had a really interesting experience working for data science you know I mean an analytics company which back in the day was the king of the hill on Facebook especially yeah that was contagion and then finally landed with the gaming people and it was an interesting path because I managed to live in the US but work first with China

[Music] and then with India and that was a really good story actually because now the second version of that game is being published my network so that must have been the first version must have been good enough to make a second one that star chef to being published by Network III I worked on the first one and then I am went to pixel berry where I started up the whole story that is now in the history books with going from 0 to 100 let's say and then I left the US because I got kicked out by Trump I mean no I'm kidding I did I mean my visa was running out went back to Europe and after a couple of other exciting adventures I landed a trapline which is in Finland but I live in the Netherlands and pretty

much the same story as at pixel barium I landed a ground zero and we're building everything from from the bottom off that monetization marketing analytics stack the growth machine and and everything that comes with it so lots of hats to wear and building up a team and so on short version okay I just want to go on record that I will be antagonizing mateus opinions however we are friends I want to record may the record show that we are friends but I have no fear in antagonizing him so he's antagonizing me now to provoke let's see what happens okay so let's let me briefly introduce myself I mean I've been in the industry

for seven years so far I'm from Slovakia and I'm based here I started 2013 at Pixar Federation which is the biggest gaming company here and then after five years left enjoying super scale and like five years ago also I started running my own new a consultancy and now these days I'm seeing more on full time on the you a consultancy in helping my clients or the game companies to grow that was the very brief version of introductions yeah but you're younger all right and just to set the agenda for today we will specifically cover number one how are you a team's change in the future how big will the teams be compared to today - is there a career in you a anymore number three how much measurement will be possible for you a five years from now does that mean we have to act more

like brand marketers and be less data-driven for who will lead free-to-play marking teams in the future brand or performance and five how much can we or should we trust Facebook and Google so starting with the first topic let's jump right in how will you a team's change in the future how big will teams be compared to today and just to stir the pot a little bit here is a response from that Gigi Digest post that I mentioned from our confident you a expert so he said teams are gonna get a lot smaller you don't need 20 people optimizing all these levers because the levers are not available anymore we will have more focus on credos messaging and brand building and on the other hand at less control and visibility on what actually works most of the heavy lifting will happen by the algorithms developed by

Facebook in Google it's common these days to make changes and hurt your campaigns because changing the signal can throw the algorithm off moreover some of these algorithms penalize constant change whenever the algorithm goes into learning mode you are wasting impressions that could have gone to qualified audiences therefore you will be able to spend larger budgets with much smaller teams that combine technical and creative backgrounds ok mate' what do you think yeah I mean I think we all agree that the change it's gonna happen here I mean it's it's almost inevitable that this change will take words across the mobile Meiko system a few very few people are needed actually to to be in the company to scale marketing spent on the most important channel switch is Facebook and Google obviously these days but the reality is that you know for Facebook even based strategies like video and the value based optimization and Ayoo the purchase campaigns with campaign budget

optimized campaigns these these changes are now helping to change account structures from having hundreds of campaigns or thousands of campaigns to actually get to the smaller amount of campaigns and you are able to run the it with the same efficiency these days because I campaigns it seems like Google UAC campaign function is the same way so basically a marketing team that are spending then spending extra millions of dollars per month might be only one or two to UI people dedicated you have people for these channels so well I think the need for like having big teams or having like campaign images and maybe a media virus is going to decrease going forward because of you know these mechanisms of these algorithms and campaigns creates more demand for like data analysts and

the creative artists or creative managers in in the sense that it didn't exist before so basically like all in all I think the mobile marketing or mobile user acquisition teams will shrink okay I mean he's he's stealing my thunder he's taking the negative view he should have said something you know no no I mean I mean obviously jokes aside I agree with him there is definitely I don't think it's possible to have a disagreement with that my disagreement comes down to the notion of like you a the the term that was invented right let's say last decade that's that's what needs to change and how are we need to embrace that change

because the we need to have more people that less smaller teams but more people that have a wider spectrum of talent that covers some of the things that might a said the data piece but also some knowledge of product design customer relationship management creative and obviously every talent has you know as a specialization in something specific and expertise or passion but being able to be like a Swiss Army knife right to think of the more holistic picture because the media buying and all that is really something that a machine should be doing and I'm a big fan of automation but the human

