S07, E21: AppsFlyer and the new dynamics of mobile attribution (with Olivia Kory)

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Hello and welcome to the Mobile Dev Memo podcast. I'm your host, Eric Seufert, and I'm joined today by Olivia Corey, who I think is coming back for the third

appearance. Is that right?
Third time. I'm honored.
Well, I appreciate you coming on because this was kind of short notice. I've been meaning to have you back on, and the perfect opportunity presented itself when yesterday we all learned that an investment syndicate consortium comprised of Meta, Google, Unity, and Moloco have invested $1 billion into AppsFlyer. And given, you know, your attachment to the measurement space, I thought you'd have a lot of fascinating insight on that news. So, welcome back.
Thank you. And uh before we started recording, I mentioned this to you, but when the news hit, I was thinking to myself, like, man, I wish I could talk to Eric about this. So, this is perfect timing and excited to be here. But you you didn't see this coming, which I I saw you posted that you didn't see this one coming, which is surprising. Usually, you're like 10 steps ahead of the industry here.
No. So, so, you know, full disclosure, I'm an advisor at Unity. They definitely kept me away from that news.
[laughter]
Which, you know, good for them. Not that I would reveal anything, but you know, I didn't I had no idea and it was, as I said, news to

me. Maybe before we dive right in, for those who didn't hear your previous episodes, I know most people probably follow you on on Twitter and elsewhere, but could you just introduce yourself?
Sure. So, Olivia Corey, I am the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at House. I think the reason that you and I get along so well is I I I usually kind of just talk about my brand side experience when I'm introducing myself, but I have a a pretty deep background also in in the ad tech space and I've kind of seen this industry from a few different angles. So, I actually started my career agency side at Publicis and then I moved over to ad tech to a programmatic DSP called Tubemogul and their big pitch also in you know, 2013-14 was independence, neutrality. They were going up against the likes of of big tech in Google and Meta. Trade Desk ended up winning out, but they had a pretty successful acquisition to Adobe. So, I saw the the ad tech ecosystem from that angle. And then I moved over to the brand side, spent a few years at Netflix. I like to say Netflix is where I got my MBA in incrementality testing

and really learned from the best. And then I moved on to Quibi, which is where I got the mobile app experience and then to Sonos, where I got the e-commerce experience and then was doing incrementality testing at Sonos and and saw the impact it was having on the organization and joined my founder Zach at House in 2022. House was kind of like born from the ashes of iOS 14.5 and built really the business with him. Been doing it now for four years and we have a a couple hundred customers. So, we've seen a lot. We have a lot of a lot of battle scars from this movement from you know, attribution if you will, over to incrementality. So, you'll find me maybe a little more tired and maybe perhaps burned out than I have been in past appearances, but transformation isn't easy.
Well, and also congrats on the promotion.
Thank you.
Yeah, I remember you that was what, like three months ago or something? I remember you announced that.
It's pretty recent. It was a few weeks ago, but I'm excited. I figured if I'm going to be giving advice to CMOs all day, I need to to prove myself.
Well, well deserved. Okay, so maybe just let's I I just want to get your kind of

high-level general thoughts on that investment. So what what was your initial reaction? How how did you interpret that news?
Yeah, I I mean this was just fascinating and I bet you can imagine from where I sit, it's kind of a a novel a novel way to think about M&A in the space, I think. So if you have to rewind a little bit, let's rewind maybe five, six years to the AppLovin Adjust acquisition. And and I think, you know, we we experience this all of the time. We talk about this in the context of House quite a bit is like independence, neutrality, objectivity is our biggest asset. It is why brands work with us. It is so core to our mission to our value prop. We're we're really nothing without it. And there are even moments where we we really put the customers at the center of everything we do. It is it's very core to our mission. But you can think of an example like like ad credits, for example, where if a

customer's signing up with us, we have this thing called the the partner benefits program where a platform, an ad platform, will provide our brand, our partners with ad credits to test a new channel. And even in that moment, it starts to become gray area of like, oh, are we are we out kind of beyond our skis in terms of our involvement here in this this partnership between the ad platforms and the brands. And so we we really try to be very thoughtful around objectivity. And so you have this acquisition of Adjust by AppLovin, and I want to talk to you about this. Like, I don't think anybody would say that is a success. And I don't know if if we'll ever [snorts] really know why. It could have been a clash of cultures. It could have been for reasons separate from the neutrality piece, but I think I I often point to that is like kind of an example of what you don't want to happen where this thing that was kind of prided on being independent ends up in the hands of the platform that is perhaps grading their own homework. And so I don't think

anybody would point to that and say that that was successful. So then here we have this news yesterday of and this is why I think it's novel of I mean AppsFlyer by all accounts is doing well. I think they feel ubiquitous to me in this industry. It feels like they've emerged as the clear winner. Attribution we can talk about this is still table stakes in this space. And so they're doing well. They want liquidity and instead of selling to to one entity, they sell to a consortium and thus not the you know it's it's the case that no single kind of entity here can bias their platform, their results in a way where they're putting their thumb on the scale. And in that way I just feel like it's a win-win. You know, AppsFlyer gets the liquidity, the team gets liquidity and Meta, Google, Unity, Moloco, like they get to keep a good thing going in terms of this like independent arbiter of truth. And so I we loved it. The team here was was really applauding the the acquisition, but I think perception is reality. The open question is like will

