The Death of the IDFA | PocketGamer.biz RoundTables

okay yes we are finally ready um i'm sorry i just had some last minute prep to do getting the uh article live but we are live with this week's um pocket gamer.biz round table discussion in which we will be talking about uh the death of the idfa that is um something we will be discussing and someone will helpfully explain it to me um because if i'm completely honest i'm not sure i fully understand it myself and i'm sure some people who are going to be joining us don't fully understand it but we will be talking about what it is uh what it means that apple is now making it easier for people to stop um allowing themselves to be tracked on on the app store and games and apps and stuff uh what people could do to to stop that from affecting them or you know help in some way um and um yeah the future of games as a

result of it all but first of all we will answer the first big question of who is everybody who is joining me um we'll start with a man who probably needs no introduction to anybody who is known pocketgamer.biz uh john jordan please give us a brief intro to yourself hello thanks rick yes uh i'm john i've uh actually a co-founder of uh steel media the company behind uh pocket gamer um and i uh i sat in the seat that rick now sits in for a number of years so i've been editor of pocket game at office um i now uh write for various sites and are still involved with pocketgamer um i i will also say i am no technical expert on the uh on the subject we are talking about um i i'm here more uh i guess for the the color commentary so i guess um i've been heavily involved in free free-to-play mobile games for the last 10 years or so i'm pretty passionate about free play mobile games advertising is a big part of that so so i guess i have some some opinions at least and some views on the trends that have been happening for a number of years so that's that's my role in this particular discussion

awesome thank you matt use next please yeah hey everyone um so i'm matt saunders i'm the user acquisition director at network um so network or a games company and a games publisher um probably best known for um our game legendary game of heroes which is just about to celebrate its fourth anniversary we've recently released tetris um uh worldwide on the app store as well um and pre-network i was a ua director at zynga and then free that uh natural motion in the uk so i've been running user acquisition uh for a long time now kind of eight to ten years um been through the the rise of the idfa and now the apparent fall of the idfa so hopefully i can give some insight into uh kind of how we're using it at least how we at network are thinking about tackling this problem awesome thank you um john not john jordan the other john pleasure to be here john kutz here i write for forbes i consult with some tech companies i used to consult with tune which was an mmp mobile measurement partner

i currently consult with singular which is an mmp's which of course then means it has insight into a lot of measurement stuff i happen to write about this small little story about the idfa very obscure little thing which about 650 000 people have read about so far in my forbes story so yeah that it touched the nerve absolutely um and julian hi yeah i'm julian i'm the chief publishing officer of exion we are a game developer and publisher that's been running for 20 years uh last five years we're really focusing on publishing our own titles latest which is the classic title lemmings uh previous to excellent i was with natural motion right at the very start to the game publishing uh hutch games and great been working in the mobile industry for about two decades now awesome thank you very much uh okay so as i said we're going to talk a lot about what they are about the idea for a and what it means that it's dying and all that sort of stuff but let's start

at the absolute basics um who wants to explain to me what actually is the idfa how does it work how has it helped developers matt i think i'm going to jump to you on this one because it sounds like you um have been working with it for quite some time and fully get to grips with it yeah yeah uh so the face down to five advertising and it is a unique device identifier um on ios so every single device whether it's a phone or an ipad will have a unique idfa um it's been around kind of since kind of like 20 2012 2014 um and it's the the successor um to the old id so the old id um was a set id which you had uh across everything whereas the idfa is always reset on every new device um we use idfa a lot and the reason it's important and everyone needs to understand it is because i mean there's pro there's many ways it's used but the primary way it's used is in user acquisition for tracking as i said it's an identifier for advertising so what that means is the way i know an install came from facebook or google whatever that was

is because the idfa is matched between the two right um so that's how we attribute our campaigns that is how we attribute value to those and how we essentially know our our return on ad spend um so you know it being changed is a is a big deal users can do that now so there's something called limited tracking um which users can go in and you can set your idf what that essentially does it sets it to zero so everyone looks the same um but you know that's a that's an opt-in function at the moment so people have to go and find that and go and do it and you know the majority of people majority people don't and you know pretty much any advertiser who is um you know running mobile mobile ads will be using uh the idfa so it changing is it has a huge impact on the user acquisition industry cool i'm guessing that sort of covers everything and nobody has anything to add i guess there's there's a lot to add there actually okay sorry go ahead please no uh john well there i mean that that covered the real basics obviously of what it does and there's there's so much more that does i mean

you can do suppression lists so for instance i'm not advertising to those people because i've already advertised them 20 30 times or something like that uh you can do look like audiences so you you found the great um users that matt was talking about and and i need to find more like those and so use some facebook technology to find more people like that right lots of other things that you use the the idfa for and and it's uh losing that is is a massive change i mean uh some several mobile marketers i've talked to have said you know words like apocalypse words like book of revelations type of stuff right and and so it's a real big deal not only because of what it does for ios but also for what it might do for android because google has a history of following ios and apple in terms of privacy we've seen that with a third-party cookie we've seen that with intelligent tracking prevention itp and safari we've seen that with the the creation of the idfa itself the predecessor was the

ud id the universal device id which was set and and unchangeable um and and people misuse that to track people all over the place and and apple created the idfa as a privacy measure to replace that right and so now the question is will google replace the ga id the google ad id or or deprecate it in some way similar as they have followed on other occasions and i think that's a good point john makes this this is you know this is one step in a in a much kind of longer trend which is that as individuals we've come to realize how apps are tracking us and and when that information has been made known to us most of us have felt not very happy with that so there's a broader trend across you know all connected devices we have more connected devices the connected devices have more um kind of power more granularity about you know what we're doing so obviously you get a geo location would be another kind of massive thing that people got worried