brain is different from a machine and we have perspective right so we can offer something different when we are thinking about you way and we need to really embrace that there is an incredible opportunity here of being able to follow a human being through you know a supermarket which is virtual okay we were able to track their behavior in incredible ways and that data is just something no one else has right and we can what we do about that data first how do we collect that data and interpret that data and then what we do about that data because more often than not we're just collecting tons of data and doing nothing about it not even understanding

half of it so we have the the the levers are in some sense more on us than on the actual channels but then I also disagree I think on the channels there are different levers from before and being able to pick up on those nuances that are very specific to how your audience and your product behaves right in response to that channel those are again the levers are on us because it's our product but we can still pull some levers it really depends on what you're throwing out there on the channels no channel is ever going to have as hard as they try you know just press a big red button and off you go and everything magically happens that's just not

possible in terms of the scale of this team reduction is is it ten to one is it 20 people to two people or what what's the and so when we're talking to all of our UA friends and there's ten of them I'm gonna be gone in five years like the scale in terms of the reduction in your opinion since it sounds like both of us agree there will have to be some reduction in team sizes I mean as is also who information the automation will play a huge thing in the team reductions but I don't think like it's gonna change from 22 to immediately and like two depends also on the seniority of the of those ûà ûà people I mean like to really senior people can handle budgets but then you know if you want to have a couple of minutes of your free time and

or you want to you know go to actually like eat that stuff so so you definitely need more people to you know take some responsibilities and do some some real work so I would say like from 10 to 5 maybe would be a good percentage but again it's like there is no specific reductions that I have in mind but I would definitely say no like from 22 to but there will be something that's kind of is gonna happen but not that significant okay actually on this one I can pretty easily push back because the last time and it's happening again here a trap like what if I if I take the pixel very example the first person that was the second person that was hired was the creative lead so the focus was of course on building out

the creative people and we reached a significant amount of scale with only one person well one plus me to really worry about the you a so if people can reinvent themselves to cover different disciplines like I was saying before then you know there won't be any need to get rid of anyone but my personal experience in my opinion as well is I'd rather hire first to get like all the ducks in order for data all the docs in order for creative maybe even somebody to take care of all the sort of lifecycle marketing and social media community etc and then you know add more people I do

agree with Matteo of course like adding more people if you find senior people then it's very easy to do you know you and the other person several million in spent because a lot of things have become automated and and things from a certain point of view have become simpler right I'm sorry to interrupt but does this also change the kind of calculus about when you start to build an internal team because it is simpler because you need fewer people and maybe now the the way that game gaming Studios will be thinking is that as the initially scale that they'll just kind of do some of the stuff on their own or use an outsourced hua agency or something like that and then when they get to a certain level of skill then they'll start building out the internal team does does this kind of calculation change now as well or no what would you guys think you can continue so if you

want with the video or thoughts I have [Laughter] no it's okay I mean I mean it's all it's all in a good flow so this is a good follow-up question for sure okay because I always you know like smaller gaming companies older like c-level guys need to understand do you a first and I think like they need to do that do the initial tests and everything by themselves in order to start building the team because always like right away starting building you a teams without any understanding is definitely not a good way for moving forward and that can be very dangerous for like the overall growth of the company well I have to agree with my friend now I think

it's very very important to have at you know obviously not necessarily founder level but somebody with a seat at the table as early as possible with that know-how and expertise because it has to influence as well the design strategy and it has to influence the way like the team is built town also on the depth side for if you need a data engineer you need a server engineer specifically for data we still have for obvious reasons Studios that just focus everything they've got due to limited funding on just the content which is super important of course but forgetting everything else is is a bit of a it's a bit of a mistake and leaving it to last minute because you're always running for the door so I'm very used to like coming in at ground zero and just sort of having this

a six month or three month rush pre-launch and and just set everything up really quickly with tape and glue and hope that it holds and then get it better after launch and I mean you know it's worked so far definitely but if we want to get you know you won that competitive advantage by having your data and really know what to do with it better earlier than later for sure and then you know after launch I think you can think about you know adding more people but yeah I think that's I don't know how in disagreement I am in this case alright moving on to the second topic so is there a career in UA anymore and Philippa you seem to mention that it sounds like what you were saying is that people are gonna have to change to be more like Swiss Army knives or broader basically and just so you guys know the confidential you a expert

in that former piece that I wrote up he's actually out he's basically so he's already left I believe so I believe so so okay they definitely shifted but what do you guys think did he get out like after the interviews that's confidential he was made up so yeah to hear that this yeah this person exists yeah might say please you you start always with the positive note yeah because I just believe and I think there will be career in the you a and still is because we heard this a lot in the last years and I'm doing this like almost every year over year like preference marketing is that you is that everything but in in