brands, will advertisers perceive them as neutral with this deal? And I think that's the open question that I've been wrestling with is how do brands feel about it? And I haven't really talked to them yet. You see this all the time with things like Meta's conversionless product or Google's open source Meridian. Like brands, even if it's built with the best of intention, they just don't want to trust the platform who's grading their own homework. So I think big open question around how brands feel about this. But I think it's it's, you know, I think it's certainly interesting and unique in the way they've approached it and I saw what you your coverage and I want to hear your thoughts. I think we also just need to talk about the why and the AppLovin of it all and in whether this was just to keep it out of AppLovin's hands.
Yeah, so I don't think it was to keep it out of AppLovin's hands. My sense is that Adjust has been for sale for some time. I don't think I don't believe that AppLovin sees that much strategic value in that asset anymore. So so like go going back, right? So I wrote I wrote

why did AppLovin buy Adjust in February 2021 and you know, my argument was okay, it's financial engineering cuz AppLovin had these kind of like locked-in service contracts, these long-term contracts. It just did you know, there was a revenue boost. The app ecosystem component of it because AppLovin was still aggregating games at that point in time and you know, they had the IDFA's and there's maybe ways you could line IDFA's up across publishers if you use the IP address and then conversion value management which was going to be the new thing everyone thought in the wake of SKAdNetwork, you know, 2.0 being launched with ATT, right? And I think none of that really ended up being the case. What they said was that look, they've got a great sales team and they can upsell their clients on our ad network. Their ad network was still growing at you know, they're growing a lot now, but their ad network was kind of like an underdog at the time and you know, that made some sense. My sense was that they saw ATT as just

an opportune time to get good valuations on assets and they just bought and a bunch of people took this approach, right? Digital Turbine for instance, like Zynga, they they just bought stuff because like this we're going to get good prices and we'll find a way to stitch it all together and my sense is Adjust probably never really materialized as like a meaningful part of a strategy. Obviously AppLovin is like a totally different company now than it was then. I mean, it's not an underdog anymore. It's the dominant app install network in many cases. You know, I'll go in and look at what companies are spending money on and it's number two behind Google. Might even be number one in a lot of in a lot of cases ahead of both Google and Facebook. And so I do know that my my belief is and you know, I've talked to people that works at the company and and they said they really did keep a firewall between those two entities. Like they had they you know, one one guy showed me he's got an adjust slack and there's no AppLovin slack and like they had no access. My understanding and this is what I've been told, you know, I believe

this to be true. They had no sort of like mutual back-end access, right? So okay, so they kept those two things separate. I don't think that they would want to buy AppsFlyer. I My sense is A it was it was a defensive maneuver against AppLovin by those companies because AppLovin is dominant in in mobile gaming now, but I think also the existing investors wanted out, right? I I actually advised the 2017 series D, I think it was or series C. Goldman invested and I said, "Look, I think Apple's going to deprecate the IDFA. I don't know if the attribution companies are a great investment right now." I wrote my piece the coming war between Apple and Facebook in 2017. The that deal was 2017. I remember believing at the time that's the whole thesis of my that coming war with Apple and Facebook V post was that I think Apple's going to deprecate the IDFA. I think they don't want I think that's a good way to stave off these companies from sort of like usurping the direct customer relationship and building these big ad businesses and cutting Apple out and cutting Apple out of not just the ads piece but the commission piece and also

control of the App Store. And so that's what I told, you know, the investors at the time. And so like my sense is like this is just core infrastructure now and the existing investors wanted out. The IPO fell through, the acquisition by PE fell through. They really wanted out. They would have probably forced the sale maybe to somebody that you just wouldn't want controlling that critical infrastructure, right? And there are a number of companies that probably fit that description. And so my sense is that's what it was. It's like, "Look, attribution like you said, attribution has been very like it's been a very durable practice, but and we'll talk about this, measurement has evolved beyond just attribution. No one thinks of measurement as attribution anymore, which that used to be the case with app advertising. And so it's just part of a it's a part of a toolkit. And for, you know, even like, you know, a lot of gaming advertisers, it's part of a toolkit. And so I think like, you know, these companies might have said, "Look, we require stability and predictability with the largest single attribution

platform. It's worth it to us to put money into it to drive the valuation up beyond what any company would reasonably pay. And so that just sort of protects that interest. My sense is, and I don't have any inside information about this, I don't have any information whatsoever, my sense is the vast majority of that billion went to buying out the existing investors so that now they've got a lot more patient investors that are behind them that are not going to try to force a sale anytime soon. You know, I don't know how much of that hit the balance sheet and it and will be used for R&D. My sense is this was just exchanging these investors that wanted a payout. Again, that 2017 investment, they did a 2017 investment and 2020 investment. 2017 was was Goldman and then the 2020 was the series D with I'm blanking on who led the series D, but it was big, it was 210 million. Okay, well, that's 6 years ago and the 2017 was 9 years ago. They want a return. They want money. And so I think that's probably what that was. It's just swapping out these PE funds that are going to want to sell and they

