Is User Acquisition Really Broken in 2025?

The misconception is I mean maybe just starting from the most broad I it's weird still how many times I have a conversation with an executive and it just starts from a de facto like well everyone knows UA doesn't work. UA is definitely alive and well. It's actually easier right now than it has been the past few years because much of the iOS pain points that broke the industry the last few years mostly blown over. Everyone's just using fingerprinting again other than Google iOS. So UA is pretty dang healthy right now. There's a lot of misconceptions that there's only a few viable sources or that only the biggest teams can do it. [Music] Web stores. You've seen what good looks like, but have you seen great? App charge is the direct to consumer platform backed by the likes of Supercell and built by monetization pros from Moonactive, Platika, Huge Games, and others. People who know the difference. App charge powers over half a billion dollars in transaction a year for top studios. Optimizing every detail. deeply personalized web store of offers, custommade design,

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heroic labs. [Music] Welcome everybody to the Deconstructor of Fun podcast. I'm your host who shouldn't be a host for episodes like this. Mishki Katkov and today we are talking about state of user acquisition in 2025. A wonderful I'm not going to call this panel a wonderful group of people. Uh in the uh left corner we got Josh Chanley, chief operating officer at Wildcard Games, an independent profitable that's important thing and profitable game developer and publisher founded in 2016 with 10 million of lifetime downloads. Josh, welcome back to the podcast.
Yeah, happy to be here.
Uh then on the in the right corner, we got Warren Woodward, chief growth officer at Optic. And for folks who are not familiar or maybe have forgotten what Optic is, it's a provider of user acquisition, marketing, creative, growth, analytics, and strategic

consulting for PC, crossplatform, and mobile games. 500 million in downloads to your clients, as well as 500 million in revenue to your clients. Warren, welcome back to the podcast.
Hey, Mishka. Happy to be here. Excited to talk UA today.
Awesome. And in the middle, Paul Bowen, chief revenue officer at Stream Elements, a creator-driven performance marketing platform at scale with 200 million monthly creators using it for Twitch and YouTube content. Paul, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Misha. It's actually 2 million creators, not 200 million, but we appreciate
could be 200 million today.
Yeah. Um, so talking about the uh the state of the market, I think it's it's good to start off with really really high level. So where does the u user acquisition stand in 2025? What I wanted to start off with is like what are some of the key misunderstandings and wrong

assumptions that executives and growth teams still hold about user acquisition? And Warren, let's start with you since you're probably seeing uh the most of of user acquisition in the in the uh in the market.
Yeah, I mean I mean there's the you the misconception is I mean maybe just starting from the most broad I it's weird still how many times I have a conversation with an executive and it just starts from a de facto like well everyone knows UA doesn't work and it's like well hold on I think data would show otherwise. So I think there is this perception I think when people have a failed experience or can't bring game to market profitably talk to other executives or leaders that have that same experience as tribal knowledge. UA is definitely alive and well. It's actually easier right now than it has been the past few years because much of the iOS pain points that broke the industry the last few years mostly blown over. Everyone's just using fingerprinting again other than Google iOS. So UA is pretty dang healthy right now. There's a lot of misconceptions that there's only a few viable sources or that only the biggest teams can do

it. And uh hopefully we can share more today about you know the how on on executing in the current landscape.
Yeah, I I agree. I think it feels that way sometimes cuz launching like entirely new games is so hard now where revenue continues to concentrate on the biggest apps. And that's just a fun way of saying they're continually growing LTV where some of these games might have a decade of AB tests behind them. And when you launch a brand new game, you are in a literally unoptimized state. So it's hard to compete on that CPI. And it feels like just because those barriers are higher than they were, you know, 14 years ago when I started in mobile, it it feels like UA is dead. But then once you cross that chasm and you reach profitability, uh scaling is is very achievable.
Yeah, I think uh Crest has been proven completely wrong. Um, UA is not dead. Uh, UA is live and well. It definitely went through a speed bump there between

2020 and 2024, let's say. Um, as some of the larger platforms pulled away from well went towards SKA ad network, right? And um and really uh invested there and didn't use I uh fingerprinting. But if you look at what apploven have achieved over the last couple of years, I think it's clear that that if you have the right strategy um you know UA can be live and well and I think you know I would say probably the most dangerous assumption that an exec could hold is that it's impossible to scale a new game. And I would just say you know look at the new games that we have um uh in the top in the top charts right now. We have King Shop, Disney Solitaire, um, Raw Kingdom, you know, there's some real hits out there that are scaling well. So, if you build the right product, you know, you can you can find product market fit and the game can scale. The channels are there and yeah, we'll get into the attribution discussion, but I think that's that really is the key to

most of this uh, leveraging fingerprinting well to scale the game. You know, I think one reason that the narrative on UA has changed, I I think we all came up in the industry relatively the same time like during the the 2010s and UA served a very different function in the industry at that time. There was a a ton of financial engineering being driven by UA to like drive topline revenue to like drive M&A and that all worked quote unquote worked worked for founders trying to make exits like during the froth of mobile gaming M&A during that time period. But the dirty secret is that a lot of that was just like loss leading UA to tell a narrative. And I think that era is firmly behind us. And it seems like Josh's that are like using uh you know bread and butter like use UA to drive incremental profit. Like it's not as sexy. It's not as um aggressive, but like that is the healthy proper way to use UA. And it's it's just I think the industry is adapting to like oh this is how we should think about UA as as a function. Um, and the kind of like glory

days of of UA were not actually that glorious in hindsight.
Well, I I also think you didn't necessarily need the best product either dur during those days and because of the laser targeting of the platforms, especially Facebook, they were so good at finding the right users for your game. You didn't necess, you know, you could find a pocket of users who could, you know, monetize your game well and and that would be great. You know, those days are, you know, we don't really have those days anymore. you can't you can't just have an average product and um and still find success. So I think you know yeah we're in a completely new paradigm where you have to have a good a good to great product uh and then work within the kind of constraints of the UA of UA right now which are not the laser targeting of kind of the days that we had you know seven eight years ago. I think it's interesting because I I fully agree with you both and yet um speaking to dangerous assumptions, I think a lot of executives still don't see the world

that way.
Um
what do you think they assume?
Well, I I I think that people still believe they can get valued on revenue multiples. Um, but I think that everything that you said, um, Paul and and Warren, like that froth, um, I think that we've transitioned from the idea of unprofitable growth to the idea of like IBIDA multiples, but there are a lot of studios out there still who think, well, if I can at least buy UA at like break even, maybe maybe my my annualized return will underperform a T- bill, But I'm like I'm profitable now and I've pushed this revenue number really high and and that's why we're um at this place where it feels like mobile gaming multiples on revenue at least are incredibly low.
Um it
I could if I could just uh insert my not understanding but but trying to
to sum some certain things up. So I put

in a graph here and it's a US mobile games market growth and how it has slowed down over pandemic. So first of all you see the the massive you know pretty much over 20% or compound annual growth of 20 plus percent every year since um since a long time and then it goes into of course the the post IDFA decline and kind of comes back to you know where some years have been some quarters have been even closer to 20 but usually around that 5 6% growth and correct me if I'm wrong what was happening is the UA targeting drove revenue growth for almost a decade and then with the IDFA deprecation that drastically decreased uh access to data that was imperative for targeting as well as attributing ads and what that led to was pretty normal things. So when you have less access to data, you have less targeted ads. And when you have less targeted ads, that means you have less effective marketing spend. And because of that, you just basically