about so um i think it's interesting i think it's there's two big extremes there's one to kind of overplay it um which i think you know probably as journalists we tend to fall into the whole thing's going to fall apart and the other thing is to say nothing's going to happen i mean clearly this is a step where as as matt says the functionality has always been there so if you go into the settings of an ios device you can switch this off that's what that's been there for a while now now we've we've we've moved to a to you know that's going to be the default is is is it's going to be switched off i guess we'll come to this in the discussion the interesting thing could be you know can can the advertising community create a scenario where they can incentivize people to switch you back on again so i think probably that's unlikely but you can imagine you know if put in the the right context people people might want to switch this um you know this tracking on because they think they are um uh they're happy with what's going on so i think this is um it's always with all these kind of things and particularly with apple just the way

apple operates it tends to you know like to wield its ban hammer um you know what seems a a fairly uh kind of uh authoritarian manner but but there are broader trends around this i think um that kind of gives some sort of context and i think you know more generally apple is has always been moving to to be the most secure the most privacy focused um kind of mobile device to all the kind of computing devices that's been pretty clear for a number of years cool um so yeah so you know kind of explain what what it is uh and obviously there's a lot of concern around what's gonna happen um julian do you think what do you think is gonna be the immediate impact of um of apple introducing it's uh so so the way i i think i've seen it is um every time you open a new app or game or something it will pop up with a notification saying do you want to allow this app to track you um and you can choose to opt in or say no and it won't what do we think is going to be the immediate impact um on developers and advertisers when this change actually comes in in ios 14. um

julia i'm going to go to you first well i think that um we're going to see a lot of the partners that we're working with racing around to adapt themselves so mmps are going to be looking at their product offering because potentially um they don't have a product offering at the moment on ios i mean we see there's a number of specialist slack forums where they're looking for their place in the market the the limitation of scan means that there's a huge opportunity for them to provide insight and intelligence and a way of managing um and looking for that intelligence um but initially i think that it's going to be um a lot of people listening talking and really comparing notes on what the effects for them will be certainly for ourselves it's uh 50 of our revenue is advertising um so we know we could potentially see quite a significant drop

on ios um with that also the we do a lot of targeting based uh user acquisition so again our capabilities there are going to be uh somewhat curtailed um so being for for us it's a case of very actively you know engaging and listening with the key stakeholders here obviously the platforms but also measurement partners as well it's important to mention that that just because the idfa is going away it's not the death of attribution apple has proposed a solution it is called sk ad network um and it will enable you to know what campaigns ad campaigns work so if you're trying to gain new users for your game you will be able to know which campaigns work you will just lack the granularity that you used to be able to get granularity that this ad was seen by that person who clicked on it installed the app and thereafter went to

level 15 and paid me fifteen thousand dollars absolutely i think we also do a lot of uh creative based optimization and yeah that is one concern for us and you know the people we're talking at the moment it's you know we're very interested in solutions around that yeah just to just to build on build on those two points as well so i i agree with everything it's being said there i think if you if you take this as a whole i think like what's probably going to happen come september or certainly when this rollout happens is there'll be some macro level factors right there'll be a bunch of companies who are um scrambling and still preparing for this um and i think in immediate action what would happen is we'll see the cpms decrease on ios so julian alluded to it so i mean revenue from advertisers decreasing and also spend decreasing that probably just transferred to android but there will be a bunch of companies who attack this really well and understand the the intricacies of sked network and if you can truly take advantage of that then there's an opportunity as well right there is an opportunity for you to deploy capital in a um you know in a slightly

suppressed in a slightly suppressed suppressed market so that is um you know certainly one of the areas that we're looking at um but you know it's going to have a it's certainly going to have a pretty big impact initially initially at least matt that's a great point and and john raised the point earlier that this is part of a trend right it's not happening in isolation that there's been a long-term trend towards privacy and i mean if you look at marketing and marketing measurement there's been an arc of the industry right where once you really didn't know what ads worked or what ads didn't work then you gave coupons so you'd know which worked right and so over time as you went into the tv industry and mass media you had all probabilistic measurement so you didn't know specifically which ads worked with which people but you had some probabilities right and you did some media mix modeling or something like that as we got into the internet and third-party cookies and browsers and mobile and all that stuff we got closer

and closer to kind of the marketer's dream in some sense 100 percent deterministic marketing every ad dollar i know where it went i know what it did i know what i got as a result of it i know who came out of it i know what happened and now with gdpr with the california privacy act with just consumer sentiment that john was talking about earlier and of course death of it the idfa we're moving back towards a more probabilistic model there are some deterministic models for knowing which campaigns worked and skid network from apple will help with that there's some deterministic models for knowing what worked on the web and you can see that sort of thing in brave the brave browser for instance but you're going to have probabilistic stuff versus deterministic in terms of identifying individual specific people and not being able to track them across websites and apps i think i agree with matt i think there's uh you know it's not every

