Stay Compliant with the Ever-Shifting Privacy Landscape with Di Wang, Rachael Weinberger & Rina Onur

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] go all right so we're going to officially start thanks for hanging in there with us that was like behind the scenes all right so um we'll do intros again as people have come in hi I'm uh Jen donaho you saw me earlier if you were in here um you will see a lot more of me um I'm on deconstructor of fun and a strategic marketing consultant for beta hat and Jade Inferno Jade Inferno it' be nice if I say my own company's

name correctly uh Reena why don't you go for it hey guys I'm Reen onor uh co-founder CE of spike games uh a Young mobile gaming company focused on casual games and prior to that I was a co-founder at Peak games again building mobile casual games for the past like how many years it has yeah something like that I don't want to spell it out as much but I guess if you do the basic math that's 2010 yeah yeah all right my name is St Wong I'm the apps performance uh gaming performance uh engineering lead at Google uh I've been working on app campaign since the beginning in 2014 when we started the project so it's also been 10 years U and cool Rachel great yeah hi everyone my name is Rachel I'm a global product lead on app spitting and optimization and today I'll be covering iOS and privacy so excited to be here thank you for having us thank

you all right so today this conversation is timely um because of everything going on with the dma uh privacy is no one's ever been actually interested in that but I think in our world we we have to be so we're going to focus this conversation a little bit more on that and we have um some Google experts here to talk about how they're thinking about it and then you know Reena obviously from the game side of How It's impacting a real life game and so hopefully some of the stories will help you with what do you need to take away from the Privacy changes so we're going to kick it off first with d mhm D what the hell is going on with dma just like just spill yeah so dma uh for those who don't know dma is a new set of competitive regulation from the EU that went to effect I believe yesterday uh yeah so dma is actually fairly complex

set regulations there's many many articles I believe for this audience mostly marketers and for UA uh the key article is internally oh I mean is a external article but it's f 2 it probably doesn't mean anything anyway but it means a lot to me so f 2 basically what it says is that big company like Google or Facebook right or meta sorry uh has to divide us ourselves into what's called core platform services or cps's right so for Google YouTube will be a CPS Google Play will be a CPS uh Google search will be a CPS Google ads will be CPS and then between CPS we cannot actually share user data without consent all right GDP gdpr consent so so what does that mean practically right uh for Google one example will be uh of data sharing for us right that that's relevant to audience here would be what we call play St data that we use

for negative filtering uh Google Play obviously has a real-time stream of users installing games or or apps right and they will send those to Google ads to us and we will try as fast as possible to put that into our negative filtering algorithm so that you know we never Target an add to a user who already installed the game right because that is not efficient uh with dma uh in EU we no longer can just do that without user consent uh so that this will be one example of the regulation reducing the efficiency of uh eua campaigns at least for Google uh with that said you know we we we we have been working on medications so it's not that bad but you know it's still it's nothing is going to be as good as having a Real Time stream of of unfilter data right uh now dma just got into effect and one of the major unknown factors is a actual

consent rate right how many users uh consent to to sharing data within Google between Google cps's I don't have that data right now because it just happened yesterday uh so if you have a lot of spend in Europe I will pay attention to your compaigns and work with sales leads oh interesting and so I understand that you have gotten no sleep since the DM it's in what was the date that it went through effect yesterday yesterday so I've been in Europe so in this lovely city I was like right uh there's some outages here and there you know we're trying to make sure our systems are working you know these the people back in the headquarters are not getting any sleep I'm fine I'm here so what's important is Reena you now have somebody to yell at um when you go through your section so how is this uh the dma impacting you guys and how you're thinking about your advertising yeah well obviously as D said um I mean we understand their

righteous mission of trying to curb excessive data collection from the user perspective so that mission in itself when you just simply put that it's it's a noble one but the way that affects the platforms which kind of trickle all the way down to the content developers is it it curbs our endeavors and our efforts in targeting retargeting and AD monation so basically decreases the relevance of the types of ads that we can show to the people so at the end of the day I'm not sure how it's benefiting people if we can't show them what they actually wanted to see but just random other stuff but yes so what's gaming has been really good at over the years is that these changes have been happening like dma is one of them idfa and scan was PR so we go through a lot of changes and the beauty of gaming is that it's filled with people who are early adapters and very flexible and adapting to the changes um so idfa was the biggest change and I think it it affected the way that gaming companies approach UA not as an afterthought but you know bringing it back into the brainstorming

