Growth Masterminds: mobile growth podcast

How do you get your first million users? I'm starting a new series in Growth Masterminds, and it's about getting your first million users for a new app. There are huge challenges for big apps and big brands to grow, but they’re different: they have resources, a brand, and maybe some existing users/players/customers. Starting from zero is a different challenge. I think there’s a lot to learn for both types of app marketers from both sets of challenges, but this series will focus on early-stage growth. To start, we're chatting with Hannah Parvaz, who is literally an “app marketer of the year” and also a “biz strategy consultant of the year.” She’s worked in tons of growth roles and now runs her own growth agency, Aperture, helping apps grow and mobile businesses work.

The golden age of mobile is over ... at least the golden age of gigatons of free data for marketers and adtech companies. Thanks to IDFA and GAID app marketers had near-free access to huge amounts of behavior data. That was great for acquisition, but also engagement & retention of users/customers/people. That era is almost over. What’s going to win now? In this Growth Masterminds I chat with Thomas Butta, CMO of Airship. Airship just completed a survey of 11,000 consumers, and Butta shares what they learned. We also chat about the one-to-one relationship apps still offer brands AFTER they've managed to get customers into their apps and signed up or subscribed.

MMM is hard. Whether you like media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling, getting all your data is hard, onboarding to an MMM tool is hard, comparing to market trends is hard, sanity checking is hard. But there is an easy button for MMM. And it's called Singular. In this Growth Masterminds, host John Koetsier chats with Singular CTO Eran Friedman about Singular's new MMM product, with: - total spend coverage - fully automated onboarding - market trends baked in automatically - direct comparisons with direct attribution results for sanity checking MMM isn't attribution, per se. Nor is it a replacement for SKAN, for Privacy Sandbox on Android, or GAID. But it does offer huge utility in incrementality checking and measuring results in hard-to-measure channels and media.

How much fraud do you have in your mobile game or retail app? According to some, it amounts to billions of dollars globally every single year. That ranges from "friendly fraud" to "family fraud" to "true fraud," according to Suresh Dakshina, co-founder and strategist at Chargeback Gurus. In this Growth Masterminds with host John Koetsier we chat about in-game fraud as well as e-commerce fraud. We chat about how this fraud happens, what app publishers, developers, and marketers can do about it, and what the process of dealing with it looks like.

Ever feel like your user acquisition campaigns are doing the same thing over and over? Ever feel like every UA manager is running campaigns in exactly the same place as everyone else? In this Growth Masterminds with Fluent co-founder Matt Conlin, we chat about fishing in new ponds: different places to find new users. We chat about CTV, TV, editorial content, rewarded discovery, influencers, surround sound marketing, and -- believe it or not -- ads in e-commerce environments. Content matters, but so does context. And there's so much more to mobile user acquisition than in-app ads. Shocker: since we chat about different user acquisition strategies, we also chat about different marketing measurement strategies.

What has App Tracking Transparency done? And what will Privacy Sandbox on Android do? In a lot of ways they shift power from the buy side to the sell side in mobile adtech ... and they privilege larger companies with massive amounts of first-party data. In this Growth Masterminds we chat with InMobi chief business officer Kunal Nagpal about the privacy revolution and how everything from targeting to optimization to measurement is changing. We also discuss how those changes are impacted every link in the adtech ecosystem. Tune in as I ask Nagpal: - How do ad networks have to change? - What’s the model that works for the next decade? - Is targeting toast? - What about optimization signals? - What about Apple, an ad network based on first-party data? - Are owned audiences the future? - What does this mean for third parties? App monetization? - What changes can we expect to see in the future from InMobi?

Planning to buy an Apple Vision Pro? Whether yes or no, Apple very quietly released a ton of new privacy updates: privacy manifests, SKAN 5 (!?!), required reason APIs, tracking domains, retargeting attribution, SDK signing, listings of privacy-impacting SDKs, relays, enhanced private browsing, and more. In this Growth Masterminds, Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv, CTO Eran Friedman, and host John Koetsier discuss the changes and updates. And, of course, their impact on SKAN, fingerprinting, MMM, and the entire adtech ecosystem.

What actually happens when a demand-side platform engages machine learning to boost your bids? We now have less data than ever before about to drive the targeting piece of mobile user acquisition, with very limited access to anything approaching behavioral targeting. In this Growth Masterminds, host John Koetsier chats with Persona.ly direction of machine learning Joseph Iris about targeting, demand-side platforms, and AI. We talk about signals, timing, context, and how SKAdNetwork and Privacy Sandbox are impacting everything. We also talk about what signals are most predictive and most powerful.

How will generative AI impact games? According to Unity CEO John Riccitiello, it will massively grow the industry, speed development by a factor of 2-3X, and enable much smarter, more realistic gameplay. In a crosspost from his TechFirst podcast, Growth Masterminds host John Koetsier chats with Riccitiello about generative AI in game creation, world building, but also in realtime gameplay. The impacts on NPCs, on immersive experiences, and on richness of the artificial worlds game developers create will be massive. Plus, Riccitiello drops some news about an AI engine that Unity has been working on for over 5 years ... and is currently present in over 4 billion devices globally.

How do you make games go boom? Balancing pleasure and frustration, says long-time growth expert Elad Levy. In this Growth Masterminds we chat with growth guru Elad Levy, who sold his last game company to Playtika. He's also led growth and marketing and co-founded numerous other tech startups. Our focus: making games growth. We chat about: - data - testing - predictions - generative AI - engagement - live ops - and, of course ... game design