problem is just uh opportunity on the other side of the coin and we certainly see opportunity i guess the one interesting thing and it does play back to um what john was just just saying there the loss of granularity i guess is the thing i think if something's going to be important it will be that because with free to play games i guess as we all know the um you know the vast majority of the profits are generated by a very tiny number of um individuals and so the ability to kind of track at a device level is very valuable if you're if you're trying to if you have like a you know a a you know an agent developed rpg that has very high levels of money that can be put into it or a 4x game or something like that then the ability to have some uh you know kind of uh information about a user and certainly users who are prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on on these games is actually very very important to the kind of free to play model um so uh which is kind of different i guess to a to a more kind of casual candy crush thing so i guess that will be the interesting thing when you lose

that granularity particularly on ios which has obviously much more um spending by kind of in-app purchases um then then i think you know that kind of uh kind of performance that the whole the whole free-to-play mobile space has been built partly on the back of this very very granular advertising ecosystem that's built up and that's obviously influenced the kind of games that we now make that we kind of make these games um that there can be people can spend tens of thousands of dollars in because we can we have this kind of advertising model that we can build off the back of it might not be a bad thing potentially for that to go away and and you know or at least have to be dialed down a little bit and people have to kind of rethink how they make free to play mobile games um that potentially don't have this enormous um kind of uh spending model and i guess we see that under pressure in other ways from things like loot boxes and kind of uh governmental fears around loot boxes which is kind of you know all these things linked in together in like a big kind of you know machine with lots of different cogs so

so if this comes a bit unstuck you know probably won't but you can imagine in five years time that that's part that's part of a a wider influence in in the type of games that we make now um and how we monetize them yeah it becomes different um okay cool um uh so i'm gonna i know hang on i'm gonna get my head together and then i'm gonna ask a question which is something on lines of um obviously like privacy in general is is something that has been quite contentious and something that people like to talk about and like to sort of uh you know we've had gdpr we've had now idfa going away and people being able to opt in to sharing what's being tracked but i think there's still um you know a lot of stuff that i think people don't know that they're being tracked on or at least willingly accept that they're going to have to be tracked on certain things such as like google and cookies and that kind of thing um that's that's my stupid thought about

it but what it so what is actually the benefit to the end user of um having this option to opt out like what what what are they going to see um and what why is that good for them i guess well they'll see less relevant ads and we can argue about that benefit or or not benefit i guess that's one thing honestly the pop-up that apple is using in ios 14 is a very scary pop-up and it says this app is looking for permission to track you across other apps and other websites and ultimately that's not really the use case that network for instance that matt works for does i mean they're looking to attribute an ad and so yes there's an app that has an ad and yes you click on it download an an app from network in this case and then they can connect the two and so yes they're using a service which is

uh could be an mmp in fact network does use singular um but you know they're not really tracking somebody across fifteen thousand websites or apps it's not like uh it's not in my mind like the third party cookie scenario so it's hard to say exactly what apple is protecting users from does it increase user privacy absolutely is that generally a good thing absolutely are you really hurt by allowing your idfa to be used so people can attribute advertising results uh i it's a little challenging for me to make that case i don't know maybe others can make it uh julian yeah i think john makes a good case here the pop-up as it is at the moment um is actually quite scary and with a sort of eye on gdpr and ccpa it's not strictly true you know we're not looking as publishers we're not looking to attract people across other apps and websites

ourselves some of the sdks that we have integrated are trying to do that um so it would be good if that message was clarified somehow i kind of think that it would be difficult within the the realms of the limited number of characters that are available on screen we should also point out that if you have uh attribution uh sdks within your app um then you know what that can do on mass if you say one if you have 20 apps on on your device and 80 of those apps have a attribution partner and they're using the background processing to fire off signals it means that that attribution partner can build up an incredibly detailed picture of you um from the unique characters of your device from the number of apps they see from your ip address the screen size the os version uh your location then

the amount of data they can build on you is quite astronomical and you know i think that since cambridge analytica and other things like that and people are very aware of what you know once you're generating and collecting that kind of data you have an awesome database and that probably goes beyond the little bit of the realms of what most people if they realized would be comfortable with so as a marketeer and a publisher i like having all that data as an individual i find it a little bit concerning that my device you know with my unique collections or um of apps will be very different to a person sitting next to me and what they can ascertain from that is is very very powerful um again a marketeer i like it uh as a user i'm fairly scary so i think for for users it's going to provide them a level of uh just confidentiality that they haven't had before i'm not

sure though that uh it's huge that people will buy an apple device or a device just because it stops tracking getting that that's a small sections of users and as you know has already been pointed out advertising is going to become a lot more generic so you're going to see ads that uh are in some cases highly relevant to you and you know that that for users that could be a little bit off-putting i mean i i disagree a little bit there julian um i i do think the reason yeah i think apple has probably proven um but to some degree it's success and i'm sure it focus tests these sort of things as well that having a strong privacy focus you know it doesn't it's not the prime reason that people buy an apple device but it's certainly i think kind of adds to the kind of confidence that people have buying apple devices um and and given um i mean obviously

they're still trying to move trying to move away from making so much money from device sales but it's still the majority part of of its revenue and will continue to be for some time um so so i you know i it's a difficult one because you know i i think um as you say there is the balance between people i think now do quite like relevant adverts i mean you know i'm sure i'm not the only one who who has you know clicks on things on facebook and quite likes seeing adverts based around the things that i click on because that's quite helpful you know i don't there's things that i don't you know if i don't care about something then then the experience is um is less interesting um of course the other hand is is that probably some people would quite like to see irrelevant adverts in the sense that they know advertisers are wasting their money there's that kind of we're not not that anyone thinks like that but potentially that they do i mean just another kind of contextual thing and i don't think this is the reason apple is doing it um per se i think it's much more about privacy but there other is another kind of clear trend that apple has um kind of gone down over the last you know decade