they need to return with much more patient investors who see a lot of strategic value in having this be independent and neutral and, you know, not sort of influenced by a buyer that might not have those same interests.
Yeah, okay. I have a a few questions for you on that. Number one, like whose hands does this get into in terms of the wrong hands? Like what what who who are Google and Meta and Unity and Moloco nervous about? If not Apple, then of course one of them, but who like where else does this end up where where it hurts them? In terms of the ad networks.
I mean, there's like there's kind of any, you know, so you could you could imagine like a ByteDance. Now, that's there's issues there. I mean, I don't know that they can necessarily pull that off. But, you know, you can imagine an Amazon. You know, you can imagine like So, I think about like who Google So, there's different sets of competing or like competition fears, right? Like Google and Meta have one. And Google and Meta, that may have been more about creating a stable base that sits in opposition to adjust. But, you know, you could like there's gaming companies that that could

afford, you know, like let's say that cuz they were trying to sell at 1.9. Apparently, the And this is just reported on by Calcalist, the PE funds thought they, you know, they should pull back on that valuation, I think, because of the AI stuff. And I guess the existing investors wouldn't accept that. But, think about like, okay, 2 billion's pretty big. But, you know, you could think about an OpenAI. You could think about any of these companies that directly compete with with with that will directly compete with Google and Meta for advertising dollars. And I mean, yeah, I would put, you know, ByteDance, Amazon, you know, OpenAI with its advertising ambitions. And like, you know, that's $2 billion to them is is chump change, right? They spent 150 on TVP and but like there's any number of these kind And then And then you see like kind of now, and we'll talk about this, I hope, you know, the sort of consolidation with CTV. Like having this kind of be like a cross-channel measurement, you know, system makes a lot of sense, right? So, I think there's just like from the Google and Meta's perspective, there's a lot of like defensive value there. And then from a different set of competitors. And then from like Unity and and Moloco, I think you can make the case that you wouldn't want private equity owning that and doing like another roll-up.
Yeah. Right? I mean, you know, so now

imagine, you know, a lot of these assets are cheap now. And so, you see private equity saying, "Hey, wait a second. We can buy a measurement company. We can roll a couple of other things into there, other types of advertising services, maybe even some apps. And then, you know, take another swing at like the sort of circa 2020 AppLovin approach, which was owning a big content portfolio plus the measurement. And then, you know, having all that data from everybody else. Like, so I think there's And so that's like the Moloco you maybe the Moloco Unity perspective. But I I think there's also just And also, to your point, AppLovin owns the other the second largest attribution platform. The first largest we should ensure that it's just neutral and and quote unquote independent.
Yep. I think you're right when you talk about attribution is infrastructure at this point, but the question I've always wondered and I've I'll ask you while I have the expert is like if attribution is infra, if it's more or less commoditized at this point, like why don't brands do this in-house? Like this was one of the things that I I

couldn't believe when I joined Quibi, when I you know, we would we went and we we learned about the ecosystem, like nobody would ever build this in-house. Everybody has an MMP. It is just not something that you but whereas in in other industries, like a lot of brands have their own in-house attribution model. So like if it if it feels like infra, why don't more people build versus buy?
That's such a good question and I'm working on a long-form like you know, just solo podcast with that is a history of the MMP program because you have to because of Facebook. It's a protected It's a cottage industry that Facebook established with the MMP program. So going back, Facebook called this the PMP program, product marketing partner or something like that.
Yeah. It wasn't FMP, right? There's FMP.
It was FMP FMP, Facebook marketing partner. That's right. It's FMP, Facebook partner program then became the MMP program. But if you wanted to attribute Facebook installs, you had to use an MMP and they got to decide who got to do that. It was a total cottage

industry. They create So like the thing is, I remember King had its own attribution. When I was at a company called Wooga, we built our own attribution system and we did attribution for everything but Facebook. And if you wanted to attribute Facebook, you had to go through an MMP and they didn't give any exceptions. And so, you know, the the tech is kind of I don't want to say commodity, but that I think that's like that minimizes the complexity of it. I think but you could build it. If you had, you know, you could you could build and maintain it. And we And you know, we did, right? And Mopub wasn't like a huge company. The only reason you had to go through an official a company in the MMP program is that was the only way you got access to the API to do Facebook attribution. That was it. So, they kept this whole segment essentially they prevented real competition from emerging. And so, like these people got to kind of charge, I think, prices that were not consistent with like the quality of the service, right? So, and I you talk about like the Apple tax. I think there's an MMP tax. I mean, it's pretty expensive. And now they they they, you know, a lot of the MMPs offer, you know, ancillary services and like a lot of companies basically use MMPs for like core analytics now.