and the product development and the product road map cycle so that continues and dma is just another lever on top of that something else we have to think about um in potentially curbing a platform that was working better previously um but yeah we'll we'll adapt no it it makes sense I mean d I think you want to go you know as Google you want to go a little bit deeper into uh you know how some of the regulations are um really impacting you know developers yeah I mean as R said right it's not ideal right we're losing efficiency uh you know and this it's really hurting right the monetization models for many advertisers the idfa is being the by far the biggest one right but laws like dma also you know continually reduces uh what makes it even more challenging truthfully is that you know those those regulations and changes don't stand still right uh Apple continually updates their policy

uh I think you know Google is very slow on this but you know some other C companies have for example putting medications on Apple on the iOS platform uh we don't know how durable those are right uh you know Apple could very easily change their policy I think it was talked about there in keynote right uh apple has a lot of ss they are balancing but it's very likely that over time right they were put it into those uh medications as well so it's it's always changing you know we had to respond right dma is the same few years ago we have gdpr uh then I guess a regular realized gdpr is actually uh causing you know giving more power possibly to like the big platforms like Google Facebook right meta and now they're pass dma to try to uh reduce some of that power but again that's that's reducing the efficiency of the advertising

so it is what it is yeah okay let me yeah so as we're thinking about the um the idfa changes and how privacy really changed everything I mean I think about martek Stacks had to change you know gone are the days of deterministic my finance friends are all very sad about this I mean so one of the things Rea as you think about um how you do it in today's world how are you thinking about I mean we can't really use deterministic what are you using in you know for you to to Define measurement and how is your CFO talking to you still not only my CFO my CMO my head of data everybody um and the and the world is completely changed B especially compared to what we were doing in a peak where the entire worldwi deterministic we didn't have a creative strategy back then because we just build a bunch of videos and static images and just put them into campaigns and whatever worked they worked um that world is gone um so right now the world

has shifted into um really really understanding your audience and having a creative strategy that works on top of that like not blindly like throwing assets or creatives into a campaign and hoping it works because you will not have enough data second is like testing an order of magnitude more compared to what you used to do and cross referencing and cross-checking data from all of these different sources and campaigns and trials so that since you don't have a deterministic data set and data model You can predict and kind of fill in the gaps in the puzzle um basically right now because of the idfa um we use Android first when we're testing out because we have more clarity there so everything goes into Android first gets tested and as soon as we have a little more idea we we just do the uh global scale W wider launch and what we're trying to do is try to run a lot of isolated tests to try to understand the True Performance of certain networks and sources um and then again as I said go back to our data and UA teams and try

to hope to piece the puzzle together to get uh a complete set um but as we always say creative is the new targeting yeah it is a lot about even back in the day when um we did have deterministic uh I mean I spent a lot of time on Creative strategy because I was on brand I was on Brands a lot of my games are Brands and you have to go you have to get approvals and things like that so um it's interesting to know that you know for you guys it's really kind of leveled to the top yeah when you think about other pieces of advice that you might have for game companies so creative strategy anything else that kind of comes to mind um well sources and networks have been incredibly receptive to everything that's happening because that also affects their businesses if it if stuff doesn't work for us then they lose business right so it's bad bad for everybody so a lot of these networks have been very receptive and proactive in in in trying to find mitigations and ways around the new regulations are the

changes um so you have to align yourselves on on platforms who are more collaborative and always looking forward with the newest technology whether it's fingerprinting or something else that has that gives you more control and more clarity and align yourselves with those networks with those account managers we're going to listen to you get your feedback tweak something within their technology and come back and get you testing again um in this case it is good to be an early adapter test everything that comes out first see if it works because there's going to be a window opportunity before everybody jumps in see if you can have like a couple weeks of better targeting compared to your marketers then why not so that's something I would I guess recommend to starting out I have always told our teams to jump on any new product because being a guinea pig in that world is actually best to be a guinea pig maybe not in some other worlds but but this world it is yeah this world is great so um I want to talk a little bit Rachel's here an expert in iOS at Google which is a fun place for you to be I'm sure I'm sure you have like you know like a

t-shirt like um the Kelsey mom with the two team okay sorry American football joke sorry I'm giving out bumper stickers at the end of this okay okay yes excellent so can you talk a little bit about how you think first party data is playing a role and like what what can we learn from what you know about iOS and what's going on yeah I think um with these Legacy Technologies like idfa and uh third party cookies going away it's more important than ever to have a first- party data strategy and I think this is twofold so on one hand you have outside of ads it's good for your business because you can actually go a lot deeper with your user base you can uh save their game progress you could uh give them VIP benefits you could upsell you could cross sell um so not only is it a a future proofing tactic but it's also um a really good um just practice in in general um and then