is that apple the thing apple probably hates more than anything else is people making money off the apple ecosystem and apple not getting any cut from that so that's clearly been with the app store and and the focus over the years of anything that allows people to generate money outside of the app store and apple doesn't get it 30 cup that very quickly uh gets banned and i think this is a and i think there's something that could be overplayed but again i i think the fact that this hurts companies like facebook um it you know means that apple are you know you know a very you know more keen to do it than they would do otherwise it also um kind of helps potentially i mean again it's not a primary thing but i think it helps apple in things like um subscriptions and the apple arcade kind of game service which is about subscriptions and no ads and and you know we don't have any figures around apple arcade how successful it's been but it seems like there was kind of quite a lot of interest quite a lot of positivity when it launched and since then it seems like people are

a bit like nothing nothing there but um you can imagine that this again you know just plays into the strength of that sort of subscription kind of package uh uh and you know potentially maybe encourages some developers who maybe like julian you know potentially if they're going to lose 50 percent of their revenue that's a big deal if they can come into apple arcade and not have to worry about advertising then that strengthens apple's hands um i think it does play into those other kind of wider aspects of what apple is going to try to do as a company absolutely i mean if something isn't apple doesn't make a ton of money from advertising they of course have apple search ads that's a few billion dollars a year it's a rounding error in tim cook's books but the reality is that its biggest competitors uh certainly google and and facebook make 97 of their revenue from advertising if apple can in some way uh make that a little harder to achieve um you know uh that's not that's not horrible for apple

probably worth um we've we've delved into the realm of apple rather than the user but they are actually linked i think one of the ways i linked is your point there on facebook and google so just for everyone's understanding because they are sans and they're self-attributing networks what that means is from every advertiser they get pretty much every post back and all that's based on the idfa so they not only most advertisers if you're nestic sdk network will know i will send you a post back if you've given me an in-store you've done something whereas facebook google they get everything so they have huge device maps of everyone right so if you're looking from a user point of view those guys having less information you may perceive that as a good thing you may not you most people really would see that as a good thing it also to john's point you know it's it it's uh it harms them this dish and may be disproportionately compared to other other networks the other interesting thing is it may level the playing field a little bit for smaller ad networks um because with apple's sk ad network framework

every uh ad network is now going to be able to get some degree of post install um event attributions and and so many ad networks have already had that uh integration so they can further target and everything but some ad works don't have that you certainly have that with facebook and google but now every ad network will be able to see okay it's limited it's very limited it's it's within a certain time frame and there's basically one attribution you can get for you know went to level 15 or signed up or subscribed you'll have to be very careful as an app publisher a game publisher decide what you want that attribution to be on but um every identical every ad network will be able to get that and then be able to adjust some of their targeting criteria on that awesome um and sort of on the note of like user views and things like that um there's been obviously the main thing

that sort of this all banks on um and the death of the idfa affecting everybody is are users gonna not are users gonna choose to opt out and not share their tracking do we think the opt-in rates are gonna be tiny or you know does anyone have any predictions as to is there like the opt-in rates that we're gonna see at this point less than 10 i mean it's a scary pop-up and why would you opt to be tracked in why would you ought to be tracked what is the benefit for you there is no obvious benefit that said i have talked to some uh mobile app publishers who said you know what we don't actually need to track everybody we actually only want to really know those people who are payers who buy things in our games and that's maybe five percent three percent ten percent or something like that and maybe we can incentivize those in some way to opt in and so we can track where our best users come from and then we can look for more like them

now there's a couple issues with that obviously you can't bribe people just like you can't bribe people for good reviews on the app store or google play you can't bribe people to opt-in that's against is literally against the rules however you might be able to set up in such a way that it is a better app experience or user experience if somebody does opt-in so if you can find a way of doing that then like twitter does then you might be able to get a a slightly higher opt-in rate and specifically of those people that you care the most about who are the whales in your game yeah i think the the important thing to answer so i i shared john's view i'm i've seen some like ad companies out there saying we're going to get really high opt-in rates i think that's pie in the sky to be honest i mean like i wouldn't click that pop-up and i work in the industry right um i think also what's important is in order to track they would also need to do both right so you could have a really high opt-in rate in your app but if you are buying people from another app and they've not opted in there the idf is not going to be

shared so um that's why i think in general for tracking purposes it's going to be it's going to be really low from a from a game developer and a published point of view it is in our interest to make it as high as possible for a multitude of reasons um but but i think we know i've already seen like some developers like experimenting right so one of the things that um i believe to be true is that we said at the start the pop-up comes up at the start well it doesn't have to right you get you have control of where that pop-up is shown um and uh it's basically you just don't get the idfa before so it is it's essentially like they've opted out um so maybe you could potentially preface that with something maybe you because you know a much uh kind of better image which explains actually what's happening maybe you could put it in a moment where there's high value to the user like there are a lot of these things are will be experimented right over the next over the coming months um as i said there will be winners and there will be losers and i think this is not not exactly the

