How Digital Turbine delivers user acquisition with Ron Alini

foreign y from digital turbine how are you doing today Ron very good James happy to be here thanks for having me very welcome lucky to be here at all I think the last two years made us appreciate these kind of things a little bit better so for folks who maybe haven't heard about digital turbine give them the skinny what is it the company yeah sure so digital turbine is a leading mobile growth platform offering a One-Stop solution for advertisers and app developers we offer both user acquisition Solutions and AD monetization we serve different types of audiences such as app developers brand and performance advertisers and the leading words telcos and mobile manufacturers so this is in a nutshell about digital turbine if we dive in I would say that on The monetization Suite we offer our ad monetization mediation

which is DD furbed the only independent mediation in the market then we have the DT exchange which is one of the leading exchanges in the market having more than 80 000 direct applications uh integrated which is a massive uh footprint and then we have DT Off the Wall which is a unique and non-intrusive AD format basically gives the users the opportunity to win virtual currency within the game by completing different tasks on the UA front we offer our advertisers the opportunity to reach and tapped audiences through our own device experience and also to our own DSP gotcha I'll Circle back to the different types of AD formats because I've been talking to a lot of you know ad platforms today and they're all talking around different ways to try and you know generate UA and make sure that people are clicking on more than just a banner ad or a pop-up or something like that so you're talking about there almost like gameplay built into the ads

themselves is that right explain a little bit more yeah definitely so we're seeing like rewarded video format is growing massively in the last few years because advertisers and app developers are looking for like non-intrusive ways that won't hurt the user experience within the game so we're looking for less like interstitials and Banners we're heading through rewarded videos and also through offer wall for example which is a great way to encourage your user to spend more time on your game and it also helps retaining those users because just things that about the users that they don't have any currency left and they are not looking to go for any in-app purchases so basically we're giving them a chance to be retained by completing different tasks in the game and have the opportunity to win virtual currency so basically it's a win-win situation for everyone like for the app Developers for the advertisers and of course for the for the user itself and how to maintain

the message when you're doing that how do you push the message for whatever you're advertising while also turning into a game that feels kind of I guess natural and organic within the shell of the game that they're playing yeah so we're trying to do it as native as possible so if we're talking about rewarded videos so usually usually we place them on the shop so where you have the opportunity to buy some stuff so you also have like One logo that tells you listen watch this video and gain Gems or coins or whatever when we're speaking about offer wall for example so we are trying we have all the two to keep it as native as possible we have the colors we have the logo we have everything that the developer wants basically so it really keeps the user in the game environment and it's not like he's clicking on something and he's being redirected to like outside page so it feels very natural for for the users when they're using this kind of performance do you feel that's one of the Olympics over the last few years because audience Behavior has just changed quite quickly in the market as a whole mobile

especially changes at a crazy speed so is that one of the big shifts you've seen or are there other New Opportunities and new wrinkles that have emerged yeah so first of all yeah this is like a big shift we're going we're heading through like more and more uh putting the user in the center and try not to interrupt the users when they're playing a game or using an app and another big change that we're seeing um we're seeing recently um is on the mediation space so what is happening these days is there are a lot of there are a lot of consolidations in the market so we're seeing like a lot of big gaming Studios buying smaller studios in order to utilize data and other and other stuff and we're also seeing um large ethic companies buying smaller at the companies we're seeing at the companies buying gaming Studios and also attribution companies and this basically creates let's say a conflict of interest

for app developer because the data their data is no longer safe it's not it's actually being at risk because uh other companies can leverage it that their data and they you know these companies have like competing businesses so it creates like a huge conflict and I believe that these days more than ever there is a true need for an unbiased uh growth platform that its sole mission is to help advertisers grow their business without any trade-offs so this is what we're trying to do here do you think become a lot more Savvy about the way that their data is used like I think before maybe they didn't realize just how much information was they were giving over and how valuable potentially that information is because the market now is all about information and users and with gdpr coming in and all the changes that were made how how delicate do you have to be when dealing with other people yeah yeah so let's say that in reason like I'll say that

um the move to more and more privacy regulation is probably the biggest change the mobile advertising industry is seeing in recent years gdpr CCPA Copa on the other side we have IOS 14 we have Google sandbox you name it I mean like there are tons of regulations and we we understand uh and we welcome this trend of users wanting more privacy and we're complying with it and we are doing everything we could to give our partners the right tools to uh to deal with this kind of new environment that you're having these days yeah and it's very welcomed from the user perspective also from the company perspective and it's it's a bit more challenging in terms of targeting abilities but yeah we're making sure that we're complying and we're making sure that we

are not putting the user at risk to us and she mentioned challenging the whole basically the past two years three years have been kind of one weird crisis after another whether it's shifting from the pandemic over now there the economy is going a bit weird in in places all over the world has that presented other unique challenges do you find that users behavior is changing when maybe the economy isn't doing quite so well and that presents its own problems so I'm going a bit back to the early Kobe days so while many Industries suffer during the pandemic I would say that the mobile ecosystem boomed really like people were spending people were spending like more time than ever using the mobile devices and the revenues grew massively and then I'm going I'm speaking then speaking about this situation that is happening right now the global recession so yeah I mean there is no escaping it right like um like everybody is being affected by this situation and advertisers

specifically are being way more cautious about every dollar they spend so basically there is a need for efficient targeting channels that would be able to give the advertisers both positive Roi and scale so this is the game these days um and um I also remember like the Panic we had like in the industry we're in apple like early last year announced the big privacy change I mean the iOS 14 that users basically can choose to be opted out from being tracked so I would say that digital turbine was the first player in the market to lead the discussion also to leverage a contextual targeting yeah and um I mean we we were all like uh concerned

about what is going to happen with the iOS 14 and the decline in revenues and I have to tell you that we weren't seeing any like declines in Revenue but the opposite that we managed to grow our business substantially thanks to these uh developments like uh contextual targeting yeah well you can see we're at a physical event finally after a two two and a half year break we haven't been back to Helsinki since 2019. and everyone's bustling around us including catering apparently over the side there um what do you feel is the difference of being at physical events versus kind of the the two years of Zoom conferencing that we have that's a great question I mean in my opinion nothing there is nothing compared to face-to-face interaction I mean like uh it's great to be here it's a lovely place a beautiful city a fellasanki and um I mean I love it I love it and I've been doing like I don't know hundreds of Zoom calls in the last two years and to

get a chance to see the person that you're speaking with and having coffee having a beer I mean it's it's Priceless and I'm lucky to be here [Music]