lower your payback periods. And because you lower your payback periods, well, that means you lower your marketing budgets. And then because you lower your marketing budget, you have you see reduced quality as well as quantity of downloads. And that impacts towards the lower revenue. And then when you get back on the growth where we are right now, even though it's not as rapid as before, we're in this sort of a value optimization again. But with value optimization, it's as you guys mentioned, it doesn't serve everyone. It's typical winner takes it all market where those with the deepest pockets can fully utilize it. And meaning, in other words, if you're winning, somebody else has to be losing. Is that the way to describe I think there's a lot of volatility. Oh, go ahead, Warren.
No, I was gonna say I think a lot of what you said is correct, Mishka, and I just think maybe a little further context is is helpful. So, you know, when talking about the the the chart that you have on screen, I think is very telling. Yeah, when when iOS uh killed

you know the ability to not target user level um the IDFA deprecation on on iOS it basically meant people couldn't do UA the old world on iOS but it had implications on both platforms right all of a sudden the major channels were shut off on iOS your iOS spend is either losing money or you're removing it for most teams and all the budget moves over to Android guess what happens when everyone is competing in Android it drives up the CPMs it drives down the margins there. So, it had that follow-on impact and that's why the the overall impact of the industry was so magnified like besides cutting off, you know, one leg of the table. It's it's making the less the other less less stable.
Yeah. And I think it's a messy thing to look at. So, this the source here is App Store and Google Play like the actual AP revenue. Correct. Um it really helpful. And I think that um a a lot of happened in late 2020, early 2021. other things that happened like COVID ended and that's a

behavioral shift but when you think about things like social casino they crushed during COVID when did casinos open late 2020 um go look at Google trends exola look at when that start hit the spike web stores like offplatform payments a lot of stuff has kind of happened in this period um in addition to just the IDFA deprecation And so it's so hard to parse out all these kind of these different things. Um but I mean IDFA was definitely a massive a massive pain point for the big socials which meant getting growth there was hard.
I I think Mishka made a good point um about kind of the zero sum nature of the market right now. Um, I think it would be interesting to see a graph of time spent in mobile games because I think

that's essentially flatlined. So, I think you would probably see a similar growth curve to the one that we're seeing right now where there's there was an acceleration between the 2010s and 2020 of time spent in mobile games. And essentially right now we're we're pretty much flatline. We're not we're not growing share. You know, social has been taking away from gaming uh for the past couple of years, especially with a lot with the success of Tik Tok. And I think that that's a real challenge as well. So, you know, fewer installs, less time spent, so everyone's spending time optimizing their current product, their product, not, you know, launching more and more new games. That's kind of the the other trend I think we see. Um,
yeah, and I'm just Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Paul.
No, that's it. Yeah.
Cool. The the the other thing, too, Mishka, as you were showing that chart, I was just pulling up like a NASDAQ chart in the background, and they almost mirror each other. You can see that like with with the stock market forever like with stock market going down it mirrors the investment level and I think that's back to that theme of people were doing

more irrational user acquisition when they're trying to drive M&A and drive financial transactions for their business and as the overall market cooled down I think
but it's not it's it's irrational based on the incentives right it's it's not it's irrational that in today's market you think why would you do that but it's rational given how companies were being valued at that time.
I just wanted to pull in one chart where I get to prove Paul once in this podcast wrong. So your hypothesis of the uh the the overall time spent on on uh on devices has actually been increasing not flatline. So um and steadily increasing in terms of hours as well as in terms of sessions. This is mobile gaming.
But I would like to see this data back to 2010 is my point. My guess is this accelerated significantly. So yeah, I think this reflects the graph that you just showed around the moderate growth since 20 2020. I mean I I agree with that. My point more is the accelerated growth we saw between 2010 and 2020 as

people were
getting smartphones and more and more content was being released.
Yes, of course. Of course. The uh the downloads is another one where you're seeing the downloads really peaking at 2016 and kind of beginning to decline since then. uh and in especially the new games entering the market has never been as low as is right now like it's much lower than 2012 and when it comes to games in the market. So just looking at app store it's almost at the level of 2012. So a lot of games came a lot of games went away and it just market just looks really mature but the time spent and the session spent and and the session amount keeps on increasing uh users are just more and more on devices. Mishka, you mentioning that spiking in 2016, I think sort of hints to another kind of macro trend in how UA has worked over the years. Back in the 2010s, everyone used to do this really stupid UA process where they would just buy as many cheap

installs as possible, drive up the charts because Apple and Google surfaced the charts more prominently, and try to growth hack by just low value empty calorie users to go up the charts. So there's these artificially high download numbers for games and over the years as the storefronts have basically moved that inventory of the chart position further and further away from visibility that that tactic is essentially nonviable now. So I think that I don't know that's the primary factor but that's probably another reason we saw that download volume peaked around that 2016 time period.
It's it's also roughly the time when Facebook launched VO, right? So suddenly Facebook went from maximizing install volume to maximizing uh you know rowouts basically. So you would expect install volumes to probably decrease CPMs to increase.
Yeah.
Yeah. I remember uh Paul and Warren, do you remember like even before the gaming the free chart the the OG way before freeto play was huge was um on Apple and

Google you would make your app go free drive and send installs to it and then turn it back to paid and those install counts would count towards the paid chart and you would get a number like number of top five paid position and you could get you get revenue that way. I mean it used to like for a very long time it was all about just driving installs not because of the value of those installs but because of what happened afterwards. Um it was really the what was it Facebook VO uh Google Torass and all the inapp ad networks starting to do purchase campaigns and like postfunnel optimization. Um that that really changed the game for us.
Yeah. And I think during that era like there was so much discussion about growth hacking and I think in and it's like you almost never hear that term anymore but like that's all that everyone was looking for growth hackers growth hackers back then because we were it was an immature system and everyone was just trying to game it in different ways like
these days it really is more just about

like understanding the interlocking pieces in depth and just doing a good job of marketing a good product like leveraging those pieces. It's a lot less wild west now.
Yeah. Yeah. launching a game, getting to number one downloads was was the key. And there was a different calculation on what would be the effect on your overall revenue and overall health of the business if you just push through and and get it to number one. Scopi was fa you know famous on on that how they launched the uh all the buddies games and and just pushed them in and to be the number one and that of course pleased the investors and and um you know created a lot of good things but that that was back then when when I was a kid. Um
dirty dirty little secret. It still happens to a degree on um on app store search results. People still do that. you're running scent installs to literally have people search for that term and then scroll to the bottom till they find your app.
Um, there are still places where essentially rankings or search result rankings matter and even today those big

companies are doing those games.
Still growth hacking,
still growth hacking.
Yeah.
So, let's talk a little bit about uh about a company that is not growth hacking but is just dominating and that's of course Apploving. So Josh, you wrote this really really amazing piece on deconstructive fund called Apploving the Apex Predator. Uh link in the description and you said in the piece that the uh the company rose on top by owning mediation, publishing infrastructure and data in one integrated loop that disrupted the traditional ad tech model and left competitors scrambling to catch up. So Josh, can you dive a bit deeper into what makes Apploving the uncontested um player in the space of adte tech? Attention app and game developers. Are you ready to unlock the secrets behind the world's top performing apps and games? With Sensor Tower, you get the ultimate competitive edge. Whether it's breaking into new markets, fine-tuning

your UA strategies, or boosting monetization. Dive into data like never before. Track global trends across app stores. Analyze market leading inapp purchase and inapp ad strategies and benchmark your performance with realtime insight. The best part, Sensor Tower doesn't just deliver data, it helps you turn it into action with intuitive tools and expert analysis. It's everything you need to make smarter, faster decisions. Thousands of app and game studios from indie creators to global giants trust Sensor Tower to help them win. So why not you? Start your free trial today at sensortowwer.com. That is sensortow.com. Yeah, especially on inapp ads. You know, obviously App 11 is still a lot smaller than Meta and Google, but they are

completely cemented right now on the inapp ad. They own gaming. Um the and the reason we can say that is that they they own 80% of the share of of mobile mediation, which is essentially the auctions that happen to determine who gets to show that ads. Um so they have an 80% share of mediation. And when they mediate, there's no better UA source out there than Applovven's app discovery. Um, and really they've cemented it in in two ways. First, first is simple. They have an efficiency advantage. If you're Unity, if you're Meta, if you're Google and you want to buy inventory from um, Max, you have to pay Apple Leven 5%. It's that simple. So, if you want to um win an impression from Apploven, you can't be as good at as them. You have to be better.