same but there is a kind of comparison to what we saw probably you know six or seven years ago with with push notifications um and and a similar thing happened i mean it's obviously not quite the same level of scariness but but um there is the official ios push notification prompt that comes up it's standard across you know all all apps um and it says i can't remember what it says exactly but do you want push notifications kind of a kind of yes or no um but what we saw quite quickly was that clever developers would would have their own splash screen so so before pulling up the official apple um push location prompt which can only be shown once and if someone says no then they have to go into the settings to reset it developers would would would kind of integrate it as as matt says potentially integrate it into the flow of a game so people go through the tutorial and then they kind of get some big reward and then you might say uh you know if you want to have a better experience in this game um you know click here to to be tracked or you probably wouldn't say track but you'd have some sort of kind of kind of phrasing around it

um and then the apple you know the scary apple thing comes up but but you've put some sort of context into why someone might want to click on the scary apple thing and you know i don't really know about push notification prompt uh kind of opt-in rates um the question i've always got is is they're not very good so i think broadly you would you would see the opt-in rates for you know for for for this ad tracking as being much less than push notification problems but i think there are things developers can do and i think it will also be it's not kind of the same exactly the same provide the same level of granularity but it potentially gets developers to um you know re-judge their their focus on how they communicate with with um their with their players so it could be uh you know getting people to opt into facebook which was a big thing again you know seven or eight years ago getting people to use facebook connect pretty much gone out the window now but obviously developers have incentivized that so you might get like 200 you know hard currency gems if you connect your facebook account or

potentially email so i think there that there will be certain attempts to kind of build other systems around this i'm not i kind of agree it's not i'm not terribly sure how successful they'll be but but what might be interesting is they might be successful for your very um committed players so so if if if the developer can find the right players and give them the right context to why they're doing it maybe they have to push that kind of further down the funnel of when people are playing rather than having everything kind of right at the beginning of it but but really if people aren't committed to your game then you don't really care about tracking them if they're just going to kind of delete it and not play more than five minutes if someone's played an hour then you probably you you'll want to work harder building a relationship with them that you can kind of then then find useful um and so yeah we keep mentioning like the scary pop-up and the wording is like i've seen the pop-up a few times now from writing about it and it is that sort of very harsh like um we're going to track you do you want this to

happen um we talked about so maybe there's a different way of wording it or maybe there's better understanding as john jordan was just saying about like couching it in something else what can apple what like could apple sort of compromise a little bit on this because obviously it's their platform it's their platform they can do what they want kind of thing and developers and advertisers just have to go along with it but if if if apple was going to do this and then consult developers and say like um how can we do this in a way that's not going to completely mess you up like what other ways could could apple um be approaching like the opt-in thing um so that developers don't have to make huge compromises and and start like redesigning the whole game to to try and get this sort of data julian do you have any thoughts on that yeah i think that that the text as it stands is probably um quite close to what they're going to release they don't john's solution of uh and he's quite right you don't have

to throw up the the permission request screen immediately so you know you could put up another screen beforehand um but i i think we are you know this is the future um i think the apple are just a little bit ahead of google here and they will be implementing it how we can make it softer is uh maybe some messaging around that but it is still going to be you know a screen where potentially at least 80 percent and it could be higher of people reject um that and once you've you know once you've requested it in a game um you can't you can't go ask for the permission again um so it's it's going to i think it's going to change industry and i think that we are um we are we we it will be um mandated i don't think it's going to get any softer um to any any great degree i mean they could potentially sort of allow you to write the entirety of the text and when you submit an app that goes through

approval um as your marketing text does but i think that uh yeah there's issues with that and then localizations and um you know these i think that it there's an advantage of it being standardized that people will recognize it and you know if they don't have concerns then yeah maybe the adoption will increase over time but um i think it is a point that matt made you know you you need this um on both sides whether you're um to you don't just need to show it in in in your games you need other people to have it accepted as well otherwise you know you you're not targeting um on an id base you know but uh no i think we're set with it and i don't think the language is going to become to any great degree softer so there's multiple back channel conversations going on with apple right now and apple's talking to many of the biggest uh game publishers and app publishers in the industry uh

probably including some on this call right now probably who can't talk about it but there are lots of conversations going on about how to be implemented will it get changed will there be sort of a grace period other things like that look if we understand apple and we've seen a lot of apple over the last little while it's not the most flexible company in the world um and and often when apple makes a decision it takes a long time to reverse as well not the most agile company in the world either and and user privacy is going to rank much higher on apple's list of concerns than what app publishers are doing that said they do need a vibrant ecosystem so that does matter a couple things that might happen uh might be a bit of a grace period that's a possibility another possibility somebody mentioned i believe as julian talked about device graphs that some marketing measurement companies build when after they touch every device they

build a device graph and then they can start to see what's happening one of the technologies that's usable for that in addition to idfa is fingerprinting and fingerprinting is just simply looking at a device and i think we've talked about it briefly and seeing what ip is it coming from what's turned on on this device what's turned off on this device what is the os version other things like that that can to greater or lesser degrees make a device look unique in an advertiser's eyes in ad tech eyes and fingerprinting is actually not allowed according to what apple has said but there may be a grace period on that and so you'll be able to track your advertising and your measure your results with that all of that at this point is speculation what we do know is that ios 14 is coming what we do know is that apple has created a specification sk ad network that will allow some level of attribution uh to campaign level not to user level

