Fireside Chat: Money Talks - Listening To Buyer Signals - Adam Smart & Edik Mitelman, AppsFlyer.

Adam and Edric, we've got um from apps fire is going to come up and talk to us through well they're going to talk to each other I believe in a fireside chat style uh we're talking about why money talks listening to buyer signals understanding the data of what buyers users are actually doing massively important I will hand over to you guys I don't normally talk about absol products when I come on stage at things like PGC and that sort of stuff I uh I don't like the whole sort of sales pitch thing and everything else but uh it came to me a while ago and said, "Hey, we've got this

new product. You've got to you got to get this across to everybody. You've got to let them understand what it actually means cuz it's called SignalHub." Now, SignalHub gives a lot of strange connotations. You know, signals, okay, great. No idea what that actually means or what it does. So, I thought drag you on stage and we'll actually have a one-to-one conversation about what it actually means and how I could use it as a gaming company.
Do you want to start by introducing yourself? That's probably a good place to start.
Sure. Hi everyone. I'm Edick Middleman. I'm the general manager at Appslier for the data collaboration platform. This is besides the MMP, which you probably all know UPS for. Um, this is a suite of products that helps any two types of companies to collaborate and share data in a privacy preserving manner. GDPR, CCPA, all of those beautiful things. Uh we're working with the largest retailers in the world, all the largest banks, um travel companies, all the companies that have interesting data and they're

willing to monetize it and to work with it and to collaborate with gaming companies like yourself or anybody else. This is what our data collaboration platform does. And specifically for Signal Hub, we will discuss how all of you can benefit real life customer consumer behavior to help grow your games. That was a lot of words.
Yeah,
it's a well-known fact that I have a smooth brain. [laughter]
So, I I need a very simplistic understanding of what this actually does. So, as a like as a game studio, what could I actually get from this?
Yeah. So, we partnered with leading companies such as Mastercard and other leading financial institutions who enable you guys to pick and choose all type of consumers based on their spending. So, you come and you say, "I want all the people, let's say in North America, who spend between $100 to $1,000 on an app store, or I want all the people who spend above $1,000 on

Louis Vuitton or whatever merchant or product or behavior, spend ranges, and demographics. So you come with your wishful audience based on real emails, real device ids, real people, real credit cards and through our platform you get access to this data and then you can target it anywhere you want on your usual ad networks, social networks, anywhere you go and you also can bring your own firstparty data, your device ids, your emails, your inapp events to create suppression lists to find joined uh audiences to do retargeting thing if you want. But actually, it's very simple. You get consumers based on their real spend in the real world and what they really do with their credit cards and with their money. And then you can go wild. And if you know your whales, if you know your top players, if you know who are the people you want to target, what do they do in the real world? Or

you have assumptions about how your whales look like, you can then get these audiences, try them out, measure raw TV, inner purchases, whatever you want to measure and see if it makes sense to you and if it helps you grow.
But normally like when SAS companies say this sort of thing, it's it's when something sounds too good to be true, it genu generally is, right? So how is this legal?
Yeah, that's the number one question we always get asked. So our data collaboration platform is built on top of our data clean room. And I will not get into the width of the technology but the data clean room piece is what enables this to be legal audited private consented GDPR CCPA all the regulations you may think. So this is what makes Mastercard and other such companies happy to share data with you guys to sell it to you guys without any problem without any legal concerns. We get banks

um to be our customers. They audit the hell out of us. Trust me, it's painful. And we pass very scrutinized audits every single month. So, I'm very confident to say that this is absolutely legal. And this is very private, hashed, encrypted. Nobody gets access to the data. Nobody can download the data. Nobody can abuse it. It's all there only for the purposes of user acquisition. And it's only there for you. Your data is not being shared with anyone else. And this is how it's all private. understand this is how it all works and this is why this product is now available and it wasn't available like three or four years ago because this technology was not yet advanced enough.
That is absolutely nuts. So you're walk me through the process of it. So like you're saying as a game studio I can have I can go to Mascard and I can say hey give me all people who've paid on Apple App Store and and Android.
Yep.
And they'll provide something through to

Apps. Y
I can then use that to send custom audiences out to Facebook, Google, whoever I want to target. Is is there a limitation on who I can use to target or anything?
No, there's no limitation. This audience can be activated across any ad network um DSPs, socials, world gardens, whatever. It's based on your channels. We are integrated to the vast majority of the leading ones. If you use some obscure weird one, let us know. we will be able to integrate as long as the ad network of your choice has an API that can accept custom audiences I don't mind connecting to that API right um so it's exactly as you said you ask Mastercard for audiences and then it magically appears in UPS platform you click a button and it magically appears in your Facebook cabinet in your DV3 in your whatever and then you run your campaign as you usually would and of course if you're an upseller customer as an MMP you would measure it against all other channels.

