Mobile Dev Memo Podcast

My guest on this week's episode of the podcast is Annina Salvén, the COO of BIT ODD, a Helsinki-based gaming studio that was recently profiled by the WSJ. Bit Odd raised $18MM in a seed extension this month, following on from the €5MM seed round it raised in 2022. My fund, Heracles Capital, is an investor in both rounds. I asked Annina to join me on the podcast to discuss the current state of venture fundraising for mobile gaming. Specifically, we cover: Why Anniina returned to mobile gaming, given the challenges; How the 2016-era of mobile gaming compares to today; The distribution challenges now relative to 2016-2018; The opportunities in mobile gaming now from a revenue growth perspective; How mobile gaming start-ups should think about exit opportunities; The process for BIT ODD in raising its Seed extension; What mobile gaming start-ups should look for in an investor; The cross-platform gaming opportunity;  Whether games publishing is still viable; Helsinki's evolution as a mobile games development hub. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: Vibe. Vibe is the leading Streaming TV ad platform for small and medium-sized businesses looking for actionable advertising campaign performance. ⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Marketing analytics that makes it easy to get answers, iterate fast, and show the impact of your work. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free. INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

ho covers the retail media space through his blog, Media, Ads + Commerce. We discuss the current state of retail media, including: When the explosion in retail media began (when did Everything become an Ad Network?); Whether retail media budgets generally represent "new money" or are being redirected from elsewhere; The sustainability of growth in the retail media market; The measurement challenges that arise from advertisers' use of multiple retail media networks; Any forthcoming consolidation in the retail media segment; Which downstream categories (like eg., measurement) benefit from growth in the retail media space. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: Moloco. Moloco empowers businesses of all sizes to grow through advanced machine-learning solutions that deliver digital growth and performance for customers. INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

My guest on this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Tom Smith, a partner at specialist competition law firm Geradin Partners. I invited Tom to the podcast to discuss the recently passed Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Bill in the UK, which grants the UK's Competition and Markets Authority with broad new powers to regulate digital markets. Among other things, Tom and I discuss: What the DMCC aims to achieve; The political context around the DMCC; How the DMCC differs from the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA); What new powers and obligations the DMCC grants and imposes upon the CMA; The long-term consequences of the DMCC. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: ⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.⁠⁠ INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠. The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts

My guest on this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Ari Paparo, a prominent entrepreneur and thought leader within the digital advertising ecosystem. The impetus of our conversation is a newsletter that he published several weeks ago for Marketecture in which he asked, Did it have to be this way?. From that piece: "After reading this, you’re forgiven for thinking that the web is dead. Not dead yet, but certainly in decline. Media companies have pivoted to CTV. The NY Times makes more money from games than news. The advertisers are finding more of their customers on retail sites through Commerce Media. When you zoom out, these are all parts of the same story, but it could have maybe been different." Ari and I discuss the history of and future prospects for the open web, including: The benefits of closed-loop advertising systems over the open web; Whether a fractured and stratified ecosystem of closed-loop walled gardens is a best-case scenario for digital advertising; The notion of the “open internet”; How the digital advertising ecosystem evolved differently than Ari would have expected at the time of Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick; Netflix’s announcement that it will develop its own advertising platform; What Ari predicts for the future of third-party cookies in Chrome. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: ⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.⁠⁠ INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

My guest on this week’s podcast is Trung Phan, a popular X (Twitter) personality and a host of the Not Investment Advice podcast. Trung popularized the “short-form deep dive” content format on X following its introduction of long-form posts and has developed a for posting infotainment style content that often goes viral. In our conversation, Trung and I discuss: How Trung’s background as a comedy screenwriter contributed to perfecting his voice on social media; How the social media landscape has arguably been redefined since COVID; The substantive changes that have occurred on X since Elon Musk acquired it; The best strategy for aggregating an audience on social media in this new landscape; Whether creators focus on a single platform or try to diversify; How Trung’s content strategy on X has changed since Musk’s takeover; How creators should approach making time investments in new platforms like Threads; The value of live video for podcasts; The optimal cadence of publishing for various platforms. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: ⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free. You’ll see why thousands of performance marketers trust Clarisights every day.⁠⁠ INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Alan Chapell, an attorney who specializes in digital privacy through his law firm and consultancy, Chapell & Associates. In the episode, Alan and I discuss, among other things: - The current state of a potential national privacy law in the United States; - What role, if any, the FTC can have in regulating digital privacy; - Google's Privacy Sandbox initiative and its impact on the digital advertising ecosystem.