And so, that's why there's like a lot of resiliency built in. But that's why. That's why you have to have an MMP because otherwise you can't attribute Facebook app installs. And if Facebook is, you know, your number one, number two, and then maybe number three, you need to be able to do that. And so, you kind of build everything around that.
Yeah, we'll talk about this in terms of, you know, we we talked about like how are MMPs trending over time and it still feels ubiquitous. And I guess my question was just why and that that helps answer it. It was propagated by Facebook.
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What is your perception of how customers and how the market perceived the

AppLovin Adjust deal? Like do you think that part of the reason that hasn't been a very strategic acquisition is because the value of the asset was diminished by it belonging to AppLovin in the first place?
Well, first of all, I love that you're flipping the table here. You're just asking me the questions. Yeah, it it a little bit, but not to the degree not to the degree that you might have expected. Like, I you know, I you know, this was kind of like what we in my consulting days. So, I worked with a lot of studios that the gaming studios at the time and their people, you know, they explored the prospect of switching, but the switching costs with MMPs are high. It's not a trivial task to swap out MMPs. And there was a question of like, well, you know, AppLovin says they're not accessing the data. Again, I I believe that they weren't, you know, in the main. And so, like it was what's the real risk here? And just given the given the the lift, given the sort of like engineering resources and and you know, the the distraction of of swapping out MMPs, it doesn't make sense. Like, I would say that the number of defectors,

call them defectors from the Adjust platform, was a lot lower as a result of the acquisition than the number of people that stopped working with AppsFlyer when they launched their gaming studio. Like, when when they actually officially launched Lion Studios, that there was more I I want to say there were more sort of like scaled gaming companies that said we're not going to work with AppLovin anymore after they announced their own gaming studio initiative than there were people that switched off of Adjust to other MMPs at least in the at least in the short term. Now, I I do think that you saw AppsFlyer eclipse Adjust in terms of like, you know, feature set after the acquisition just because they're a you know, sort of a portfolio company essentially of AppLovin and so they're treated as so. I don't think that they invested as much in like R&D as AppsFlyer was. And so, you did see more of like a trickle of people away from from Adjust. But, I think they've got a pretty stable customer base. I don't know that I don't know that it's like dwindled down to something immaterial to the company. So, you know, there wasn't though that like sort of immediate exodus that that you might

have expected.
Yeah. I think well, that that bodes well for further still for AppsFlyer in terms of I mean this is minority stake, no influence, and and a consortium of platforms. So, we'll see, but I think that to know that there wasn't a mass exodus in the hands of AppLovin makes me feel pretty confident that brands and advertisers are not going to see this as problematic, which I think is exciting cuz I think it's the right thing for the industry.
Yeah, and just one more thing on this cuz cuz you keep saying brands, but we're talking about app advertisers. And for an app an app advertiser's like mentality about all of this is very different than like a traditional brand. And so, you know, it's kind of like and and even with the gaming studio stuff, it's like, okay, well, AppLovin is now a serious competitor of ours when they are publishing games, but what are we going to do? Like, where are we going to go? If we cut AppLovin out of our mix, like, what we're just basically cutting off a stream of revenue. And so, I think that's kind of how they

think about it, so they can be just much more calculated in those kinds of decisions. But, okay, let's talk to me about what were you seeing in terms of app install attribution before this? Like, what were the what were the trends? And, you know, what kind of insights do you think app advertisers were most interested in? And how had their measurement stacks been changing and adapting to support that?
Yeah, okay. Yes, you can you can get back to asking me questions now, Eric. I won't ask you anymore. Attribution trends. So, these MMPs are still very much ubiquitous, and I think one of the last times I was on here, we were talking about this evolution in terms of measurement from attribution to incrementality. And that is very much happened, and it's happening, it's underway. But, we still see that there is a role here, and that attribution has value. And the reason why is despite it being clicky, right? Like, it's clicky, like it it picks up these lower funnel channels. It gives you signal on lower funnel. It it really misses impact in terms of of upper

funnel view based channels, YouTube, CTV, Open AI, you know, ChatGPT ads, like it's definitely biased, but these advertisers need two things. They need daily signal, and they need ad level granularity. And we have seen time and time again that is like non-negotiable for them. And so what we're starting to see is like incrementality adjusted attribution in that we understand the bias. Like we understand the ways in which attribution is biased. We can adjust for that bias, get to an incrementality kind of adjustment, but still give them what they want, which is the daily ad level granularity. Like you you said you just made a joke about like these are app advertisers, and I think you know this ecosystem even better than I do in terms of like they're in Meta ads all day. They're in Google all day. They're clicking around all day long. Like to expect that they're just going to be able to like hand wave and say like, "No, we'll get