And these they don't have to be like your own users. This is like it it's like you remember when you used to go down the pub and meet someone and they say, "Hey, do you want to buy an email list?" It it it feels like [laughter] that.
Yeah, it's that but it's very targeted and it's necessarily not your users because you can bring your own users to exclude them so you don't waste dollars on people you already own and uh players you already have. That's the beauty of it. while you can join your first party data, your device IDs with the Mastercard data or the Visa data or the whatever data and then you really focus on user acquisition on you to brand people. Or if you're in the retargeting business, you can do the opposite. You find your own people within these audiences and you retarget them because you know that they spend a lot of money on Barbies. So now you can have a creative with a Barbie on it because you know these people have some something to do with it. So you can impact your creative based on what these people buy

or acquire new ones based on your assumptions of how your whales and your top players look like
or use those assumptions to then tailor the creatives that you're using in order to target or change the way. Yeah, you can have an entire campaign tailored for a specific product because you know that you're targeting people who spend a lot of money on this specific product or with this specific merchant.
Absolutely nuts.
It works
like and like do we have you seen any success stories with this so far? like I mean how how are people working with
what's the what's the general I mean I when you told me there was an instant sort of oh my god um you know how are people looking at this and what are they thinking of doing with it
yeah so the reason why I'm here is that gaming companies this is available for all verticals e-commerce fintech what have you but the gamers usually tend to be at the at the cutting edge you guys are very innovative so when gaming companies heard we have it they were like all over it and we already have more than I think seven live um

customers for this. We just announced it in November. So two months passed with the Christmas break in between and they're all like inapp purchase gamers are looking to buy like audiences of people who spend in app stores because if somebody spends more than $1,000 in an app store that means a they have a credit card and they have the behavioral pattern to click this button and spend and b probably they have kids who do it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to like just because they they have inclination to spend on the app store doesn't necessarily mean that they're automatically going to spend in your game, right? I mean,
but the likelihood of them being more heavy spenders is higher. Yeah.
So, you're buying you're targeting people who have more propensity to be in a purchasers,
but it's you still have to put a good game out. I mean, you still have to something that people's going to want to pay.
Nothing beats having a good product. You have to have a good game. You have to have a good

tendency to buy in an app store. We take social casino games etc. They come to Mastercard like hey can I please have all the spenders with casinos in Las Vegas like real casinos and they get a million Americans like literally millions of Americans who spend a lot of money in casinos. This is an interesting audience. If your game is something to do with poker, with roulette, with casinos, you have people in the midcore gaming like um you know all kinds of war games. They're targeting people who buy in Toys R Us or different such merchants. They buy toys or they buy gaming um equipment that again correlates with their hardcore user. So we see a lot of different verticals in within gaming. identifying what means good user for them in the real world and then you can also buy specific um competitors of yours. So if your

competition sells direct to consumer their name will appear on the Mastercard list. So you can specifically ask for all the people who spend with your direct competition as long as they're merchants of record. If they use upcharge the guys here then upcharge will appear on the Mastercard list. So you can ask all the people who spend X dollars with upcharge. Great. You know these people buy D2C coins. Great. Now if it's relevant to your game, you can target them with your offering. So you can slice and dice according to merchants and products in the real world. Everything that goes to the Mastercard printout you get at the end of the month is within limits and is available.
That's I mean it's really got the potential to change user acquisition. like the more the more companies that start jumping on this, the more advantage that there's going to be. It's it's inc it's absolutely incredible. But what is there limitations as to what I would actually be able to ask for from some of these providers?

Yeah, every provider has their own privacy threshold. So if your ask will be five Americans, they will not give it to you, right? Because this is identifiable. So, as long as your ask is something above 10,000 people, this is available. But again, this is what the data providers do for you. You ask an audience still for free. You don't pay them anything. They go, they do the homework. They come back and say, "Yep, we can do it." Or, "No, sorry, this is too small. Please expand your uh query a little bit." And then you can play with your parameters, with the ad spend, with the ranges. Somebody just yesterday asked me all the people who spend more than $2 million on their credit card. That's it. So, Mastercard came back and said, "No, unfortunately, not enough Americans spend more than 2 millions on their card. So, we cannot give you this." But they found the minimal threshold, which was something like 700,000, which was already enough people to give it. So, you can just get millionaires if that's who you want to target, regardless of where they spend.