My guest on this episode is Olivia Kory, the Head of Go-To-Market at Haus, a marketing decision science platform. Before Haus, Olivia held senior marketing roles at Netflix, Quibi, and Sonos. Olivia and I discuss a wide range of topics within the subject of advertising measurement in this episode, including: The role of causal inference in marketing measurement; The common skillset gaps that Olivia witnesses when observing companies making the transition to probabilistic measurement; The unforeseen challenges in transitioning to probabilistic measurement for marketing teams; The amount of coaching required for the non-marketing teams within the organization to socialize the concept of probabilistic measurement. The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts About Olivia: Olivia leads customer support, marketing, and partnerships at Haus, which is productizing incrementality, experimentation, and econometrics to help brands quantify marketing ROI. Before Haus, Olivia was the Director of Growth Marketing at Sonos and has held marketing positions at Quibi and Netflix.

My guest on Episode 4 of Season 2 of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Joy Howard. Joy is the CEO of Early Majority and is a remarkably accomplished marketer, having held CMO and other executive-level marketing positions at some of the world's most recognized brands, including Sonos, Patagonia, and the Coca-Cola Company, among others. I invited Joy onto the podcast to discuss all things Brand Marketing, including: What constitutes a brand; How a company builds a brand; The difference between brand development and brand advertising; How a company measures the value of its brand; Also: some of my tweets. About Joy: Joy Howard has scaled disruptive technologies and led two unicorns through the transformation required to thrive in the public markets. She's been recognized by Forbes and Fast Company as one of the most influential and creative global business leaders and was profiled by Bloomberg for her unconventional journey to the C-suite. In 2021, Joy founded Early Majority, a community that makes gear for getting outside, where she serves as CEO.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Peter Hamilton, the Senior Director of Ad Innovation at Roku, about the digital advertising opportunity on CTV. Among other topics, Peter and I discuss: The high-level promise of CTV for advertisers Creative strategy for CTV The availability and efficacy of targeting on CTV The verticals that tend to experience the most success with CTV And the most common ways in which CTV inventory is purchased. The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts About Peter: Peter Hamilton is the Senior Director of Ad Innovation at Roku, where he leads consumer-facing ad experiences across Roku's OS, The Roku Channel, Mobile, Commerce, and Interactive. Prior to Roku, Peter was the CEO of TUNE, an early mobile advertising attribution company, which exited its mobile measurement business to Constellation Software in 2020.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Alex Collmer, the CEO of VidMob, about the power of creative in the modern advertising landscape. In Episode 1, Season 2 of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, among other things, Alex and I discuss: How the role of creative optimization has changed over time as the privacy environment has grown more restrictive; How creative experimentation and creative concept construction align with audience development; How a productive relationship between the creative team and the media buying team can be structured; And the skillsets that Alex see most commonly in effective CMOs. About Alex: Alex Collmer is the Founder and CEO of VidMob, the world’s leading AI creative performance platform. Since founding the company in 2015, Collmer has raised more than $220M and led initiatives that earned VidMob official marketing partner badges from Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Hulu. Today, VidMob provides its software to a majority of agency-holding companies and counts many top global brands as clients.

In this third and final episode of ATT, One Month In, I speak with Alex Bauer of Branch about the iOS 14.6 adoption rate curve, why it's unfortunate that misleading opt-in rate measurements proliferated throughout the mainstream media so quickly after the release of iOS 14.5, device fingerprinting and whether or for how long Apple will tolerate it, and Apple's PR campaign around ATT. The previous episodes in the series are: Episode 1: ATT, one month in: privacy thresholds with Rich Jones of Dataseat (ep. 1 of 3) Episode 2: ATT, one month in: SKAdNetwork standards with Paul Bowen of AlgoLift (ep. 2 of 3) In conjunction with the podcast series, I am offering a 20% discount on my iOS 14: How to prevail in Q2 2021 course which can be accessed with the code MDM_4325_OMI_20PCT or through this link. The discount will only be available through June 4th, 2021. As always, the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts

This is the second episode of ATT, One Month In, which is a podcast series that aims to provide advertisers with an overview of ATT's impact on mobile ecosystem as it takes root. The first episode in the series can be found here: ATT, one month in: privacy thresholds with Rich Jones of Dataseat (ep. 1 of 3) In this episode, I speak with Paul Bowen, the GM of AlgoLift, a mobile marketing analytics and campaign automation company that was acquired by Vungle last year. We discuss SKAdNetwork conversion value standards, the conversion value window, and why and for how long fingerprinting will be tolerated.