And second, they have an incredible data advantage. It's very hard to put towards the advantage of um having Max internal. Um but I'll try. So when Apple runs UA, they they kind of cause that install and they track the revenue and when the revenue happens, it goes directly within their servers back to them. Um, and they see everything about it. They see the ad type, they see uh the IP address if they pass it, they see battery life, see everything they want to see. Um, but what about Unity? What about Google? What about Meta, Integral, Malokco? Um, they have a different pathway. So when they're tracking ad revenue, especially Max finishes the auction, Max then passes the auction result um to the device like literally like the phone that Yeah, there we go. the phone that is being uh nice visual the game is

being played on and that gets passed to the MMP and the MMP decides whether or not the ad network gets a gets to have that impression data. Now there's a couple of key points here. So one is the MMP may decide the ad network just can't have that data. No one's telling only Max can tell apple whether or not they get data and max is applo and so they get it but second the data quality is different um all these MMPs pass back data in different ways and there are different things missing uh the best example of something missing is something that apps flyier doesn't currently post back and that's the ad type um when unity or malokco or google or meta is trying to optimize for rorowass class for you with ad revenue. They don't know if revenue came was a banner ad or interstitial or rewarded video.

So if um they see that you sold an ad and that ad was sold at a $10 CPM in the US, which is like a $10 for a,000 ads, a $10 CPM. Well, banners, you know, typically are at a $1 CPM. And rewarded videos are often at like a 30 to 50. So, if that $10 CPM ad was a rewarded video, that's some kid on his mom's phone. If that $10 CPM ad is a banner ad, like the Sultan of Brunai is like in your game playing right now, and that matters. Uh, Apploven gets to know that. Unity doesn't. Um, so knowing that means that yeah, they they're going to dominate. And so what we're seeing right now as of like today is on Android's on max inventory, AppLeven is buying two times more inventory than the next ad uh than the next ad network. On iOS, it's 7 to 8x

more. So they have they're buying almost twothirds of inventory on iOS right now. They have an insane advantage because they can see everything that's happening and they're providing friction for every other competitor by charging them 5% just to play. But there's something else going on that they're right. There's something about iOS that shows that they're able to better value a user than anyone else because you know why are Android and iOS not the same? I think there's two reasons. Um, so one reason has to do with the the big mega companies, Meta and Google. Like you were right, they went all in on scan. They didn't do probabilistic. um which is like an interesting choice in retrospect but basically they believed um they believed Apple and because they

have no probabilistic attribution they can't compete on inapp ads and so on android Google and Meta combined for about a 36% market share on Max on Android those two combined for a 6% market share on max so there is literally just less competition for inventory on iOS. Uh the other thing though is the attribution is substantially more fuzzy. Um I think it's no secret that um hijacking the click link, which is the primary thing used for MMPs um to attributes um has been a really powerful tactic on iOS. Um if you watch a mobile game ad today, it's funny how the the store always pops up.
Mhm. And that's a that's a click link trigger. That is them telling the store or the the MMP, hey, I sent someone to the store if they opened the game, it

was me,
right? And that's why if you look at the data from these networks, you see like uh you know what, 90% click to install on some of these rewarded video networks, which is like not rational uh behavior, but it's it's a byproduct of what you're describing, right, Josh?
Yeah, exactly. So on on AppLin today, you might see a click-through rate on Android of between 5 and 15%. But you're going to see a clickthrough rate on iOS of 90%. Nine and 10 players aren't clicking on your ads. They're hijacking the click link because the way MMPs work, there's only two ways that you can signal that you may have caused that install. One is an impression link, which is very weak, like, "Hey, they saw an ad." But one is a click link, which means they they went to the app store because of me. Um, and so when you trigger and you spam those click links, you you win a lot more of those installs that maybe you did or didn't cause.
And when you do that, go ahead.

Oh, I was going to say, I know we're getting pretty in the weeds here, but I think maybe worth a quick diversion to talk about like why that behavior exists.
Like look at the incentives, right? So there's there's two there's basically two parties that are pushing this behavior of we're going to say something that's not actually a click. Was a user click and claiming that install came from the ad network. It's clear why the ad networker wants this. They can claim the install and claim more value. But what's less clear is why the MMP would want this also. If you look at the business models of the MMPs, they are all based on uh attributions for paid campaigns and organics do not count towards this. So, it's also they have an incentive to also support this more aggressive insult claiming behavior where a click is not actually a click with human intent.
Well, there's an additional So, that that's right. And then there's an additional party who who is also in on this and knows what's going on, which is the user acquisition manager, the people actually spending the money.
The numbers look better.
Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, the shortselling reports of that blowing

kind of Yeah. mentioned this, but this is this is something that everyone already knows. Everyone knows this goes on. Everyone knows the user acquisition managers know what h what's happening. They see the 90% click-through rates. They know what's going on. MMPs know. So, obviously, you know, the networks know as well, but everyone's complicit in it because it because it makes the system work very well.
That's okay. So, and and the the reason for the 90% click-through rate on iOS is is can you just
it's not just iOS, it's both both pl buttons.
It's both like
it's worse on iOS um right now because it's a more powerful technique, but it's a measured click-through rate. Nine and 10 players on iOS do not click on video game ads.
Yes, of course not. But nine and 10 players on on iOS are forced to kind of drag their way through a Go ahead.

Describe the actual ad behavior might help.
Yeah. So right now on iOS especially, but everywhere on inapp ad, we've moved to a three tap system. So first um there's an experience usually a video. Um the on interstitial is skippable in 5 seconds usually. and then you get an X. Um, after that there is an end card experience that is usually a playable ad and after a couple of seconds there's an X and then usually there's just some kind of final screen that just shows the app icon or something similar and that has an X. And I believe Warren, it's between those first two X's that the majority of um ad networks see as basically a click signal and pop up the app store. And so the app store pops up as part of the UX and that

ad store popup counts as a click.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that the flow is is less important between kind of different formats, but but essentially what you have is either a video or a playable or a static where the app store is loaded basically at the end of of some sort of form of timer. So you'll watch a video for 15 seconds and the the end the app store is automatically loaded and that that's loaded with a click click through attribution. So the network is saying the user clicked on this format and therefore I want to get attributed if they install it. So that's kind of the behavior that's happening. Got it. So mis not misleading but basically just a poor user experience that kind of forces you to open up the app store to get rid of the uh the app rid of the uh the ad whether it's playable or the end card or a video attributes as a clickth through because it kind of shows that you're interested and you actually click through the ad and wanted to to uh to download it. I

