Why you should diversify your demand | Eado Hofstetter from Digital Turbine

[Music] we are now joined by Ido hofa from digital turbide how you doing today all good really good yep fantastic I it's the first time you and I have talked we have talked to digital turbine in the past but if folks aren't familiar what is it that your company does well uh here at digital turbine we do a bunch of things but basically we have this platform called DT growth where we do user equ through the offer wall and through preloads and uh direct demand um besides that we also have a very big exchange basically it's the second big exchange where we have a lot of uh brand uh ads add a lot of performance ad and the really cool and the really unique thing we have we have this little firmware called ignite which sits on the carrier and the oems and basically these are very

special users that we're able to identify and we're able to show them special ads and preload them on New devices hey okay now we were talking to people last year about a Unity report that suggested more people are playing mobile games with maybe fewer spending money 2022 was a bit of a tough year all around for everybody um and we're hoping things would pick up how does that Trend affects a company like yours well when you think of it there's a bunch of sources of Reven that comes into our world right we have the VCS the VCS are not well they're sending less money to many of our developers right uh the second thing that we see is in a purchases the world is going through recessions there's less in a purchases that obviously makes a lot of sense and besides that there is brand right so where can we bring external money out of we can from Brand ads because when we

think of performance ads basically it's just it's a rotation of money coming from one developed to another developer when you bring brand ads when you bring Coca-Cola when you bring Proctor and Gamble uni liver basically you bring external money into our developers world and the I guess the word the the word here is diversification do you diversify your demand do you have the offer wall do you have preloads do you have brand brand performance we see a lot of Revenue coming in from fintech companies with all kind of really cool apps ftech apps we call these brand formats basically it's brand using a lot of performance kpis the more you diversify I guess the safer you are AI was a big Topic in 2023 with generative AI hitting the mainstream for the first time companies like yourselves use ML and a variation on that and you know have done for some time but in 2024 the feeling is maybe a

little bit mixed on on the subject what's your reaction to the whole AI situation how do you think it's going to affect things going forward Yeah so basically sooner or later AI is going to be all over the place it's going to be in our lives in gaming or in other places in uh in our lives um when we think of AI and gaming so we have this the graphics right there there're already a lot of software who can enhance your graphics show really cool colors really cool games GES but I ask myself myself what happens with the creativity is AI smart enough today to create new original Mechanics for the game I don't think we're there yet I do foresee we will be there in the future but today I believe it's more on the graphic side the and the development gotcha and from your perspective if there was something useful you could pull from AI at this point like what would you you like to see AI be doing in

your daily work or that wouldn't maybe cost people jobs but would perhaps make people's lives genuinely better yeah so I do we do foresee that AI is going to go a lot more into the optimization on the adtech side basically you have on one side an Advertiser you have a publisher you want to connect between them you want to do it in the most efficient way they want to advertise in uh TV in uh in app Billboards all of that at some point there's going to be some kind of AI system which is going to do some kind of optimization and is going to find the best audience for each and every one of these advertisers so we do foresee AI coming in more and more we already have it partially in our systems but it's going to take over attech as well if a if 2023 was kind of the AI year what sort of trend you see pushing out into 2024 is it going to be everyone's still talking about AI in 12 months so do you think something else will have a place

there well we're definitely going to still speak about AI I believe so but one of the really cool things that are happening in our industry well our industry is dominated by a duopoly of uh Google and apple right so we have the Apple Store and the Google Play and we see a slight crack in these uh in these stores we have already some kind of legislation in Europe there is some in Korea there are some cases that were very uh wellknown epe Google Apple we see some kind of crack you had china as well with their not allowing in app payments uh daily reward bonuses things like that they've really cracked down moment with as well yeah yeah so we definitely see a lot more players a lot of conversations we've even had here in the conference about alternative app stores is this going to take over uh Google tomorrow probably not but we do believe that we're going to see more and more alternative ative distribution of

users connection with the carriers and the oems we're going to see a lot more of this alternative uh stores this year as I've been walking around filming I obviously go into the track rooms and I cover the conferences as well and web stores has been one of the things everyone's talking about so I'm I'm I think you're right there it's going to be a bit more of that what about yourselves what are your plans for the upcoming 12 modes so so basically we we foresee that two things two other big things are going to happen for us this year besides the alternative store we are also into the alternative store we're working with Verizon and other uh carriers um but besides that we we see the world of privacy we have Google's privacy sandbox this is another very big thing that everyone is going to have to adapt to um from our side besides that we uh we are progressing more and more into uh inapp bidding the waterfalls are slowly they're moving away and bidding is

becoming more of a thing so we spoke a bit earlier about machine learning AI we're working a lot on these iterations in order to make our bidder significantly stronger to get more performance so we for see that this year is going to be the year of bidding for us um and we do believe that other together with Google which now is moving into bidding we do foresee that other networks are going to move into bidding as well and what about coming to conferences like this you've turned up at the show today you've got a booth down there on the hall just from your perspective why do you come to shows like this what's the benefit from from your company's point of view so from us I I believe it's it's a good opportunity to meet many clients it's very very stressed you have half an hour clients with every half an hour discussion with every client you get to touch everything very very quickly very fast a lot of really good developers are coming here the relevant people that we need right

so we have uh we have monetization people we have user acquisition people alternative store people and here it's one place where we can meet all of them have a little discussion maybe go out for a little coffee and then discuss business during the year 24 go well we're delighted you came along today and we hope to see you at the next one thank you for talking to me thank you very [Music] much m