the you a career I mean it's definitely changed since I got into the gaming industry which was seven years ago and me personally I'm definitely like a different way manager then I was back then when we had this Facebook kind of a desktop things with very very small banners on the right-hand side of the Facebook and CCP eyes super well and that was all all you you cared about but you know you a manager need to need to change and that the career or the skills that will change and it's changing year by year but you know that's that's the part of the job and that's why I love the job as well like learning and improving your skills and and adapting to the the current situation on the market I mean in the game ecosystem and you know and also like looking into the future what's next and what needs to be changed and but yeah basically like I

still believe there will be a career in the UA and there is still a career in the UA it just gonna require a slightly different skill set or the as you mentioned people be more like like a sweet life yeah I think you know again it's hard to disagree with that what I can add to that maybe in the more negative I mean it's not for everyone you know if people yeah I have seen people depart and change because they're looking for something a little bit more stable and honestly it's dreamland if you think that in the year 2020 you find a stable career I mean dreaming even even a massive organization like uber managed to fire people okay it was coded but you know I think be ready to change and be flexible and that's really really important and so that's what UA is

demanding it's demanding to stay humble and just keep learning which is hard for a lot of people who you know can be there's a lot of there's a lot of self entitlement anyway there's a lot of people saying I'm the best I can do great things because you need to you know sell yourself that way and so a lot of people just would rather stick to tried and tested approaches instead of just redoing everything from from scratch so you need to reinvent yourself constantly which doesn't mean you need to change your narrative you need to actually change your skill set like what they was saying in the sense that you need to really understand certain things of course there are areas that each one of us really loves like some people might prefer looking at numbers and others might think more about branding and but we do need to you know stay

relevant and to stay relevant it takes keeping your finger on the pulse you need even train necessary whatever course is in digital marketing or so I think there is because things are constantly shifting and the biggest shift I think that is a hot topic in the industry is being able to be very cross-functional talking to the dev team the product team and just being much more blending yourself with with many different functions in the company because you are dependent on them in order for you to succeed in yeah so maybe just moving on to the third question I mean I could ask you some questions about specific skills but I

think we've covered that I think another interesting aspect of this which maybe we could cover in a future you know future discussion is more about you know the skills from performance marketing to influence or marketing because it definitely seems at least on the PC console side that that's now like the main thing driving me you know marketing at least on the PC and console side but moving on to our third question then so how much measurement do you guys think will be possible for you a let's say five years from now I think since about February I personally have been hearing more and more about rumors around the you know loss of device IDs by both Apple and Google and so if this trend continues in terms of loss loss of data not only from Facebook but also on the device level and then now does that mean that we have to act more like brand marketers what would you guys think well you know measurement I don't think still like we do all these

brand marketing we it's it's actually gonna happen but that's that's a that's a different topic we can cover in a bit but the right effective measurement I think the measurement under not thing but it's like the measurement is a vital part of mobile marketing and it's the same as with with the you a career I mean we are still going to measure the the KPIs and that night always on the positive side and I don't seem like this is gonna disappear or change dramatically from where we are at the moment I mean we still don't know what's gonna happen in one year not not even five years and you know another corridor another change of Facebook Terms of Service maybe or losing dye and the mobile device IDs well but what I do know these days I mean as I mentioned the Facebook change the Terms of Service and you know there are already some

agency that store their clients data and in their data warehouses which slightly violate those terms of services of Facebook and and also I think that's fair and mobile mission partners so we actually don't need to look that that far into the future to see like the measurement is changing at least four vendors or agencies already yeah I mean this is another beautiful hot topic with lots of lots of hot debates the fundamental issue here is privacy versus profitability right and let's be honest no one's you know like Facebook Google any one of these players is just gonna say we'll just give up on 50% of our revenues because they're untrackable so yeah device IDs will disappear something

else will take its stead because everyone's gonna want to continue you know taking a piece of the action in this ever-evolving industry it you know removing trackability is just going against all interested parties but the party lines have to be you know great privacy consciousness but what is needed to change really is we really need to come together think about how we do this attribution this is this is a big problem because obviously how do you bring together the same table Google Facebook etc etc on the subject but we really need to work the the we still have very limited visibility what