mean the other thing is small hard to click I mean there's a meme about this but hard to click on e X's uh closed screen as well so you accidentally click on the the format versus the X. There's a ton of techniques here to
they're not doing that because it makes you install the game more.
They're doing that because it helps increase the install rate measured because that helps you win more of the actual impressions that did occur installs that did
occur. I I was gonna say I would encourage everyone to read Josh's article. It's really good about explaining like why this is happening. I wonder if we should maybe pivot to like zooming out and just talking about the actual implications of this in the ecosystem,
how it's affecting.
Yeah, let's do that. I I just want to do a couple of things. So just because there are terms thrown around. So CPM is a cost per millle which is cost per thousand impression shown. So your ads is viewed by by thousand uh people in Instagram and others. uh mediation or mediator uh for those who are not marketer basically your game is the ad

supply. So if you're looking at the the chart that we have here in Spotify or YouTube uh your game is the ad supply uh then there's multiple ad networks they are the demand for the ad inventory and then mediation automatically chooses the best paying ad network to show an ad in real time based on factors like CPM, geography, ad format etc. And then Apploven is so good. But this as I understand is because they built from scratch a real-time bidding system versus a waterfall. Waterfall meaning like you have different uh different ad networks in line. You got to use the first the unity then you got to go to meta and the Google etc. And then MMP uh as an applier for example is a mobile measurement partner thirdarty service that helps to track, attribute and analyze user acquisition across different marketing channels and ad networks. So that hopefully helps folks who are maybe not so familiar with the terms used.
Yeah. And just to clarify, so part of what you're describing, Josh, of how

Appven has gotten more powerful, there's kind of a flywheel, right? because most of these benefits of the additional data granularity and data signals that you're getting from the the ad serving uh these are only really unlocked if you're also monetizing with app if app or rather if app is your mediation provider. Um
it is that correct?
Yeah. Well, I mean if you're running AP then it's not as big of a deal. Um, but I think what you're talking about is for for studios once you acknowledge that app 11 has an incredible data advantage and they can win distribution. What that means is now essentially you have to run UA with app discovery because they are winning twothirds of impressions on iOS and at least a third on Android. So you if you are a mobile game company you you need to run on apploven. You need to buy user acquisition with apploven.

The plot twist is that if you are running um an admonetized game or a hybrid monetized game and you want to run either an ad rorowass campaign or a blended rorowass campaign with them, which are campaigns that use either all ad revenue or ad and AP revenue. They only will let you run those campaigns if you use Max.
Exactly.
And so what that means is in order for your company to grow and succeed, you need to turn their market share from 80 to 81%. And that's the flywheel that you're describing. And that's how they've grown from about 40% like 5 years ago to to where they are today.
Right. And we're even we're exacerbating that by like even this discussion today. It's it's just snowballing, right? Because as Apploven becomes increasingly I I pulled some numbers ahead of this just about our portfolio trends um and and how Apploven spend has shared um but as App 11 becomes increasingly important

in the UA ecosystem, it becomes increasingly important for you to have them on your stack. And then if you want to have edge in buying from this increasingly uh important source, you also want to monetize with them, thus giving AppL even more direct inventory, even more data. So it keeps snowballing and snowballing. And I pulled some trends just at a macro level of how our spend had changed amongst our portfolio. And I saw in the last uh 12 months uh had been a 4x of increase in spend to app over 12 months but three months three 3x of the 4x was in the last 6 months. So it's accelerating the pace at which uh market share is driving to to app.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's incredibly powerful. I believe in like December last year even Zingga moved over to Max.
So their inventory is exploded.
I think the question is you know as the big platforms Facebook and Google move

to probabilistic attribution to target ads. Can can they get can they kind of compete as they are on Android or and take more market share or are they going to be stuck at the the the low digits that they are right now?
Yeah, I can give a quick anecdote here too. So I looked at like where that inventory was like in our portfolio mix. We operate and just call it a dozen studios and maybe you know 18 18 games currently. And most of that market share had just come from App Leven's more direct competitors. And I think this gets to sort of like another macro factor like for for us. I mean just a sanity check here. The big dogs are still like Meta, Google, Tik Tok. All of those are are still notably larger than Applov and just overall UA spend. I don't think that's the norm for most teams though. Like we are a user acquisition company. So we have you professionals and all the different cross disciplines do it right. Apploven is pretty idiotp proof if you are

monetizing with them. you just hit the big red button, give them the creatives you tell them to send them, and let their algorithm do its thing. So, I think the barrier of entry is another reason why, you know, Josh, you and I were talking about this before the podcast. We our our team at Uptake, we actually underindex, I think, relative to the rest of the industry because we're attacking these channels that are a lot more that still take more hands-on operation to conquer. Whereas, I like I said, Apple is pretty idiot proof. You monetize with Max, you plug it in, you get that granular data, hit the big red button, let the algorithm do its thing. So, it's a good starting point for teams that don't have full in-house user acquisition resources to still get a good result. And I think that's kind of one of the other big unlocks of how they're operating right now.
What What could companies like Unity for? I mean, not like Unity, what would Unity need to do to become competitive with AppLin? Because at one point they were kind of head-to-head and maybe with the iron source uh acquisition merger, they they kind of looked that they would be ahead of the game and then suddenly they're not even a partaker of the game. Yeah, go ahead Paul. I mean you were

there.
I mean top line what what Apploven understood was access to unique data gave them an advantage over over other competitors. So if you think about what Unity can do, they can act they can attempt to access well at least better data than they have right now and ideally unique data that better informs what games people will pay in. Ultimately pay pay in or watch lots of ads in. That's ultimately what they need to be able to do to be able to better understand than at love in especially who who may pay or who may watch lots of ads in in a game. And so they have some assets for that and um Josh has written about this as well before but you know they have the engine that should be that should give them a lot of data on on kind of what what players are doing. So if they can leverage that engine data one, if they can get permission from the the developers to actually use that and then leverage it to better target ads,

that's really what they need to do. And I think, you know, that is what Vector's attempting to do. Whether they can do it well enough to take some share from uploading, I think is still to be seen.
Yeah, I
I was just going to say I was totally wrong about this. like I expected at the iron source unity merger just taking Iron Source's experience with the Monization and UA operations side and Unity has the biggest unfair advantage at their disposal with just being the deacto game engine in mobile but they have not leveraged that and that it's it's just like an operation uh an operational gap that seems to be like why they haven't been able to claim this. I'm not sure about that because I think the mo the most you know the the IA the IAA data is incredibly valuable and the media only the mediator owns that data right there's no way
owns that also
I mean they well they have a market share
yeah exactly so they're not in a strong position there they could make some play

for AP data so they should they could require all Unity developers share IP data with them and then they would have that data set to leverage to better target that those users, but they don't have the the the ad data that Applovin has and it's going to be challenging for them to get that. I mean, yeah.
So, I I would say that there are there are two distinct sets of challengers to Apploving. I think one is Meta and Google and we can talk about that kind of um after because like Vector I think is fascinating. Then the other the other other arrival is Vector. Um I'll try and give my opinion in the most basic way possible. Um and so I I don't believe that Vector right now has any chance of beating uh Axon 2 which is Apploven's app discovery kind of ML platform on