you that incrementality read out at the end of the month." is just unrealistic. And so that's what we're seeing in terms of this movement of like we're actually bringing the best of these experiments in causal data into the kind of dashboard, if you will, MCP. They can pull it into their system, but into the view that they're used to looking at like hourly, if not daily.
And so so was that a function of like that that, you know, having that incremental lens on it, was that a function of exploring new channels, or was that a function of kind of like leveling up and and probably evolving from the last click kind of mentality that dominated, I would say, app install advertising from like 20 call it 12 when the practice really took off till like, let's say, 2019 or 2020 even going into ATT. Was that Was it Was it an evolution or was it just, well, actually we need more channels, and then we can't use last click on those, so we need a new approach?
Yeah. I think it's it's both. So, the bias in terms of of correlation and

click-based attribution, I think is well understood at this point. You run like a a UAC standard campaign in Google and it looks extremely efficient. And then you run a UAC video campaign that's delivering primarily on YouTube and on other video channels in the the video campaign looks horribly inefficient. The standard campaign looks great. You run an incrementality test and it's actually the reverse. I think it's it's you know, you see that these things normalize when you're adjusting for incrementality and I think I think budgets are are adjusting accordingly. Like you're seeing shifts out of the typical kind of lower funnel search ASA good example of just a a channel that looks amazing on a last click basis in the MMP that, you know, tends to be less incremental. So, that's happening and that's been I think that's been underway for a while. And then you have the persona who just wants to expand into new channels. There's this there's this constant belief, again,

whether whether rational or not, I think there's some truth to it, that Meta and Google are kind of perpetually delivering to like circling the drain in terms of delivering to your existing customers and the people who are going to come in anyway. Like they're their algorithm is so good at finding intent that it tends to be non-incremental. And there is just this this like belief across the industry that this is what's happening with their models. And so, when when folks sign up with House, their number one use case is like, I want to introduce my brand, my app to new audiences. I want to go break out of this bubble and go deliver to new customers, to new users. And the way in which they they see themselves doing that is both signal engineering in Meta and Google, pointing it to kind of like shallower kind of signals, but also expanding into new channels. Enter CTV, YouTube, you know, most kind of video-based advertising channels are are seeing a huge rise in popularity and

then the like LLM kind of ad formats of the world as well. What's interesting here is they all come in really excited about this and then something like the tariffs happen or the you know, there's a war in Iran and oil prices are going up and like the appetite to actually see through that channel expansion and to like have the patience to actually go crack those channels tends to be a little bit lower than than perhaps it was when they started the year. So, I'm not seeing like the rise in spend match like the rise in excitement, if you will, around a a platform or channel like CTV, especially in the the mobile app space. Like I'm not seeing CTV budgets taking like 20% share of wallet. Even though again, you might think that based on the the headlines. Like every time times get tough in terms of macroeconomy or pacing behind on goals, they end up back in Meta and Google.
Yeah, like flight to quality, but flight to a perceived quality and like on the basis of, you know, the measurement, which I think most people would agree is

not very sophisticated or robust if you're just doing last click, right? But to your point, that's how they consume it. And it's like consumption defines the framework in in a lot of ways. It's like cuz well, if the CFO looks at this dashboard, then whatever we replace it with has to fit in the dashboard and that's not as easy to do with like pure play incrementality or or whatever other approach, MMM.
Yeah. What we are seeing though is is the the rise of the longer experiment. If the hypothesis is that these channels, like a vibe, which I'm sure we'll talk about, or uh universal ads is introducing your brand to new audiences, which is again what they want, what these what you know, they sign up wanting, then you need a longer test that plays out over a longer time horizon. So, you know, one of the big learnings that we've had over the past maybe year or so at House is like a two-week test is not is just not enough time to even see anything on a CTV channel. And what we're seeing is like a lot of that lift is coming in in

the back half of a of a four or six-week experiment. And that is a reality though that you do have to contend with of like these different channels have different payback windows. And what is the value of dollar that you get today versus a dollar that you get back tomorrow. So, that it is One thing that we've learned is that you need a longer test, but that also comes with its own drawbacks.
Well, yeah, right. So, good luck going to a CFO and saying, "Look, we can't rigorously make any determination about this unless we spend 500k over 3 months." You know, like, well, you're probably not going to get approved, right?
[laughter]
Yeah, we're not very patient. Marketers, we're not we're not very patient. And so, you really do like you And we've we have so many examples. We just published some data on this of most of that lift on CTV is coming in the back half, which is like if you cut it at three, four weeks, you are you are missing all the value. So.
Right. And the And the interaction

effects, I think people don't appreciate that. It's like, yeah, it has value when paired with these other channels. And so, you know, that's a big piece of it. And a lot of MMMs don't even they they they deliberately don't even capture interaction effects. And so, you're not going to you're just going to miss that completely. And you know, like it's But it's like even like, okay, we do a longer test, but at a very tiny budget, you're going to run into the same issues. It's going to get absorbed by the bigger channels. You're not going to really be able to distinguish. You have to You have to You know, like I was you know, I don't need to tell you this, but you have to really deliberately and thoughtfully engineer these tests.
Yeah.
And people just don't. Or they'll have like it'll be messy and, you know, all of this in marketing is kind of it suffers from collinearity anyway. And so, it's it's very it's a very challenge Well, you know, it's the reason why, you know, house exists. Like that's the whole point, right? So to get that marketing expertise applied to your campaigns. I want I do want to talk about CTV and I do want to talk about, you know, the vibe acquisition that I just got announced today. But before we get there, I think another takeaway from the this investment into AppsFlyer is

