Smadex’s Philip Gontier On Scaling With SKAN 4.0 And The Benefits Of Privacy-Centric Platforms

[Music] what do you think about this one Phil I was talking to someone I just said your name it's like Oh you mean the Godfather how does that make you feel well it just makes me feel I guess old I've been in the industry for far too long I think we've known each other since your days back in what is it like 15 years at least yeah in some ways it's it's uh it's interesting but like yeah it just goes to show how long we've actually been on the circuit so to speak we finally have time to sit down have a little chat here at Pocket Gamer in London but what are you up to now what's your gig well as you know as you see I'm just uh joined uh a company called smartx I'd actually known Geordie who's the founder and CEO of smartx for years but would have actually worked together

so I started speaking to him he told me about the project which obviously you know he founded the company about 10 years ago but in the last I would say probably in the last year or so they've really started accelerating they brought on board pal cavado uh who's based in Berlin he's got some real gaming DNA and have started transforming Smarties to become more so like gaming focus and we actually also have the backing of introvision our parent company which is a much larger company based on uh listed on the New York's Stock Exchange so you know they're going to be doing about a billion dollars of Revenue they're very profitable over 100 million in the beta and they're very much focused on investing income is the digital portfolio of companies in the in the portfolio that can actually accelerate growth so this is just like a new opportunity for me to see if I can take the business help take the business to the next level which is what you've done throughout your career so I have to ask you where are you taking it where are you shaping it because I understand what the company

is like to understand what it's going to be yeah what I don't want to do is you know just position ourselves as another sort of like in-app growth platform uh what we have is a platform that is very much privacy Centric we don't have the masses of device ID and graph ID data that some of the other platforms have so by Nature we've had to be very privacy Centric so we've been looking at you know how can we use contextual signals how can we use first party data how can we double down on creative and uh you know custom product pages and now as well what we're doing is you know really doubling down on uh scan 4.0 so we've been running campaigns at scale on scan 3.0 uh we are in discussions with the Apple support team directly who are very helpful in terms of helping us understand exactly how 4.0 is working now the additional three but the two postbacks uh to try and understand you if you can build a model to optimize for

performance using scan 4.0 so what some of the areas that we're going to be focusing around is you know privacy Centric can we launch campaigns on uh you know using contextual signals and then also doubling down on 4.0 to see if we can actually try and run performance campaigns obviously it's early days 4.0 has just been launched uh the traffic that we see at the moment is minuscule but I think as the MMP start to launch the sdks as the Publishers start to adopt it I think we'll start to see more traffic and we want to be one of the first players that are kind of like testing and insulating in 4.0 timeline when you think is it months years hopefully you will start to see some scale in Q3 Q4 and then the other area which is interesting which you know some of the other dsps don't focus on uh we've been pioneering CTV as well so CTV has been a hot topic for the last couple of years uh we've actually been running CTV campaigns for multiple uh gaming

companies and non-gaming as well so what we can do is we can run CTV for Pure branding metrics if you're looking at that upper funnel you know just branding you've seen players like dream games uh run you know a big CTV campaigns very recently I think that's going to accelerate in 2023 the advantages of CTV is that you can actually add some level of tracking and metrics uh because what we can do is with apps layer you know adjust singular and the others we can actually track installs from A CTV campaign as well based on the the IP address and time stamping so where are you seeing like the really exciting results I'll say CCTV obviously is it's brand new we can run it at scale in the United States you know we've run campaigns of up to about half a million a month so you know nothing to be sniffed at a pretty decent scale um and you can do very specific targeting um and as I mentioned with uh with the likes of apps line and just and others we can do that specific tracking so you can see that you know you launch a campaign it drives an install and you

have that attribution in tracking so if you think about what's happening in with privacy this is another area that you know people need to explore so you know performance advertisers need to look at other channels rather than purely you know relying on probabilistic matching today probabilistic matching is working it can drive scale but you know there there are rumors we don't know when and if but you know there is a possibility that one day app will if there's a significant adoption of 4.0 and they've offered a solution for you to to run performance campaigns using uh SK ad Network attribution then there might come a day when they you know decide to call the day on probabilistical fingerprinting so I mean I don't know what your view is on that yourself I mean you speak to a lot of people in the industry Peggy people are like okay I gotta get my head around scan not gonna be easy using learnings and they're in some data to wrap it up Phil I mean I started You're The Godfather that's what I've heard and yes been

there done that so we rely on you a little bit to look around the corner see a little bit into the future I won't ask you for predictions but I will ask you that you know what is it that games Publishers are missing that they need to focus more on in 2023. I would say without doubt start learning and thinking about how you can optimize 4.0 it's going to happen and there will be an opportunity to scale and then of course as we mentioned uh CTV uh that's another area I would encourage a lot of the gamers to look at if you've got budgets and you're spending Millions on probabilistic matching campaigns for iOS and iOS and then also on Android then you know it makes sense for you to start uncovering what the opportunities are for CTV thank you so much Phil thank you snooze