back up for anyone who's not in the trenches like us just define what vector is. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. All right. So, uh, Vector and Axon 2 are kind of nebulous brand names and terms to describe big piles of data infrastructure and machine learning and data pipes that um um essentially connects um all together for these ad networks so that they can decide one very simple thing. What the hell do I bid on that ad? Um, and how do I make it back out to the right return? And so, AppLovvens is called Axon 2. Um, predictably the original was called Axon 1. The big innovation with Axon 2 is it connected and really utilized the Max data their mediation platform in an incredibly robust way to the point where I mean wild card we're seeing higher scale um with AppL than other inapp ad networks

with the a similar rorowass and we're paying much higher CPIs. What does that mean? If if we're buying inventory from just games and we're getting the same rorowass, but we're paying way higher CPIs, it means App Leven's targeting is amazing. They're picking the best users out for us. That's that's really incredible. So for ad monetization, Vector doesn't really have a good way to win because they don't have that unique data. And Paul and Warren, you're you're right. Appleven has a lock on the best ad monetization data. But here's the thing. For every dollar in ad revenue in mobile, there's three to four dollars in purchase revenue. Um, you know, ad rorowass and campaigns are not the the the largest um bulk of even Apploven's UA portfolio. We all know the big dog, the thing that like ad revenue campaigns wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the fact that we had

purchase campaigns and purchase-based games driving inapp purchases into the ecosystem. That is the majority. And so if Vector can acquire unique data on inapp purchases and that kind of data that is uniquely powerful and that is the promise of what the engine data could do and there's kind of two special things about it. One comparing it to Max having that real time powerful uh first party data means they will be able to target much more effectively. But um aside from the fact that the purchase data is much larger, there's also something special about purchase data, ad revenue, there ain't there really aren't any admonetized games that have scaled without running performance marketing. It's really weird to see an admonetized

game not running an EUA. And yet companies on the AP side like Marvel Snap exist. What's special about purchases isn't just that it's three or four times larger than the ad revenue opportunity. What's special about purchases is at least 20% of it isn't tracked. at least 20% of it is coming from the Marvel Snaps of the world where they're not sending revenue back to Appsfly or Applovven at all. And so, not only are we talking about better first party data, um where like the max comparison would be Applovven gets everything, Unity just gets it was a $10 CPM. But now 20 of those of those purchases Unity could know about and App Leven could not know about. And that's incredibly valuable. Even if you know someone's a whale, like there actually

here's a fun fact. There's a there's a magical time when a whale temporarily stops being a whale. If if I spend if I spend a grand a month on mobile games and I just double spend on $100 APS and I spend $200 in 5 minutes, you know what I'm not going to do? Install your game and spend money in it. If Unity or another ad network has that data and Applo doesn't, that's a big advantage. And the the promise of vector is that well first of all it's an incredibly uh modern infrastructure. The unity infrastructure is quite you know quite old. Um and the the team building it is very strong. Um I especially believe in Felix Tay their SVP of product and engineering. Uh like he's a he's a huge

part of the reason that I believe in Vector to begin with. Um, but the access to data, the potential, we can talk about the probability of that happening and whether they're willing to do it, especially after runtime. But if they're willing to be the bad guy like Apploven was, man, the TAM is like so huge
because they're talking about dominating a much bigger market. I
I would say that Abloin has an asset that we haven't really discussed where they can get the same data. So they could use adjust to get that same data at scale and use that and we don't I don't think we know for sure whether Apple's even using adjust data in Axon. I wouldn't be surprised if they are they could
outward the outward messaging is that they're you know church and state separation but yes there's definitely an incentive at the very least to utilize that data in more aggressive ways right
and you know just theoret in this

theoretical world of unity competing against AppLin where they basically make all their developers share this AP data with them you know abl could could also counter with hey we're giving adjust away for free everyone come on board. Um we're going to you know help all help you know we're going to build this AP fortress as well like we've built this IA fortress.
I don't see that happening though. I mean you can say you don't see vector receiving runtime data but I don't I don't see that happening with uh adjust for two reasons. Uh first it's extremely difficult to change MMPPS. Um it's not. I used to think it was like a heart transplant. It's actually not. It's like a heart transplant and a blood transplant at the same time where all of your pipes immediately break for every UA source. So, it's quite intensive. Um, but second, what's the upside? One of the reasons they get to claim they don't use app adjust data directly is because

they're already like the vast majority of customers send back all revenue data to app when they run UA with AppLin. Um, and so they're already receiving that data. Um, and they're already doing with it what they can't. Um, MMPs like um, Appsswire, they allow you to select what you receive, but with other MMPs, it's much more biased towards you to send back everything.
Yeah. And but not Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
I have a small vector rant. I want get on my soap box for a minute. So like the industry has been talking about vector for months and months now but in you Josh you said a key word a few times which is the promise of vector. So I think it's important to call out that like I think most teams are not materially seeing impact from this yet. You also called out Josh that really both vector and axon are kind of branding rappers around a set of initiatives. I fully believe

that Unity has a talent in inside to execute, but I I was checking recently because I was getting asked a lot of questions about Vector and I was like I feel like I'm seeing tons of PR about Vector, but very little communications. We operate, you know, Unity campaigns, you know, for a large portfolio, very little communications to the buyer about this. And I actually saw that I, you know, I have a problem deleting my emails. I have all the old spam like marketing emails from Unity. And I saw they to unless I miss something they did not communicate in a marketing email to their actual buyers about leveraging vector until this month even though they have been doing this large scale PR campaign to I think the investment world for months and months. So I think it will get there but I think they're a little ahead of their skis with the promotion of it.
Yeah. And even today like the sorry but even like when you run UA as like a little as a media buyer I I happened to see the the dashboard yesterday everything's still labeled Pinpointer which is still which is like the old one. So it's it's very um I think Vector

is still but a wee babe
right
the question why are they so loud about it so far ahead of it
because they want to boy their stock price basically.
Exactly. That's the only reason
I think I think there's two reasons. I think Paul was correct about the first reason. Um when I when I on the admon sides um I would say that what we saw when Axon 2 rolled out was very different than what the UA side saw. On the UA side I mean Warren it was fairly like boring. Um, on the admon side, it was absolute utter chaos. CPMs crashed. I had the most senior person I worked with at Applov and say, "I'm sorry. You're going to have to go and sell your inventory to Unity and Meta." And then a lot of the executives literally flew to Bali and

stopped answering questions to any of the account management team. Um, it was bad. It was crazy. Um uh but what came out of that was um an incredible platform that once it was trained was really powerful. Um but what that taught me was that it's very hard on an individual UA campaign like individual app to see something um whether this ML platform is working. But on the ad monetization side when you're selling you're servicing everybody. And so you kind of see a portfolio and um while Axon 2 when it rolled out was was a was a terrifying and scarring thing um that incurred a lot of like um I think negative um feelings from the admonetized publishers that worked with Max. Looking at Vector today, we see

something different. Um, over the last 3 months in Wildcard stack, we've seen Vector increase its share of voice by 30%. Um, which is surprising considering how quiet it is. Um, and it's still clearly not done. Um, now on the UA side, we have seen an uplift.
30% from what base though? uh from I mean it's still under 10% total share of voice. Um so now it's in the five to 10% range
and that moves at say 50.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh quite a bit larger. So they have a ways to go. Um
I'm I'm not sure that says any anything apart from, you know, they could be pumping it full of their own dollars just for testing. It's I don't know what that says. We'll find out if they're pumping it full of dollars for their own