and some level of post install event reporting so it need that's something that everybody under needs to get on board and need to understand how to work with it there are some challenges with that there are a lot of challenges with that right it's it's a framework that's very limited in terms of number of campaigns number of iterations you won't be able to tell with the same level of granularity what creative is working well what creative is not working well that'll be a challenge you know multiple other issues number of campaigns you can have is extremely limited your post install event notifications are pretty limited and also pretty open to fraud as well because although the initial install is cryptographically signed by apple the post install events are not and they can actually be fairly easily faked so there's a lot of work to be done by a lot of people in the industry big app developers mobile measurement partners all those to make sure that people are ready to go you also see a lot of mobile marketers here saying hey i'm going to get my insights on android

and i'm going to apply them to ios what's working i'll find out there where i have deterministic information i'll apply those to ios you know as i think matt was saying there's going to be a lot of experimentation there's going to be some winners there's going to be some losers i guess it's an opportunity if you're not at the top of the heap right now to find new ways of finding customers to do that contextual uh contextual irrelevant advertising versus targeted advertising this actually could be a good thing for publishers who monetize via ads in some ways um you won't be able to tell the individual value of a specific ad but if you have a premium app or a premium website your your your eyeballs will have a higher value than maybe in some um less premium site yeah i think just to just focus on that point i think it's unlikely apple will do anything major on that prompts their motivation here is not to support people like me to be

clear right um i do think if they are going to help people like me the way they are likely to do that is probably put further development into sk network they've already done that right so sk has been around for a couple of years not really being fit for purpose um with the new version they've announced they've announced things like you can do re-engagement and these kind of like post limited very limited kind of post-install events um but there was very precedent there and i think they are likely to develop that further and you know i think that's where you know at least some of the conversations i've seen have been kind of trending towards apple very pretty pretty strong on their privacy privacy policy at least at the moment and you know apple aren't particularly well known for changing their mind so i think that's quite unlikely i think one one positive change here is that within the specification of skf network we get the source id um so we will know the app where our install comes from and i think the you know if you uh start looking at things like match theory then we could be you

know moving more towards uh match theory based targeting as opposed to looking at the individuals and their previous history so as as matt says i don't think that we're going to see great moves on sk network we are going to see it evolve over time and potentially get more powerful there is the conversion value uh the six bits available um that we can use but certainly you know we're looking very closely at and we've been somewhat frustrated in the past of not having the source id from every platform so i think the source idea where the app install is coming from is something that we can further use for targeting absolutely julian and that's also something that can take out some percentage of fraud from the system as well because obscuring where that actually happened where that view actually happened was one of the sources of fraud in the ecosystem guessing the work that we've done in the networks that provide us with the source

id yeah we can see there's a validity behind the model so that we know that we're getting very good conversion from certain apps and certain type of apps then we can double down on those sources cool um awesome this is all great stuff by the way i it's half of it's going over my head if i'm completely honest but i'm really enjoying the discussion you guys have been great so far um we've not got long left on on this round table so i am going to look at some questions uh from the audience thank you to everyone who has posted them um so the first thing i'm going to jump to is something that i wanted to ask as well um so we've already sort of touched on android a little bit uh this person wants to know if google is going to implement the same sort of system but i think we can look a bit wider on that obviously we've we've talked the main focus of this is on apple's approach but um what's kind of the state of play on on google and what they're doing on through with through google play and how they're doing this kind of thing and do we see them following along and starting to

crack down more on its privacy measures and that kind of thing i guess as we mentioned earlier there's definitely going to be that pressure and we've seen that google has followed apple before in privacy measures that said one key difference here is that apple makes money on devices as john mentioned and google makes money by selling ads so google is a performance ad network literally and so tracking and measurement is really really critical to them that said if they can keep a little more information out of the hands of their customers and in their own hands well that might not be a horrible thing for google actually so there's a lot of factors at play here and as we saw when uac came in and it was more of a black box it's not a horrible thing necessarily for a google or facebook for that matter to have kind of a black box put your money in something will come out be happy yeah i think i think just to add to that i think that the general kind of consensus is that google will follow suit in some form i think it's

likely it will be less extreme than apple for the reasons john just mentioned um i think the one thing uh which is important to note is google have a product called firebase right so that is capable they have their own product which is an analytics product from mobile apps which can do attribution and it doesn't have any where as much of the bells and whistles as some of the kind of like the mps we use and other third-party mnps um but i could certainly see a world and google have been trying to kind of like you know encourage developers to integrate that anyway and they've locked kind of betas behind it so i thought i could certainly see a world where in six months a year's time in order to do attribution this is pure speculation to be clear but in order to do attribution you need to use firebase on google i could certainly see that happening hang on i got distracted uh awesome thank you um another question that i thought was really interesting in amongst this mix there's quite a few questions actually um do we think that

this is gonna balance the ua field between indie developers and big publishers um as an indie publisher um i think we're i mean both on the monetization and also the acquisition side we're going to see the the top the peak come down and the bottom potentially move up i mean it's certainly going to make general ua a lot more cost effective for some of the smaller companies and you know i think we're going to find a level uh a medium level somewhere um between the the the peak at the moment and the valleys um that we see so it it it potentially will bring down the average cost of user acquisition and you know when you when you sort of look at the campaigns in the future you're you know where it's going to be more cpm based rather than um than install or event base but i

think on the whole you could see a reduction um in the actual uh cost of ua but when you look at it on mass then it it equals its weight in itself out it's really challenging because it's hard to value the value of the traffic value the eyeballs right because you won't have that granular insight so it'd be hard for hyper casual to get super cheap uh users it'll be it'll be hard for the the high end premium mid core hardcore gaming apps to really go after their audience as well that said those those mobile marketers who do really really well will probably have very sophisticated machine learning ai models that can take all this probabilistic data and come out with a good strategy and i'm not sure that the low end players or the the indies um can match that yeah you're good i think just to just to follow up on on that point we kind of touched it a little bit um but within sk network there's these