exactly is our customers journey as they discover us and they go through ads and so on how many of our ads are they see right because those theories of put your ads everywhere so there's this constant bombardment or do I just need one or two and with you know last click you can view through we're getting we're getting pretty much a very limited picture of them so it would be nice but I get shut down every time I say this a little bit of standardization around this just just a teeny bit without disrupting innovation because standardization is seen as the European communist standardization no we're talking about inciting innovation by having equal rules of the game so it will take some years but just you know a more fair

playing field for everyone that everyone can stick to you know just just saying link I know it sounds utopian but maybe at some point to make spending more efficient people come together and say okay well maybe we should say how big is that last click or some other attribution window and attribution methodology moving on to the fourth topic who will lead free-to-play marking teams in the future given the loss of data will it be more brand like brand or is it gonna be performance and we're already seeing some companies in you you know free-to-play mobile space shifting their leads to brand people so that's what's going on guys yeah you've talked about this before with with me when our last last podcast but I still believe that like shifting more to grant and

other companies in gaming one this won't happen anytime soon I mean you know still as measurement we still are going to be measure and evaluate like campaigns creatives analyzing the player segments and and create look-alikes and everything else before well almost exactly in the same way as before but not that differently to think that my brand marketing will take all all over the place and replace performed marketing I heard yesterday I'm one of the conference's termed like brand formance which is kind of use that in the past yeah bread ferments which is really nice but I mean we we talked about this also it guys last time there will be no brand or UA or performance I mean it's going to be all in one mobile marketing and there will be no differences that much as there may be now I think this is related

to our human need for labels and which is particularly emphasized in the US because I've had the great fortune of working in the US and working Europe where we need titles right and so we know our place in the universe and I decided now for the past couple of jobs to pick the title of growth although it it's dangerously close to these horrible things like growth ninja which I don't care as long as I get results call me whatever from now on you are a girl achieve growth the name Jack no my god don't call me that I'm just basically just the generic term growth I think is is the most relevant because if we keep

thinking you a and we keep thinking branding there are already a blend of two and actually on your note brand for months I have typically used it in in my work to say once performance has been around for a few years and we've reached a certain scale then we need to start thinking differently and it becomes more like brand formats I know it's terrible I stole that from something I don't know I think you know that we should already be thinking about typical example it's so easy given our expertise and the movers that are still there let's do clickbait right and i mean that in a very elegant sense meaning not gratuitous stupid stuff but stuff that really grabs your attention and is quite a divorce from from the app or game

you're advertising and that's great and that works but what is the long-term impact on your brand when you you know I am now working on a game which is quite humorous in content but it's ultimately a main course strategy game so should I quit the main character one of the main hero characters taking a dump on the toilet because it grabs your attention right and destroy my brand for the future or I'm actually be great for the brand because you know it's a funny character anyway he does funny things in the game so these are all the questions we should be asking ourselves as growth people you know not just get me that ro ass yeah we need the robots to keep the company afloat but we also need to think about these other things who is going to leave the future as the swiss army people understands both brand who

understands performance maybe you know also having a deep understanding of the influencer marketing spaces that's growing but you know one one thing I will say is just from my own personal experience being here in Silicon Valley what we see a lot from heads of growth in more Silicon Valley product companies but not so much in the gaming companies is something what I would call more of a growth strategist someone who's got like who articulates what the overall growth framework is and understands like the exact equation that drives growth for their game or their product and so maybe you know maybe the person that should be beating the free-to-play marketing team for games should also not only be more the Swiss Army knife but also be more the growth strategist as well but we'll see what happens definitely agree with you I'm not gonna be against you on that one so final

question how much can we or should we trust Facebook and Google so the point here for our audience is that because Facebook and Google are sucking up so much functionality they've got a lot of they're a black box they're doing a lot of stuff and you're trusting them with the money that you're giving them and they know all of your all of your data how much players in your games are spending and so when they so we don't know if they're being good or not right like the margin that they're taking maybe maybe a lot more of them then I mean they could just cheat and take all your margin if they want it to so given that what's what should be our perspective given that what we have seen whether it's from established companies like Amazon or other companies is that when we put some of these companies in positions of power they have abused it what's that what do you guys think might a is wearing a Google t-shirt yeah but

you know it's you a society a society should with Google branding but I'm also gonna say Google is not the most trustworthy company in the universe and also like Facebook as well with the breaches and because of scandals you know it's very and it it is it's going to be even harder to trust anything they say or a report in in the ads manager or any type orts but I mean is there anything we can do about it or we just you know try to to squeeze the best out of the numbers we can see so it's gonna be definitely a lot of fun congratulations of picking hot topics for a small coffee talk conversation yes each question could go on for like the