testing, we'll actually see something really loud. We'll see a revenue collapse, right? Because what we see is like revenue from AppL and Unity is UA spend minus what they pay out to the pubs. And that margin, I would call that margin, but they call that revenue, right? And so if they're taking a huge wash on that and they're taking like a 50% wash to to pump it up, we'll see a collapse in Q2 in Q2 earnings. For me, the important takeaway go ahead.
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Josh.
So, I I think that the way the like Bramberg is being held accountable right now,
um I think it's very unlikely that they accept like a a major drop in their their thing that's generating the majority of their IBIT da and the majority of their revenue. Um, I think that they do not want to see their stock price collapse right now and the gross segment is 2/3 of their revenue and

probably 80% if I had to guess of their profit and so so showing um a negative result there I think would be a scary thing for them. It would be like it would be challenging. So I don't know if they can afford to do that to be honest. But maybe I'm wrong. What I'm thinking about as you're saying all this, Josh, is like, you know, I I represent the the buyer side of of this this this equation, right? And it's clear that like the tip of the spear when things are changing is going to be seen on the developer side and the teams managing admon. It's like you're seeing the hint that something is changing. You guys are a single developer with a portfolio of games that represents like one data point in the ecosystem. as if this gets traction and continues to improve for you, word will spread, other developers will start to see these impacts as well. And then there's like a there's a lagging indicator on the buy side. It's like uh so I think the tip for anyone on the the user acquisition side is like talk to your friends on the

product side on the monetization side. If we see that vectors is is getting these improved results is going to be a signal that it will be more important to you on the buyer side probably in the months ahead because same thing when everything changed for Axon it was my initial uh reaction was like nothing's changing we're seeing the same results but now a year later holy like massive shifts in UA spend um distribution to to app and I predict it will be the same thing if the Unity team does what you think they are capable Yeah, I mean I think Paul was right. Achieving big growth numbers is easy when your top competitor is 5 plus x larger than you. Uh that just like uh I I used to joke when wild card was a baby like, "Oh, look at this. We're doubling revenue quarter over quarter." But at the time we were doing like 20 grand a month. So I was like, "Yeah, of course we can." Uh you know, we're we're at a very different scale now. And now it's really hard to maintain those like 50%

year-over-year.
I would just go ahead.
Sorry. I sorry to interrupt you, but I would just be really curious to see what their actual strategy for Vector is. What segment of advertisers are they focusing this launch period in? Is it
I have a hypothesis.
Is it IAA? Is it AP as we've suggested they should probably focus on? because it doesn't make sense to launch a product and just try and build it for all all their advertising customers. Um,
no, it's really scary. Um, they're they're it's really hard to do what they're doing, which is like not just a heart transplant, but a heart transplant while the patient's awake almost. Whereas, um, with Axon, it was just like there was a surgery and we woke up and there was trauma the next day. Now it's like all happening in in real time. Um
I mean the but the benefit for app women at that point was they had enough penetration of their of max to really

focus on on IAA games right that they they could they could segment that that customer base and say we are going to make this work very very well for this set of of of advertisers.
What's what's Unity strategy? who who what segment of what type of games are they focusing on to actually get Vector V1 to start working?
Yeah, I mean when I hear in the industry people saying that they're having success with Vector because like Wild Card on the UA side is not having massive scale increases. I can say that for free on the UA side. Um but if you look at all of their case studies and you hear people who are happy with Vector, it's AP based. Um, so my my suspicion is that they're solving the harder problems first and whatever works for IAP, they'll be able to expand out to IAA in the future. Um, the the challenge is that

they need more data sets, they need unique data, they need more features um for their ML to train on.
I'm not sure it's only IP. I'm looking at the case study they released a month ago for
it was Zepha mobile uh part of triple dot.
I'm pretty pretty sure this is an ad for an IIA game.
Interesting.
I think I think the most interesting piece about the case studies I've seen out of
Vector is none of them have mentioned row so far as I am aware. So this one talks about increase in install volume and drop in CPI obviously um on iOS but nothing on rorowaz but I mean that kind of goes to the point we were discussing earlier maybe ro is a lagging uh a lagging uh improvement but but my question remains who who is vector 4 right now and I so you lost me guys like now we're super deep so I wanted to pull back and and

focus focus on more on like individual and operator level type of a questions. uh and really hear your opinion on on let's say if you are running a midsize mobile game publisher just like Josh is actually not even a a fake scenario like how would you set up the organization today like what would your growth organization or UA organization look like and what would you prioritize what would be you do you prioritize and overall what are the key differences of operating your growth team today versus what it was just a couple of years ago So, um, Josh, this is too familiar for you, so let's have you go last. Let's start off with Paul.
Yeah, I'm probably not the best, uh, person to comment, but I'll give my thoughts from just speaking to to UA people, uh, generally. So, I think firstly, I mean, we have to acknowledge um, the efficiency um, economy that we're in right now. And

I think you know there've been so many layoffs uh also on the UA side. So I think we're doing less uh more with less. So I think you know we have fewer people doing these ro doing these roles um and ask and being asked to do more. So my first advice my first kind of thought is like we should you should really simplify as much as you can and focus on doing uh fewer things and doing them well. Um, however, that doesn't necessarily uh translate to kind of the creative side of things. And I think the the creative side of things is really a focus on doing as much as possible and getting as much diversity as as you possibly can in in kind of your creative mix. Um, because you really need to fuel these ML machines with as as much creative as possible to really allow them to pick the winners. And so if you think about how you set up an organization, I think um yeah, I mean you need to simplify

um as much as you can um have creative work very closely with your UA team. It really should be part of the team not kind of a se separate organization. Obviously depend on the size of the organization but really creative and UA should be side by side. um and really be build an organization that really builds a a a creative generating machine because it creative is really the only lever that that teams have now.
Um so that really is the last frontier of the last frontier of UA is is on a day-to-day basis is really creative. And so how do you build a creative machine that builds concepts and ships uh creative at scale is is kind of the question there. Well, can I you just teed off perfectly for me to shill apps applyers state of creative optimization 2025 edition just taking a point out of that they I remember they had the stat in the report they said top 2% of gaming creatives pull 53% of total spend so

Paul you're saying try as many things as possible be efficient in trying as many things are possible but at the same time when you find what works that's going to be your like the concept of hero for creative seems to be still well alive.
Yeah. When I when you say try as many things as possible, I'm talking about the creative side, not the channel side. I think
the creative creative side
given given your resource constraint on the people side likely. You know, we're not in those growth days that we talked about earlier. Um you really need to be thoughtful about whi which kind of channels you're working with, but double down on the channels that are working. Um, and then triple down on the creative side of things.
And just a additional question, like anybody can answer this one except myself. Uh, when you're thinking about focusing and we're talking about channels, so you're you're what you're saying is perhaps limit the channels you're you're using, but at the same time, if you're thinking about your UA

team, would you have them focused on channel or focused on a product? Today's podcast is brought to you by Appsflyer, inviting you to dive into their new firstofits-kind report, the state of creative optimization 2025 edition. It's not about how to make creatives. It's about understanding what makes users actually stop scrolling and what emotional and psychological triggers drive performance. Based on over a million creative variations and nearly $2.5 billion dollars in ad spend, the insights in the report will help you develop a winning creative strategy. Check out the link in the podcast description below or go to appslire.com and search the state of creative optimization. That's appslire.com.
Yeah, I can I can jump in here maybe. So, I think one of the biggest false consumptions in UA is like I just got to find that channel. It's just like maybe there's that that I'm going to keep testing channels. I'm going to get

totally different result. You're not like Yoi is going to fundamentally work or it's going to fundamentally not. And it's a combination of creative which Paul really focused on and and product is the two the two biggest levers. Um to the question Mishkov like how to kind of optimize and lean teams out or you know how how we're thinking about that. We literally cut our UA team in half, which might sound crazy for a UA business where our actual book of business is growing, but we retoolled the team. And this kind of ties back to what we uh were talking about earlier of how these algorithms are getting stronger and stronger. The person pulling the levers is an increasingly small part of the puzzle. Like it says it's 10%. So we actually we didn't we didn't you reduce the overall team size. We reorg the team and we put about half the team on what we call like the growth strategy team which is basically like cross functional operators working with product uh working with admon working with creative and just doing little stuff that falls through the cracks like data governance.