up to 64 conversion events that you can map right that is and and to really dumb that down that is essentially a data science problem right so that is how can i as quickly as possible understand that a user does these things and they are this values were valuable to me in in the long run now um we as a relatively large ua developer have already got a team working on that right so like and the aim of that is to be ahead of the curve so that i said when september comes we can deploy capital when the cpms are expected to be to be lower right but i think it's uh i think overall cpms will be lower and in general ua has became easier right it is easier for anyone to deploy marketing dollars via google uac or via facebook and facebook are you know releasing a very similar similar product um it is easier to deploy capital you are relying on them to tell you that was a good deploy or not though right whereas more sophisticated marketers i think will still have all these data science tools and capabilities and graphs made

which will allow them to deploy capital in a similar way to which they do now to be honest on a less technical level but uh you know i kind of think as an industry matures after the first couple of years no change that happens in that industry is good for the for the indie players unless it's a specific you know someone specifically changed the industry to help indie players if something gets more complicated than the indies don't have that experience in-house they rely on third-party services which is what they've been doing for the whole kind of ua thing um and in fact they kind of you know as they rely on third-party services they lose any in-house kind of kind of kind of capabilities they have because they don't need it it's wrong third parties and the third parties get screwed by apple for the ad network stuff and then the india's haven't have no capabilities at all and it may be particularly for some certain indies who if you're doing and as i guess most in this now get very specific about kind of niche games that they kind of make you know if you if you made a very nice sort of game and you know there's not many people out there who will like that game but you know there are a few who will spend a lot of money then

the current level of advertising is quite good because you're happy to spend quite high levels because you know you can target the right people and you know you have high conversion rates if you lose the granularity of those individuals then you can't find the people who like kind of weird quirky japanese dialogue games about you know high school if you can't find those kind of people then you can't really advertise i mean you can't advertise but you're not going to get the conversion rate because you've lost the grading latitude finding those people so you know maybe you know this pushes people back to kind of apple arcade those kind of indies but um yeah i think the indie game people in mobile have have kind of sort of long gone and the ones who who are still there and rely on advertising uh or advertising revenue as well but of course that's the other thing to remember in this situation if if if kind of advertising dollars are being less well optimized in the system then potentially uh developers who rely on advertising don't get so much money as well so so it cuts both ways it's the ability to generate money and the ability to get money so yeah i don't think that's a good thing it's all friendlies

uh this is actually kind of leads on something that i am personally really curious about is um do we think this is gonna have an impact on how free-to-play games are designed in the future um are we gonna see a shift away from like heavily reliant on advertising uh somebody mentioned hyper casual earlier we're going to see because obviously hyper casual has grown and grown and grown but the thing about that is because it relies on advertising and they're quick to make and that kind of thing um are we going to see less hyper-casual games like what do we think is going to affect is this going to affect how games are designed and which games are going to grow and be of interest and impact on the app store the answer is 100 yes um and and but where that goes and who that benefits will be really really challenging to say i mean the one change that will happen that we know is that you need to understand very very quickly as matt was talking about who in your game is going to stick around who in your game is going to pay and you need to know that within the first week and you need to start knowing that almost within the first 24 hours really because that's when the post-install event attribution starts

kicking off and you can delay it you can you can increment that value but you need to understand that very very quickly you're going to get that one insight and that one insight is going to guide you in your future marketing spend and so you need to get really good understanding what does somebody who uses my game frequently what do they do early you need to understand your users extremely well and and you need to be good at prediction and then getting more like that and but it is changing a lot and frankly um i'd be interested in hearing what matt and julian had to say about uh how it's changing although you guys obviously aren't hyper casual no i can i can add a little bit if i'm gonna put my cynical hat on for a second this is very cynical um apple don't like her casual right they don't make any money from it and they like to pitch themselves as this really high-end kind of um you know like gaming service and uh at the top of their charts are not that anymore right they are hyper casual so you could say this is a move which um which harvested interestingly that's probably a small point

um i think uh to to john's point i think where we will see development changes in that initial stage right so like game like thrive legendary is a mid-court game right it's a it requires and relies on most typical free-to-play things right so people to spend money and we have really great long-term retention we are going to need to be able to understand someone who is going to stick in our game for a year within like a week right so how do we approach that that's really hard first of all that's really hard to model right but um how we approach that is probably we design things in the game early early doors to give us the best chance of that right give us the highest probability and i think that's one of the ways in which free to play development will change i think another one is if we take at face value that advertising in its current form is going to be less effective and users are going to be less effective then what are other way mobile games become big right um you know that might be they look really fancy that might be they have really good community um community uh aspects right i think

those sorts of things and ways to grow games organically which has always been important right but i think just they become even more even more important i think actually rick there's a good question here that uh will these changes force game developers to improve live ops and monetization models um and i think you know that's not changing the way free-to-play games are designed or made but i think one knock-on effect is if you have game if you have a game with users at the moment then people will kind of definitely be doubling down on keeping keeping what they've got at home and and monetizing them you know as best they can there's another potential i've seen written about that it may make um kind of the developers who have large kind of portfolios of games that have a lot of users but don't necessarily have a lot of monetization um they might become more valuable because people will want to buy up that those kind of portfolios and then cross promote because you know you kind of have a lot of information about those players probably because the games have been out for a couple of years