This is just very very rich people who spend a lot of money in their credit card. If this is your target audience, you can go and get these.
It's nuts. Like seriously, [laughter] but where All right. So, where do you see this ending up? Like what's where does this go? Like I mean presumably you're building some kind of marketplace blah blah blah. There's going to be a lot of
Yeah, this is already a marketplace. We started with North America because for some reason all of you are targeting North America first. Um, so we're just going where you guys want to go, but we're opening more and more countries pretty much every week and every month. UK will be open very shortly. Latin America, Brazil, Mexico, cheaper CPMs, cheaper data, different users. So this will be available um APAC. So like Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, all of these countries again available through Mastercard because they have strong base there and we add more and more providers in North America. We already have four.

So if Mastercard for example gives you merchants, we have another partner called Factures. They give you products. So you can look at all the people who buy Air Jordans across all the merchants in North America. So, Mastercard gives you merchants. Factures gives you SKs. You can look at what SKs are trending in Dallas. You can look at what shoes were selling the most in California. All of this is available as long as the number of people that you get back in this audience is big enough to pass the privacy threshold. So, anything through these the combination of these data providers is available. We're bringing now Equifax on board. they know about the socioeconomic status of the people. So you can combine the data from Mastercard with average salary and then you're targeting people whose average salary is somewhere here and their spending patterns are somewhere here and then you know who you target. So by combining different sources you really

can build audiences that are tailored for your whales, for your needs, for your users um in every country pretty much. And the next phase of it is um of course adding AI to that. I think we were 10 minutes in. I didn't mention AI. Sorry. Uh that's off brand for you. [laughter]
But the idea is that some of you come to us and say, "But we don't know what to ask. We don't know what our users do in the real world." So yes, of course, that's what AI is for. you will be able to give us a seed audience of like 100 or 10,000 of your best players and say, "Hey, what do you know about these people and then we can take these people and go all the data sources and maybe we will find out that your whales love ice cream for whatever reason, right? But we have access to the Walmart data. Entire Walmart's data is in the platform. So maybe we can find patterns about your users, your players that you don't know of and have no chance to know and

and then proactively pass information.
AI will discover this and then you will be able to buy these audiences and target more like this. So this essentially replaces the blackbox lookalikes that Facebook and Google promise you will work here. This is real. It's it's kind of moving that power back from, you know, you would have predominantly used DSPs to do this level of targeting and everything and it's it's almost bringing that back in house.
You take control. You don't need to trust the ad networks to tell you our blackbox works and just trust us. You take back control. You define your audiences. You look for interesting signals about them. You license that data and you activate it directly. You know exactly what are you buying and who are you targeting instead of here's my seed audience. Hey, uplaving or whatever. Do your magic.
You you said like part of this is going and and talking to Mastercard and back and forward sort of saying I I want this and they're saying no, we can give you this.
Is that a costly expensive process? Like I mean does this

so the whole reason
this is difficult to start doing
the whole reason we exist is that we automated all of this. So all of you here probably can do it by yourself but this would require you a year of legal paperwork of all the contracts. How do you get the data? You need privacy tech all of this. So we built our signal hub to for you it's two clicks. You agree on an end user license agreement with Mastercard. You define the audiences and you decide the ad network and it works. So that's why we built this product because otherwise for you it would be a lot of heavy lifting to get this by yourself.
Can we can we help convince people's internal legal departments?
We know how to do it. We have the paperwork. I meet CISOs and security teams every day. Um, gaming legal teams happen to be easier to convince than banks. We were able to convince banks. So, any one of you who needs help uh to talk to your legal friends who usually tend to be a pain, we know how to do it. We have the paperwork. Our legal team is very happy to jump on calls to help you

convince your internal colleagues that that's fine. It's legal. It's all good. You're not buying some gray data of the newspapers. Yeah. You're not going to be in the newspapers.
Amazing. And you're going to be on our stand which is just outside the door here the entire day right here to booth I think to the right. Feel free to reach out or through email or through whatever. You don't need to be an upstar customer. It's preferable but you don't have to. You can use any MMP for that purpose and you can start right away with a PC and see if it works for you.
Amazing. Back to you, Oscar.
And on that note, [laughter] thank you very much. Uh I I would as tempted as I am to offer you questions, I think I ought to move on, but thank you very much. Uh very interesting stuff. Cool. Um and obviously random of course. Thank you. [applause] I think more we understand about what players are actually doing, the better. And if we understand what they're buying, behavior like even better squared.