you know people are gonna hate me now for what I'm allowed to say that's good I you some more there is always I've been in meetings where like people go and meet with Facebook and gore and they're super defensive you know your Facebook and Google I hate you because you do all these things so we need to first of all split the public appearance the consumer appearance of these companies versus what we are doing with these companies it's a very different story and if we really want to call a spade a spade we probably take the the the same sort of position as them as far as the consumer I mean we are using their functionality so we we gain a lot of benefit for a lot of the things that they take heed for

from a data standpoint are they a hundred percent innocent for for what we do in marketing absolutely not we will never know the margins and all this but the bigger question is do we care first of all it's all about the people you work with and so far most of the people I've worked with in these companies have been really really smart and really go to bat for you because they know that if they're not getting you results you're not gonna spend any more with them and you'll just figure out another way of spending the money yes do they have an enormous share of voice but it's not exclusive is it if you really think about it that human being you can find somewhere else somehow you know so it will take you more money and it will be harder to do and so the great thing is we can reach to a huge amount of human human beings really easily and really cost

efficiently right who cares if they take a lot of money if you are able to have a certain cost efficiency and also build your own business I'm actually absolutely fine with that because at the end of the day the people that I work with are not you know shortchanging me those people because they are trying to get me you know the results some people actually evaluate it based on the results that they're getting us right because the better the results the more we spend with them so they're incentivized but also I just you know it doesn't really make sense for their future to get into some kind of sort of thieving business because it just you know every if we look at it as just a consumer product every region you know every generation has a great consumer product they get stuck so we're seeing this right snapchat Pinterest take talk what's next you know there's you go in France so these guys have to stay

relevant they have to stay important they have to stay you know ahead of the game or a new generation of kids comes along and makes a new product and blows them out of the park right so I think that they have a very different set of problems because they're very wealthy but they still have a lot of problems to deal with and you know we will see much more diversification undoubtedly just look at what's happening we ticked off these days right so I don't think for all products we can just survive on just spending on Facebook and Google but in my experience I've never had just been able to do that so was I against you enough you know yeah I'm pretty pretty surprised but you were more on the positive side all right well just kind

of I think that's it for the question but just kind of in wrapping up maybe maybe we could wrap up with just final word a device for any anyone out there contemplating a career in performance marketing what you would say to them and then if anyone does want to reach out to you guys can they reach out to you and if you have any other sort of final message for audience please let us know now maybe starting with you want a sure might want to mention to people that you're married yeah you're really good-looking solo so reaching out to you you know yesterday some some actually Slovakia guy was picking up and reach reach out to me or during the conference and he was saying okay I'm a temp from Slovakia as well he's my number call just called me like what the [ __ ] just happened but I I really wish I said we

mentioned a lot of drama and click bytes I would like to stress that not everything is going to be that dramatic in the in the future so please be careful when you are reading me any news and the articles or and or trying to listen to us as well and please make your own opinion about this and I think like the future is bright but it's just going to change a little bit in terms of the way and all these skill sets and everything in terms of mobile marketing so yeah that would be that would be my final five words can people get in touch me yes sure but final words are no final

words of advice well wanting to go into you a as a career definitely come because we need as much perspective as we can yet from whatever background you come from and I've worked with people say it's weird because I was flying satellites I mean I've worked with people who were incredible in the legal field and now are working as marketers there are so many backgrounds and I think that's what makes it really exciting just the people you work with come from so many different stories and that really brings perspective and we need fresh shoulders we need fresh ideas and not to sound a usual thing we still have a pretty male-dominated environment

and we need much more non male perspective especially when we're marketing products for a non male and so it would be nice to really get more international gender diversity perspective not just sort of academic and work backgrounds but also just life experience you know if you want just a stable easy thing and then this is not for you at all because the rule of the game change changes every day almost but that's what's really exciting and so again for me it's what gets me out of bed there's something new and the first reaction is not again but then the second reaction okay what do we do now you know what's the solution and so that's it's a very exciting space to be

in no it's not yeah I mean I was expecting the day to give me a little bit of a harder time to be negative now man I'm always positive so why why give you a hard time alright guys well thank you very much for your time today I think that's it and if yeah if everybody everyone or anybody can or want to get in touch with me just LinkedIn or links in the show notes for anywhere I'll get in touch with you you know but he has a he has a de Waal on this page so if you wanna have 99

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