Today I am publishing the first episode in a three-part podcast series called "ATT, one month in" that will report observations on iOS 14.5 and its impact on mobile advertising from various corners of the ad tech ecosystem. The purpose of this podcast series is to serve as an analytical waypoint in the roll-out of iOS 14.5: what is currently happening in the ecosystem as the mobile landscape changes, and what can be expected in the near-term future. These episodes are not expected to age well: they are snapshots of what is happening right now -- in this very transformative moment -- in the mobile ecosystem. In conjunction with the podcast series, I am offering a 20% discount on my iOS 14: How to prevail in Q2 2021 course which can be accessed with the code MDM_4325_OMI_20PCT or through this link. The discount will only be available through June 4th, 2021. In today's episode, I speak with Rich Jones, the Head of Product at Dataseat, a mobile DSP. Rich and I discuss the nature of Apple's privacy threshold and what we've learned about it since ATT was first announced. Rich yesterday posted a very provocative graph (above) of the prevalence of conversion values in the postbacks that Dataseat is seeing across its network, which precipitated the conversation.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Rishabh Jain, the CEO and co-founder of FERMÀT, an eCommerce platform designed to maximize advertising conversions for brands. Prior to FERMÀT, Rishabh spent nearly six years at Liveramp, most recently as its Vice President of Innovation. In our conversation, Rishabh and I discuss, among other topics: Rishabh's journey from a PhD in solid state physics to ad tech; The necessity of financial literacy for eCommerce media buying; How the media buyer role has changed following ATT, and the optimal marketing channel mix; Why more consolidation and roll-up efforts haven't occurred within DTC; The viability of a product like Shopify Audiences.

My guest on this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Mikołaj Barczentewicz, an expert on European data privacy law. Mikołaj is a law professor at, and the research director of, the Law and Technology Hub at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, and he joined me just a few weeks ago in A deep dive on European data privacy law to discuss recent developments in Europe related to data privacy and GDPR enforcement. In this episode, Mikołaj outlines the legal impact of both of these pieces of legislation in detail, with specific attention paid to the digital advertising market. We also discuss the latest news related to Meta's recent fine by the Irish DPC for using first-party data without consent to empower personalized advertising, as well as the temporary ban that the Italian DPA enforced on OpenAI's ChatGPT.

My guest in this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Brad Richards, the Managing Director & Chief Product Officer at LOVOO, the most popular dating app in the German-speaking world. Brad and I discuss the Product Management role for mobile-first companies: What a product manager does; The path to becoming a product manager; The role of A/B testing in product management, and how it can do more harm than good. We also discuss the Dating App Dilemma: how the success of the product's core use case actually creates churn for the product. If you enjoy the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, please remember to rate it with 5 stars!

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Jessica Lee on the topic of digital privacy legislation. Jessica is a Partner and serves as the Chair of the Privacy, Security, and Data Innovations practice at Loeb & Loeb, a New York-based law firm. Jessica’s practice focuses on emerging media, technology, advertising and promotions, privacy, and intellectual property, and she has represented clients in a variety of fields, including Internet, film, music, sports, telecommunications, and consumer products. Over the course of the podcast, Jessica and I discuss the history of digital privacy, the prospect of a federal privacy law in the US and how the recent midterm election results impact that, why Europe leads the United States in codifying privacy protections into law, and the efficacy of self-regulation, among other topics. For a full transcript of the interview, see this post on Mobile Dev Memo.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Taylor Holiday, the CEO and founder of the Common Thread Collective, an eCommerce growth agency. Taylor and I discuss the general state of eCommerce advertising, what happened within the eCommerce category in Q3 and what he sees happening now in Q4. We also speak about the coming reckoning in the eCommerce advertising debt market (with background on what this is!), misconceptions about how Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy impacts eCommerce advertising, and the nature of setting direct response advertising budgets. Common Thread company publishes a regular newsletter containing recent eCommerce advertising performance data.

My guest on this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Liat Barer, the VP of Product at Odeeo, an audio SSP. Liat has deep expertise in mobile ad tech, having worked at Yahoo and StartApp prior to Odeeo. I invited Liat on the podcast to discuss a topic that has taken on increased importance within mobile ad tech since the introduction of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which is yield management, and how SSPs assist app publishers with maximizing the revenue they derive from in-app advertising. Liat provides an expert overview of the way in which SSPs -- the acronym SSP stands for Supply Side Platform -- interface with demand sources and in-app inventory to generate revenue for publishers.

I had the great pleasure last week of speaking with Matthew Ball, a prolific writer, investor, and respected thinker in the interactive media space. The backdrop of our discussion is Matthew's upcoming book, The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything, which is currently available for pre-order and will be available for sale on July 19th. In this podcast, I speak with Matthew about the economics of the Metaverse: what are the parameters of commerce when resources are infinite and the only constraints to production and economic output are human ingenuity? In our conversation, we also discuss Apple and the path to open economic systems, the role that games play in making new technologies ubiquitous, and how absolute replicability impacts our understanding of legal protections, among other topics. The interview is transcribed below, and it has been edited slightly for clarity.