that, well, okay, these companies clearly believe that SKAdNetwork/ ad attribution kids going nowhere. If they thought, like, no, this will evolve over time and this will become something meaningful, they probably wouldn't do this. But no one does. This is dead, right? I mean, I was I chose violence one day. I was I was on a flight and I it is whatever it was, like last week, and I was like, "Are you kidding me, Apple? So, you're just done even giving us updates. Like, you pushed companies into adopting SKAdNetwork wholesale. You convinced them this was the future. People spent millions of dollars. Like, I mean, I was attached to projects where probably millions of dollars were spent in a single company adopting to SKAdNetwork, and you're not even going to give an update anymore. You're not even going to tell us what's new, cuz nothing's new, because you don't care about it. You just decided one day that you were going to you were going to force everybody to adopt this new methodology under threat

of basically being, you know, call it deplatformed, having your company be killed. Because you if you get your app removed from the App Store because you were deemed to be non-compliant, I mean, you're talking about a a potentially like existential threat. You're not even following through what this is 5 years later. You're not even following through with updates anymore. This is dead. This was the This was just so disrespectful and and so inconsiderate and so and so callous to the entire and to the entire mobile app ecosystem that supports you. And you can't even deign to give an in anymore about what the road map is or any new features if there have been any that have been added to add attribution care? Are you kidding me? So it's dead, right? It's dead.
Oh, well well said. We've got a clip that. Uh we've got to clip that. I think about this all the time. It's It is still infuriating. I mean that they did it also like all under the guise of privacy like with the billboards everywhere in 2020.

And I don't understand what the end game was because my thought at the time when they did it is like okay, they're getting ready to launch a big ads ads business of their own. This is like the only logical explanation for what they're doing is that they want to win in the ads business, but they're not really doing that. They're not really trying to build a much bigger ads business. At least it doesn't seem like that to me. Did they just not realize what they were getting into here? Did they not realize how hard it was going to be? And does that bode well for the AppsFlyers of the world if if they if this is just like kind of painful and and complicated? Like I it just the strategically it makes no sense. Like I feel like someone at Apple should have to explain themselves.
Well, you know, I would hope they would have had to do that in a some kind of congressional testimony or something, but that never happened. And it just seems like they've abandoned it. Like they're not even giving updates anymore.

It's not even like what's new. I So so they just left people with this complete completely dysfunctional incomplete framework that is is useless. It's effectively useless. And and walked away from it like as if that was going to solve any problems or fill this void that they created that they or that they sort of conjured up. Like and you can make you know, and I don't want to get into the ATT stuff cuz that's old.
[snorts]
That horse is that dead horse is is has mutilated. But like it it's it was just the fact that they can't even they can't even go through the motions of pretending like they're continuing to invest in it. Like they they have completely moved on.
Yep. They've completely abandoned it. There's no explanation for that other than they just didn't realize what they were doing at the time. It wasn't well thought out.
Yeah, I mean I that I think that's right. And I also think there wasn't a consensus internally and there was just a lot of like, you know, people that made the case that this won't have that big of an impact. Maybe the experience from ITP was like was informed that

decision cuz ITP didn't really change that much cuz Safari wasn't the dominant browser and people found workarounds. But yeah, maybe they just underestimated the impact.
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Okay, I'm going to talk about CTV because that's a really interesting you mentioned that like you see the app the app advertisers aren't shifting meaningful budget. But is it trending up in the CTV? Are they are they is there more experimental budget going there? How do app advertisers from your perspective view CTV?
Yep. So, I think what the Vibes of the

world and the Universal Ads of the world have done really well is we talked about this earlier like good luck telling the CFO you're going to invest more money and for a longer period of time and you won't be able to show returns for 6 months. Like that is a a very difficult conversation to have. And so where I think Vibes winning is they've positioned TV as a performance channel. And so you're seeing the rise like in in Universal ads has the same messaging in market of like run this like your meta ads and like we're going to hold ourselves accountable to a performance outcome. And I think that's working really well now. And and and just to say because because I've experienced this with finance teams as well as like everybody talks about brand marketing and wanting to invest in building the brand, but the reality is they only care about brand and so far as it's driving downstream outcomes. And so you eventually have to tie the brand spend to an outcome or it's going to be

the first thing on the chopping block. It's going to be the first thing that gets cut. And so I think Vibe's doing a really good job of that is like they're similar to AppLovin when they launched the e-com pilot is like they have leaned into third-party measurement quite a bit. They're funding a lot of house tests where like they'll put credits up and they'll make it really low risk, very easy to test. Universal ads the same way. And thus they can kind of the the marketers and the teams can kind of justify it as a performance channel. Now, that being said, I do like to be realistic about what's possible here. Like it and we have some data now on how quickly you see the effects of a meta, how quickly you see the effects of an AppLovin. It takes a little bit longer to play out in terms of these effects. Like you are you're introducing your brand, your app, what whatever it is to like often like new audiences. They're going to need more frequency, they're going to need more time. And so