on the other hand from an ads perspective having a first party data strategy is going to marginally improve your performance um and this is where we introduced a a newer solution called on device conversion measurement I'm I'm curious how many people um are on board with that already but raise your hand yeah raise your hand anybody oh okay okay a couple a couple so for those that maybe it's it's new for um this actually collects uh your consented emails email addresses and phone numbers and then uses that to increase your observable conversions to then improve your conversion modeling and then ultimately your campaign performance and this was actually built with these privacy changes in mind so um no underlying information about the user actually leaves the device um and it doesn't get disclosed to any other external parties it actually doesn't even get disclosed to Google um so I think first party data

is the future regardless actually of operating system I think it's a a good practice and I think those that that get ahead of it will be ahead um because I don't think it's going anywhere soon yes uh I I think one PD is the new acronym of the industry for first party data it's all new buzz word yeah it's the new buzz word i i there needs to be a talk on how you set that up at a company cuz that is not an easy thing to say everyone's like oh just do that um it is not when you're a smaller company so digging in a little bit more on iOS um how are the models changing um as as you think about adhering to all of the new rules yeah so the more signals that you provide your campaign the better your advertising outcomes are going to be um and that that is looking like the future so whether those signals come from what I just mentioned non- device measurement or not that that's totally optional it could come from another first-party data strategy it could come from consented ATT users

um there could be strategy about how to increase uh that opt-in rate even uh there's actually another product that we're working on called scan event integration um and this actually is slightly different it doesn't require any kind of consented data in that way what it does is it takes your scan conversion value schema which is Apple's new measurement methodology that's intended to measure post install activity and it integrates that with our tcpa and tros campaigns to actually provide additional signals and then ultimately improve your campaign performance um and I'm not sure if anyone in this room has heard yet but this is actually expanding to um inap ads monetization later this year U so I know that that's a big one for this group so oh breaking news breaking news we get sticker for that you get two bumper stickers from te you heard it here first I'm throwing them out at the

end is there anything else about scan that you want to dig into about scan performance or do we do we check check all the boxes on scan we could definitely go deeper if you want let's hear it no I think everyone know I mean besides everyone complaining about scan you have well first Reena what you have a great comment about scan what are you talking about I love scan yeah I think if I if I were G to add one thing I I'd say um that measurement has has changed in the industry and and it's a new world that we're in a new reality that we have to come to um and I would say that there's a lot of places where you can actually measure your iOS specific performance today there's you know your aaps there's Google ads front-end modeled conversions um there's also skad Network and I think the the best way to tackle that today is actually taking a holistic picture of all three um there's going to be trade-offs when when you look at each

kind of measurement methodology But ultimately I think looking at all three places will give you the most holistic picture and the best kind of uh picture that you can make your assessment and evaluate your campaign performance nice okay any any parting thoughts we were're actually we have a few minutes left and we I've run out of questions on my iPad so yeah I mean maybe I can talk about some of the medication stuff we're trying to do uh and this is related to you know trying to collect as much data as possible Right including what was the your acronym one p first party data first party data one PD one PD yes okay I remember that so on the technical side right we're also working with research to improve our modeling techniques right uh especially with regards to partial data right uh one example be what we call transfer learning right can we use Android data right if you're you have run advertising companies on Android iOS

can we you know learn audiances from Android right and then try to say do the same type of targeting on iOS uh can we take the consented traffic iOS and try to predict that for the projecti out to unconsented traffic right so there are still mitigations going on and hopefully over the long term right they they improve as with technology improves and our research team uh you know something that's interesting I think both for the game developers and also for people in the industry I think back in the day before all of these changes when we were building our UA teams uh like it was very natural for marketing professionals or marketing teams to have a strong background and brand and maybe that only now that skill set is completely changed you have to have a lot of highlevel Quant and analytical skills because not only you have to have a creative strategy you have to test a ton and like do isolated test and then stitch them back to together to triangulate and get

to a result you have to do a lot lot of like proprietary modeling the data that you have to actually like get from point A to point B because there's like no step in between um so I think the type of teams that we have to build and in return the type of people that come into the industry to perform these jobs that has shifted a little bit to encompassing a lot of more Quant and analytical skills so so how do you think about that for for you at Spike um so I think depends on the life cycle of the game to be honest with you because there there look up until a certain point until your game reaches certain maturity or scale there's so much stuff to be done under the sky in just Performance Marketing so just sitting in front of a desktop like running campaigns modeling triangulating all of that but then after a while it gets so expensive that investing into brand like the old school method of doing things becomes more sensible so then you change your team and you change your entire budget to say this goes goes into performance this goes into brand

building for the company or for the products or the product suets um so it changes but since we're very young T Busters still in early days we haven't come to that point yet but a peak there was a point where it made more sense to invest in TV and Ryan Reynolds than go give more ads on Facebook got it so did you ever start with brand though so I always not us I think Turkish gaming companies are notoriously B at that you don't know how to do it so there's still much to be learned okay okay any final thoughts all good all right we're going to wrap this one up so thank you guys this is privacy