uh and so if you know kind of if you can look at kind of what type of games they are and if you have games that's similar you kind of think you can cross promote that in a effective manner that will get uh that could be an interesting one to watch and that was kind of broadly similar to what happened at the start really of of kind of free-to-play uh gaming where you didn't have these very complex ad networks but people were very much focused on this kind of cross-promotion sort of thing and that was the best information we had was if you like this game from this company then you're like this very similar game from the one the one i'm making um so so those become more valuable um but i think that's very much in the in the short term and that's interesting that's an idfv strategy which is identifier for vendor which is something that you get as an identifier if people are in multiple of your apps or your games and so one of the things that i've speculated about personally is that we might see a a big publisher strategy here where a publisher has you know 50 100 1 000 different games or apps doesn't

have to be games can be utilities whatever it is to increase their footprint of user visibility device visibility and therefore do that kind of cross promotion understand what people do what they like what they might not like because guess what you know maybe i'm a hardcore gamer i'm not but maybe i am but that probably has some other impacts on some other areas of my life what i use what i do and if i can understand that as a publisher and i can start targeting to that i can start doing some pretty interesting things of course like all things i'm i would be building my business on a very uh thin limb that apple could cut off at any moment i mean i think that's an interesting point john really so if you create a publisher of convenience or a service publisher yes and it were you know we've seen a lot of the big publishers and ea and others acquire businesses that did work at a portfolio scale but as time went on they reduced the number of games that they published down to two or

three a year so they could focus on them you know they're you should say there may be an opportunity um for somebody to return to that sort of service publisher um view i think it's also you know it's worth poking out for the hyper casual guys is you know they worked really well because of the arbitrage between acquiring users super cheap and converting them into more valuable users um i think that's going to be very interesting uh to see how they pivot uh with this uh to i mean certainly think they will still be around them awesome um right i know we're coming up very close to time i know there's quite a few questions in the q and a section i'm going to ignore all of them um sorry about that for folks who asked them i think if you go back we so this will be available on youtube straight after we finished um if you go back it should answer some of the questions that are in there but there's one thing i just wanted to kind of end on which is um just to everybody with a bit of technical knowledge john jordan and you know you can join in

if you want but um wow put me in my place i was so i just wanted to sort of round this off with a quick go around and say um what do you think developers advertisers and can start doing now to prepare themselves for this inevitable change coming down the line um i can i can start if you want i can tell you what we're doing and then and then we can head over so so i've actually um done this over the last couple of weeks with all of our product teams i'm starting with each of our product teams and basically we have a list of key actions that that we are doing right as a product team and the ua team and i think number one is understand in detail all the changes that are coming read the documentation join communities do things like this and be really like critical of uh content marketing pieces that you read by companies who are likely to be affected by this right so just approach it with a critical critical eye um and then understand the sk network so we've talked about it a little bit in here we didn't go into detail that's a

whole other technical session on how that works right but uh you need to understand its limitations and how it works and then very specifically around these events which i which we talked about you can map up these conversion events what is important for your game what what events can you read early that will map to long-term relativity and that's where we are actually spending a lot of our time right now and then outside of that um you know we could touch this earlier but like idfa uh is important for a lot of things tracking suppression re-engagement look-alikes all those kind of things you don't have to use idfa for that you could use other mechanisms like email or something like that so we're also looking at like alternative data collection flows as well um yeah i think i think i think they're the main things right so it's uh it's really understanding these events really understand the changes that are happening um and then and then you know think about what data collection flows you have in your game cool um julian anything to oh sorry go ahead no no good job go ahead

you started i would just follow on with what matt was saying is and build up first party data um especially if you're mid core or something like that you know have an identifier or an identity an id for your players for your users that is not dependent on a third party or an ecosystem player that might be email address that might be phone number there might be different ways of doing it i'm not entirely sure and there's different ways of incentivizing that or making that make sense in your app or game but as long as your ability to communicate with your users target new users is dependent on others depending on factors that others control you are in a tough spot potentially and so if you have first party data on people that use your game uh play your game that is you can still do lookalikes in uh you can still go to a facebook and say hey these people these email addresses or you can go to facebook and say these

people these phone numbers like you know what facebook has some phone numbers i think from whatsapp it might be the case i'm not sure i've heard um so um you know there there's some possibilities there yeah i didn't mean didn't uh so not to go over the ground that john and matt have already been it's also i think that people stay in contact with you know uh and sign up for the slack groups mobile dev memo and map working group you know there's a lot of good knowledge in amongst uh fairly poor knowledge but there's good knowledge there in there and also yeah build up your own um internal um data science teams and and collections i mean we we certainly are and you know as john just touched on there that you know there's a number of different routes uh where you can get uh gathered um i don't wanna say gather data but really gather data on your users um and different ways of collecting so that you can potentially match that in the future

excellent right i think that's that's all we have really have time for um because we are pushing up against now i just want to say thank you so much to everybody for joining us uh and to the panelists in particular it's been a really interesting discussion um and i'm really grateful for you all for joining us especially um jj who joined in like last minute to fill a spot thank you so much for that um we will be back i think in two weeks for another roundtable discussion um keep your eyes on pocketgamer.biz for more information on that but for now thank you so much for joining us and um i'll see you next time goodbye thank you guys thank you thank you so much

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