we've again we we did publish this data, but for a a channel like a CTV, you've just got to run a longer test and you have to be realistic about about expectations there and you have to make sure you can protect that long enough to see the effects. And that's the thing that I I I think to the teams that we work with struggle with of like letting the bet play out for long enough to actually make it an always-on channel that is, you know, there alongside the Metas, the Googles, the Apples and the world.
Yeah, and I think, you know, it's that that timeline is is important to think about, too, because I think, you know, like no serious person would say brand marketing can't possibly improve my commercial prospects. Brand marketing can't possibly contribute to my marketing success. No serious person would say that. But you do hear a lot of people saying like, well, brand marketing will absolutely contribute to your commercial success. And it's like, well, that's just as absurd of a statement. You have to test it. You don't know that. And

then the other like the other thing is like, okay, sure, but like I think it can. So like I believe that it can possibly. I believe that brand marketing can upper funnel, let's call it. Upper funnel marketing can possibly improve the, you know, the my my sort of like the the impact of my marketing on my business. On what timeline? Because it's also got to do it on a timeline that I care about. Right? And so if it's in 5 years after $100 million of expenditure, well, okay, maybe I'll leave some money on the table then and not pursue it. Like yeah, I understand that I'm sort of like under-investing by that standard or, you know, from that perspective, but like it's just impossible like the, you know, the the time value of money and and like the prioritization and like the the the return on other things is just greater, right? And so it's like I get that brand marketing could. I get maybe if I even say I bet, you know, I've done this sort of analysis where I've looked at comps and I bet brand marketing probably will improve the power of my marketing overall, but like given the the timeline to of return on that investment and and the

sort of like the hurdle rate in terms of how much I have to spend to see that return, there are other things I can put that money into that would have just like higher ROI and so I'll do those things. It's not like, first of all, it shouldn't be driven by like religion or like kind of like, you know, just blind faith. You you need to test it. But second, you need to kind of just determine like well, when I take into account the time value of money and I take into account the ROI on, you know, when I rank that expenditure against other places I can put that money, is it going to be the best possible use of that money? And so, I think like that's an important exercise to go through.
Yeah. The conversation I'm having a lot of right now is this comes up every year. Every year the this you know, there's this big like hey, we need to we need to crack TV. And then they'll find reasons not to tell like this actually happens more in the world of linear TV than CTV because CTV's pretty easy to test and it's pretty easy to get going, but in linear it's a little bit harder to run a geo test and so every year they'll look at

doing a geo test, they won't run it, they might try it for a few months, they won't be able to see any any discernible impact to the business. You mentioned collinearity, it's a multicollinearity problem where they're lighting up TV right around the time that their business kind of seasonality tends to to ramp up and then nobody has any idea what it delivered to the business and then they turn it off and then they have the same conversation again next year. And so, I've been pushing really hard of like I know this is going to take longer and it's going to be more expensive than you would like, but you need an answer to this question. And so, that's what we've been seeing a lot of, but I'm totally with you. We talk about this all the time is like these delayed impacts you're speaking of like it feels very imaginary in a lot of ways and we're trying to help these brands actually actually assign some data to it and I think the research on this the like existing kind of data on long-term effects is like not good. There's not like there's not much of it and so, we're finding that we're just having to go and run these tests ourselves and collect the research.
When you approach this, you know, that

it's important to have like some kind of measurement framework. I think a lot of the other people that advocate for like well, brand advertising is is is is a necessary, it's it's a critical, it's it's an indispensable part of the toolkit, you know, they never a lot of oftentimes then they'll say something like, "But it can't be measured." You know, and like, "Well, that's not really helpful." Like I had Carl Mela on the podcast and what I loved about his framework is like, "No, he's measurement-first. It's measurement-first framework. It's like, here's how you measure that. I'm not just making a claim that like you must be in you must be building a brand." And like, "This is the approach you should take to measuring it." And so and I like also they rooted that in a lot of kind of like financial metrics because then, you know, that's an easier sell to you know, your your finance team or whatever.
Yeah. Yeah, and we're like, you know, we are working with with some very large brands, but like for the most part we're not talking to P&G here, like a big CPG conglomerate. We're talking to a Series B, Series C startup that's like fighting every day to survive. And it's like the brand conversation is just a very it's a

very different one at that stage. And like again, you just you can look at these like shallower proxy metrics. You can look at them, but like you need to tie them to downstream sales and in I think that's part of the reason we've been doing well as a business is like we speak and we report on the language that the finance teams understand. And the board is like we're speaking in the same language in terms of these metrics.
Well, I also think that's what's important about then what's differentiating and meaningful about the approach taken by Universal Ads. It's not it's not so much that it's measurable from a click standpoint cuz it isn't. It's about they let you be flexible with the budget, with the targeting. And if cuz if you don't have that, there's no way to do real experiment-based measurement. There just isn't. And and if you set the bar for a campaign to be like, "Oh, well, it's a million dollars minimum." Then well, forget it. Like you're never going to get you know, a smaller company investing in that. They need that that sort of like money at risk has to be much lower than that.
Yeah. Vibe has made it incredibly easy to do business with them. They are so accommodating. They're so easy to work with. And there's something to be said for that versus like a a trade desk on