There was I have to watch my words carefully here. There was a large acquisition that happened uh in somewhat recent history where when the dust settles the games were wildly undervalued because of a data governance issue. The the UA was missing call it 90% of the the revenue because of a simple data governance issue. So it's just weird stuff like that that's like it's not specifically the UA person's job. It's not specifically the you know the CEO's job. It just falls through the cracks. It's not the person building the dashboard's job. And so us just putting part of the team onto sort of like this cross functional kind of like seal team to find like why isn't growth working? What can be improved? That's how we've reorged. And the thing that we've almost completely eliminated and I think the worst job in performance marketing right now is BI or analyst like because this with the technology we have now leveraging AI or we just built like plug-and-play reporting. Every company needs the same reports. Every company wants the same forecasting. So, we have that like fully automated like we we sell it. Show my bag for one second.

Like we we have like like basically 1,500 bucks a month like replace all of your BI and in analytics. Like it's it's a commodity now. So, I think that is probably one of the worst roles to have and one of the easiest things to optimize because there's even if you don't want to leverage third-party tool, you can just use AI to like look at your data and provide insights, provide views. Um, so what we're not reducing and increasing focus on is creative. Exactly as Paul said, like that is the product that marketers are putting in the world. Like that can almost always use more love, more TLC. So increase resourcing for creative, increase cross functional growth work, decrease lever pulling, decrease BI analyst functions.
And I think the the important point to note on the lever pulling is there's just no there's just no levers to pull anymore. the the levers all been automated by the platform, especially the big platforms, but they've all been
there's a little more nuance to that. So like we track our time in a pretty

detailed way here. And so we found the number one time tracking thing related to UA was like building a cadence and rotating in new creatives. So that's like the next thing that we're trying to to automate fully. But again, it's it's really just you're just trying to make the algorithm happy. You're just trying to give the algorithm stuff when it's basically giving you signals and saying like boss I'm hungry to feed it and feed it the things that it likes. So the job is really changing versus a decade ago.
How about you you Josh? Like what are you guys like levering up levering down
from the I mean I I agree I'm an uptick disciple on this one. Um, so the way the wild card is set up, and I'm going to over overgeneralize is that there are kind of three high-level concepts. There's a creative team that effectively tries to minimize the cost per install, a product team that tries to maximize revenue per install, and a data team that tries to

balance those two um and maximize rorowass. And so if our goal is x% rorowass or x% uh annualized rate of return, their goal is to spend as much as possible and hit that target. And as the creative team succeeds and drives down CPI, they can scale. As the the product team succeeds and increases LTV, they scale. But now rather than the media buying team being these lever pullers that unlock growth, it's now of a data team being like actually we're just going to give what you take. We're going to take what you give us. Um and so the big focus inside Wildcard has been for for years now, how do we create the tightest possible feedback loops for the creative team? Because if you asked like me 5 years ago, basically the media buyers would run creative,
which is a horrible
um and would like file tickets and be

like, "Yeah, yeah, like give me five videos by Friday." Like that kind of a deal. Um but now the our creative team runs their own creative tests. They can create UA campaigns by themselves. They can create creative reports and like do these loops crazy crazy fast, especially with the advent of AI in the production process. Um and what what we've seen is is a huge improvement in just like how fast and how effective they can be when you remove red tape approvals and other human beings from uh a feedback loop. So it's only the actual like skill positions um focusing on um creating value in the position where they're skilled and then they just deliver those creatives.
What levers do the product team have within that within that old structure? How how do they how do they hit their KPIs? I'm I'm curious.
So the product team is really only materially worried about LTV and so there's kind of two aspects to that that

teams think about. There's the live oper this is kind of getting way out of UA but I mean UA is one side of the same coin. Um and so um the the big challenge of our our our mobile game world is that product teams especially old product teams think about like daily revenue. How many DAU how many what's my current ARPA? what's like my calendar day and UA teams think in this cohorted view where it's like today's revenue 10% came from installs you know three months ago 20 came from two months ago and so the product team's big challenge now is balancing those two and so we run optimizations that are focused on new users and we look at from a cohorted view and we run optimizations for retained users from a more daily view And so um what we the product team is doing is consistently trying to unlike that

cohorted view improve not just LTV but revenue milestones and revenue maturation ratios. And so for instance if the UA team says okay well 6 months ago if 5% day seven rorowass backed out to our target great. um that that hits our target, but the product team adds a feature. And what this feature does is it increases short-term revenue by 50%. But it kind of like is only up on D90 by like 5 or 10%. Like it's a very upfront feature that can break all those projections and those estimates. And so they are working closely with the data team to help make sure that LTV is being assigned in the correct way. Warren.
Oh, you're muted.
What's Warren, what's your what's your take on on Josh's uh organization?
No, I think it's smart. I mean, I Yeah,

I I'm always pretty candid with with with Josh. I think they have a their team being really cross-disciplined, I think, is their unfair advantage in the space. Like the worst results I see are super siloed teams. We we talked about one byproduct of this earlier which is like
everyone knows there's like UA attribution fraud or at least mal intent happening but it makes the UA manager numbers look good.
We've got brought in for audits before where we found stuff like that and the UA manager is basically like yeah but our numbers look good so we're going to leave it leave it alone. So just everyone being aligned and and and working cross functionally I think is the the big edge there.
What's the best way to test creatives or is there a way to test creatives? Like I've done a lot of, you know, CPI testing early on and it's sort of a nice thing to have to help to greenlight your project, but then again once the game goes live, you don't know how quickly the CPI is going to move and plus how it's going to develop over over the time. So is there a way to test it early or is it just when you're live just keep on hammering and and try as many creatives as possible?

So this is this is evolving pretty quickly right now. I think that's a a good question to touch on. This is one of the areas where I think the kind of false signal right now is that like AI generated creative is going to solve your creative problems. The issue is not that you can't generate enough creative. Like you have to get sample size for each creative. So if you have 10,000 creative to test and you need to spend a few grand to test each of them, congratulations, you're out of business now. Like you you've successfully tanked your company. Um an emerging field that a few people are building in now is like simulated audiences for UA creative testing. So I mean these days it's a non sexy answer. You just build structured you know siloed meta campaigns for creative testing or whatever networks you're doing. But I think even a few months from now we're going to see teams moving to AI simulated audiences to test creatives at scale. And now all of a sudden it does become a little more interesting to generate high volume creatives. But for our team we focus a lot more on volume but more on differentiated. How far apart are your creative ideas? What is the breadth of ideiation that you're covering? Um, and

most people are shocked like how few like creatives we're actually shipping a month and testing for large games because it's more about well produced differentiated creatives.
And so when you're talking about producing creatives, I remember like long time ago we had Gonzalo Vasanella. He was CMO of Tactile back when Lily's Garden was really scaling up and he talked about uh the team composure and almost kind of approaching but this was pre IDFA. was talking about approaching it almost like an ad executive kind of coming up with a story and then really like really really being creative rather than throwing spaghetti on the wall or copying whatever else is doing. What's the uh prevailing approach right now?
Everyone's still copy pasting like I we were doing some analysis one of uh we were working with a partner that's in the sports betting pace and we're doing some app store analysis. All of the competitors were showing pictures of phones in the screenshots and it's not because this converts well. Like we've done tons of tests. That's like a it was like early days of the app store. You

