How has attribution changed since ATT Privacy? | Adam Smart from AppsFlyer

[Music] we're now joined by Adam smar from apps flyer how are you doing today I'm very good thank you for having me fantastic I understand you did a talk was it today or yesterday uh I did three yesterday well then yeah I imagine a solo one and a bunch of panels Season Pro uh no I actually had three panels oh so one was uh I've got a podcast that's in the sandbox with with huge from product Madness so we did a live version of that which is going to be out in the public very shortly um we did I did another panel which was surrounding the the creatives and the importance of creatives at the moment especially with all of the Privacy uh changes that have been introduced and how you work with creatives now and why it's important to work with creatives and all now um and another one that was looking at the the impacts of uh the the economy the the

situation at the moment for gaming and whether or not it's the right time to launch games for for companies well it's funny you should mention that that's what we talking about first of all though if anyone hasn't heard of apps F given the the one sentence slug light so I mean we we're there on a very primitive level we're there to connect the click on an ad with the install um and that's that's the sort of whole premise of what we do everything else that we have all of the other features that we have have all been spawned from the needs that arise outside of that but that's the main premise of what we've got you well let's start with the stake of the industry which has you know suffered a little bit in the last 12 months we've seen a lot of layoffs we've seen uh some spend has been up but engagement has kind of been down and we've had a situation where people are blaming regulation people are blaming lots of things but the the end result is fewer jobs VC funding's down fewer games are going to get made this year that's just sort of what's Happening so from

your perspective how does that affect what you do on a day-to-day basis and what are you hearing from your clients and customers what are they asking you for I think it's not it's not anywhere near as as Doom and Gloom as a lot of the the media makes out and I think when each individual case of redundancies and that sort of stuff has to be you know you can't just Club them all together and say that this is this is all one reason for the redundancies I think there's multiple different reasons going on for that at the moment and some is you know when you're looking at the PC and console side of it some is what has always been done really that's it's just been a lot more quiet than it is now when a game has been released the the all of the people working on that particular title maybe are no longer of need so they scale back you know and that's that's happened for years and years and years on the PC and console side on the mobile side I think a lot of companies have taken investment uh or perhaps not invested the money uh

they've invested towards growth from some of the covid bump money yeah and that that growth isn't necessarily there anymore so they've had to scale back but it's it's sort of they've grown to then scale back so it's it's not as I mean obviously the the news of constant redundancies and that kind of thing has a massive impact on everybody's psyche and and the terminology for the industry but it's not necessarily as as Doom Gloom is is that makes out sometimes so regarding the data stuff we talked about I've been talking about it all day with people the the fact that in the last four years we've seen a scaling back of the kind of data that ad ad networks that even the ml Learning Systems can be trained upon so Apple shut things down quite a lot Google's doing likewise we had china you know recently saying we're not allowing certain types of inapp payments anymore they're they're really kind of battling down the hatches on what signals get out yeah and that

affects the way that you guys you know what you can learn from and the information you can process how do you make the most of the signals that you've got and have you had to adapt in order to you know keep thriving and producing new school lectric I think some of that in in terms of what we actually do the the attribution side of things hasn't changed as dramatically as some other areas like we still have probabilistic and if you look at some of the the uh the changes within the industry recently you know you've got the Privacy manifests from IOS where lots of people thought that that was going to be the end of of probabilistic and it's very clear now that you know no MMP has been brought into those privacy manifests meaning that that's not Apple's primary focus of of the Privacy manifests and as a result you know the action that's going to be taken from those privacy manifest so it's a very different level of information that we actually have you know it's it's it is possible to run user acquisition through probabilistic

in a very in a very strong way like people have been doing in the past um I think the areas that that have cut down are definitely areas that are more dubious in the way that they function and I don't think for an end end user that's necessarily a bad thing um you know a lot of the work that Apple has done to to secure their platform and to secure the um the sanctity of their platform I think is very very good um so I again I don't want to keep saying you're wrong sure but you know it's a there's multiple different readings for the same thing yeah yeah that is interesting CU people have generally been quite positive and it's always difficult to tell whether they're doing the brave face PR Line This is fine of course versus actually no no this didn't make huge impact te you know in reality at all uh so it's interesting to hear that regarding the AI side of things we've been talking about that as well last year the generative thing became more widely known people are now

familiar with it on the street as it were and ml is something that you folks have been employing for the longest time ever is there anything in these wave of like generative AI development is there anything on the ml side that's kicked him that's changing the way you operate yeah I we we've literally just this is perfect timing we've literally just released a creative product which that's its sole purpose is to iterate on designs of creative and be able to feed those back out to different um uh um sorry the name's gone completely um generative AI services oh got um so you would be able to to see all of the readings come in from each of your individual campaigns and the the more than the individual campaigns the individual creatives and then be able to iterate on those but send them out to multiple different um it's com I I would know what you call the M the generative AI service things yeah sure

generative AI yeah that's interesting to hear because I it it has got a bit of a questionable reputation I guess people are concerned rightly so alongside all the layoffs I think it's comeing a bad time where there's there's legal issues there's a lot of legal issues that are attached to it and I think it's it's uh it's still an area that's that's establishing itself um and I think now for me personally I think it's too early for video I mean video is the main source of advertising for a lot of creatives and I think uh generative AI is is just a little too early in terms of what it can actually do and what it can achieve and I I think give it a year or so and the services will be up to par and you know it'll be usable by everybody and you think there'll be something in it yeah so yeah definitely what about coming to these kind of shows like face to-face events obviously been back for a while now but what's the benefit from your perspective to doing something like this over I don't know Zoom or Skype or

whatever human interaction is always a benefit you know like Zoom God bless it is amazing but being able to sit and talk to somebody you you actually Express so much more in you know facial contortions and uh you know mannerisms and that kind of thing that you just don't pick up on on Zoom so being able to have conversations and side conversations of you know sort of if you have a zoom conversation it's generally you know you have 10 minutes 20 minutes 30 minutes you stick to the subject and then as soon as that's done thank you very much goodbye whereas here you're you're having a beer with somebody you're having a conversation with somebody and you're you're expressing more than just that one fine-tuned comment that you're you're talking about so you end up having a lot more conversations and hearing a lot more about the industry yes well hopefully we'll see you in the next few but excellent St to you today that's going forward thank you for having me

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