the other hand with minimums and just a lot of of of barriers to entry. So, I'm that team just has been hustling like crazy. I'm really happy for them.
All right. I want to I want to talk about you So, you recently published in a report on AppLovin. They just today went GA with the self-serve. So, you know, maybe it was I don't know if that was in response to the the SKAdNetwork to try to suck all the oxygen out of the room, but I think that was it's been on the schedule for a long time. Tell me about the report. What What did you find? What are the primary findings of the report?
You know that the conversation around AppLovin has been very polarizing for a very long time. I started off very skeptical just with a background in programmatic open web, really hard to like differentiate in that space. And there's like just not a whole lot of great inventory. So, I myself personally started off skeptical. We started testing. We looked at, you know, 15 months as part of this this most recent analysis. I'd say last year throughout 2025, we were very encouraged by results and we were posting them along the way, but this meta-analysis looks at 15 months of data.

And what we consistently see is that app is hanging in as like a strong number two or number three channel in the mix. We looked at how it's comparing to the other experiments running at the same time. And we saw its efficiency was 11% better than the average of other channels that those same brands tested. So, it's looking good. It hits hard. AppLovin works quickly and and we know we just talked about this. That can be a feature. That can be a really good feature, very easy in terms of of working it into your models and your your payback cycles and and whatnot. So, it works fast and it is also primarily driving like D2C. So, it lowers the measurement complexity because most of the impact is happening on digital channels versus like offline on an Amazon or a retail. I'd say those are the key stats. The big one that we looked at The big question was is it hanging in as these brands scale the channel?

And the data there is is it's a more mixed story. So, you know, but I think this is probably similar to a lot of new channel stories where you see really good efficiency and then the next question is how is that efficiency hanging there when you start scaling the channel? And what we looked at was how is AppLovin performing versus the typical test run at the same time to control for seasonality. And AppLovin was beating the typical test between like 60 and 85% of the time in 2025. So, just consistently winning in terms of of performance. But in 2026 that number has come down and it's settled to closer to like a coin flip, which means only half the time is it beating the average of other tests and other channels being run at the same time. And so that suggests that that like early edge that they have is normalizing as brands scale up spend. But there we're we're seeing a like AppLovin share of wallet increase very clearly. We have data I think it's yeah,

5% in January to over 8% share of wallet in May. So, it does seem like brands are are leaning in. Obviously this data is mixed, it's not great like it's not perfect in terms of the the data on on how it's scaling, but it is they're commanding a pretty respectable share of wallet in terms of of 8%. We don't see anyone else in terms of the secondary platforms growing at that clip.
That's an incredible share, 8%. I mean that's that's impressive in the e-com space in the course of 15 months.
That is that's API spend we can track. So, it's like the core digital channels. It wouldn't include TV as an example, it's the meta, Google, AppLovin, Snap, TikTok, Pinterest.
Wow, okay. By the way, I I just occurred to me, you're not chatting me from the beach in in Cannes. I don't see a turquoise water in the background here.
Yes, I'm then I wouldn't be here with you. This is what I live for, Eric. So, I'm I'm better behind the desk.
So, I just saw them the most what I

think is a very sort of like appropriate description of Can from Matt Baloney. I'll just read it. Welcome back to what I'm hearing. Thankfully not coming from the Can Lion ad conference. I shouldn't have to say this, but to everyone asking if I'll be at Cans this year, Can is the festival to Can, a prestigious global film event where talented creative people display and sell their work and look glamorous doing so. Can Lion is not. It's a tacky business conference for selling advertising and announcing brand partnerships populated mostly by poncy middle managers and YouTubers. They call it an international festival of creativity, but that's just to make the suits and the media people feel better about their soulless corporate boondoggle. Enjoy the rosé.
[laughter]
Oh, man. I I wish House was this House experience was like 10 years ago or 10 years from now where, you know, my kids maybe are a little bit older or I don't Yeah, it's just like it's so hard. It's so hard to justify. I agree with a lot of what he said.
I hear you, Olivia. Thank you for coming on the podcast in with little to essentially no notice. Appreciate your insights as always. Talk to the audience

about House. How can they learn more?
house.io. We just launched a lot of very ambitious new products in terms of road map. We've been kind of building toward this since the early days of House in terms of like you know, how do you reduce the friction from insight to action? How do we get better at operationalizing incrementality in a way where like you're actually using these tests to improve business outcomes? So, our road map is all in pursuit of that and would love to to just talk to more folks about what we're building and get thoughts and feedback from smart people. So, of course, feel free to to message me. My my DMs are open.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, Eric.