show a phone so people know they can like we know we can use the device on we know we can use the app on our phone like it's it's it's 2025 but everyone's doing it because they're just copying what each other are doing. They're not using like principles for like
uh you know just actually thinking like a marketer doing something that actually converts well. So I would say that predominantly people still copy each other. We see our biggest wins when we actually yeah take more of a marketer's like madman approach like what's going to be something that's actually novel gets your attention is fun to watch is engaging
and I think
for a reason go ahead Paul
well I was going to say I think the so so Warren you were kind of a little bit negative about the potential of AI but I think the question for AI is can AI generate novel novel new concepts uh because right now humans are doing it and doing it with a ton of random almost random, right? It's just like, you know, can I clip this stuff together and generate a good IPM. I think the question for the future and AI is can AI

get enough data, get enough context on what's working and and you're completely right. Everyone's copying everyone else. I mean, that's basically what they're doing right now. And then someone has this random new concept. Can AI do that? I think is is is the qu is the question for whether AI fully takes over create creative or not. I I think it probably will do um at some point. I don't know what along what timeline though.
I think there are two kind of key challenges that we have with like a creative and I think we forget about one of them. The key challenge we all think about is how do we connect with the player with the ad and make them want to install. Um but there's actually one other problem. there's effectively an incredibly stingy accountant between us and the player where um the ad network is trying to figure out what ad will convert the best. And when we think about that, we

think, well, we have these five ads and it knows about this one really well. But that's not even really true. What it actually knows about is hundreds of millions of what all your competitors are looking like. And one of the problems that we have now is well if you copy a competitor appla and meta Google what they're going to say is oh he gave me some stuff or they gave me some stuff it looks like what I know works and so I feel confident buying and pushing into that and so the algorithms are always going to push things that are copy copy paste and how do you overcome that is like a really big challenge and so I I think the one thing that I would disagree on, Warren, is I think our team to some degree accepts that that the algorithm is going to pick what the algorithm picks. And so we we have a firm a firm policy at Wild Card of just trying to drunkenly meander in like the right general direction. And if we bounce off

of walls, that's fine. And we don't really think about like cost per creative. We think about how much it costs to get a winner. Um, and depending on the ad network, you know, if you're doing social, it's probably a few more. And if you're doing, you know, inapp ad, it's it's probably less per month. But to some degree, we are just trying to figure out um what is the network comfortable with because that's our first filter.
I'm not sure the goal is you said that kind of the first goal is to connect with the player. I'm I'm not sure that's the goal of creative for performance marketing at all. I think I I think it's I think you know the fake ads show that connecting with the player on the game content is is is
well it's a connection doesn't have to be genuine play. Um
so so then I think you probably need to describe it differently. I I don't think connection would I I I think the I mean the goal is to drive an insult

ultimately and then obviously
the goal is profit.
Yeah. on a longerterm b. Yeah, but you can't you can't generate profit without an insult. So like I IPM has to be a top of funnel metric and obviously you know there are deeper funnel metrics but I don't think connecting with the player is the goal of of creator creative. I I don't know what it is but um it's it's a push pull right because we know that for any customer if they're misled to the experience of the product they're going to get it's a it's a negative impact but there's a crazy clickbait factor to the ads that you're speaking to Paul. So the the it's it's a it's a g a a a gamut of a gambit of can the clickbait factor of this over-the-top clickbait ad overwhelm the aversion that the user sees when they go to download a product and it's not what they saw in the ad. So I don't think it's that the clickbait ads are uh helping with that like later user funnel. It's just if the clickbait factor can overwhelm the negative impact

uh of it further down the funnel. Yeah, I think that's completely true and there are hard to measure impacts of that too. Like when I do competitor analysis, I'll I'll I'll name I'll name names just to be mean, but if you go and read a lot of Triple Dots um and VAS um user reviews right now, these are admonetized game companies. There'll be a lot of one-star reviews saying the ad explicitly promised there would never be any ads in this game and I open it up and within a minute it's showing me ads and you go and you look at their and you go look at their top ads. The ads are saying in big bold text, no ads download now. Um, and then it's an admonetized game that has no AP.
And this is my I don't think it's just I don't think it's binary fake ads and not fake ads. My point is I think there's there's lots of shades of gray here around what you communicate in the creative and and really what you're trying to achieve and I yeah maybe that's a connection to the player no ads

but I you know as you're thinking about new concepts and what you're trying to achieve there I'm not sure only connecting with the player is kind of the goal.
All right I wanted to take this home cuz you you guys are losing me. Uh you're going too deep and I'm a I'm a shallow person. So, uh, so I wanted to kind of end it up with, uh, with just, uh, one question for each of you is like, what's the most powerful way to gain an advantage in today's market when it comes to UA? think that um in UA the thing that I've seen teams most reliably do to cause success is to break down all of the key tasks into individual pieces and focus on creating ultra fast feedback loops. Ultimately, every um every team is incredibly scaled in their UA. We're all running experiments super fast and we're all like CPI is going up

for two reasons. One, because of inflation and margins and stuff like that, but also because game LTVs are going up. There's constant there's a constant arms race of just how good things are getting. Um, and so the faster you can help your team iterate that's on creative on LTV predictions and on products, um, the better. And so on one hand that means those teams collaborating, but on the other hand that means unencumbering those feedback loops and breaking down layers of approvals to just to maximize how fast those loops can turn around because really you're trying to figure out how to make the most gains you can um and create a gap between you and your competitors.
Yeah, this is going to be a weird one. It's just top of mind because we just did it. I would say actually do because do an exercise in time tracking for your growth team and find the lowv value work. I think it's going to be a little different for each team but probably for

a lot of teams what you're going to find is it's something like building spreadsheets or building reports something like that. There is a lot of lowv value work that exists in organizations just because that's the precedent that's been set. That's step one. Step two is like give your team some nonzero engineering resources either internally or through thirdparty to solve for that. So that's the number one thing we usually see when we come into an organization. There is usually just some sort of archaic bloat of process. It's not adding any value but taking up a lot of people's time and just identifying that we have so much we've never had more tools available to automate and remove that lowv value work but it takes someone to identify and push to change that process. And that's true for growth, but you can kind of apply it to other aspects of business as well. But start with time tracking.
Really simple and effective. That's a good call, Paul.
Yeah, I think Warren and Josh kind of gave similar answers in terms of efficiency and feedback loops. I I think that's the common theme here. Um,

I I would just kind of add just a real focus on creative and and ensuring that you've got an optimal machine to generate creative concepts and uh basically double down on the ones that that are working. So, you know, efficiency is key, but you know, if you wanted to overinvest anywhere, it would be on the creative side because it's probably the biggest lever you have. But yeah,
beautiful. Well, thank you so much for for very actionable um advice on how to how operators can can upgrade themselves and upgrade their organizations in 2025. Uh it was a privilege guys. You are so much more smarter than myself. I will need to listen to this three times to understand a third of it. But uh I appreciate you coming on on the podcast and uh let's do this again.
Thanks for having us. Cheers. Pleasure. Thanks for having us.
Thanks everybody for listening. Cheers. Thanks for listening to the full episode. Now, did you know that

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