Intelligent Artifice, formerly the Mobile User Acquisition Show

In today’s episode, we’re featuring Annica Lin, VP Growth at Sable, a financial services company. Annica has spent quite a few years in the field of performance marketing for consumer fin-techs like Stash, Policygenius & Thimble. 

Outside of work, Annica is a passionate runner and has successfully completed many marathons and ultra-marathons. 

In today’s conversation, we talk about the advent of the Brave browser and ad network and discuss the varied strategies that are employed by Brave to ensure that users enjoy privacy while advertisers have the privilege of targeted ads, by making use of web 3 based protocols. We cover quite a few FAQs around the Web 3 space and delve into her experience with working on the Brave network. We also discuss some of the challenges and limitations Brave ads have as of today.

This episode is really fascinating because it opens the door to a new wave of advertising that is just emerging, and could very much present a big opportunity for the early adopters. 

Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/web-3-ads-brave-network-annica-lin-sable/
**
Note:
1.  Mobile Growth Lab
Doors are open to the third edition of our workshop series The Mobile Growth Lab, designed to help you break the shackles of ATT’s measurement and performance losses and win in a post-IDFA world. The workshop kicks off on the 26th of July, 2022. 

We have some exciting sessions planned and also some awesome guest mentors - Matej, Thomas, Claire & Eric.

Register for the workshop here: https://mobilegrowthlab.com/

2. Join The Mobile Growth Slack.  A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/
If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

**
Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com

Today’s episode is a re-release from our older podcast - How Things Grow.

Our guest is Eric Seufert. Eric is the Founder of Heracles Media and Mobile Dev Memo, the author of the book Freemium Economics, and one of the foremost experts on mobile user acquisition today. 

Eric has worked on an incredibly wide variety of apps in very different capacities and he's seen it all from the early days where you could buy bot installs to hit the top 10 ranks on iTunes, to today's increasingly sophisticated world of automation and post-identifier growth. 

While this particular interview is from a couple of years ago, and some of the specifics have changed in the light of ATT and post-privacy platform changes, a lot of the history and insight that Eric provides in this interview is very instructive - for in the past lie the seeds of the future, and reviewing this history of where we’ve come from helps us contextualize and prepare for a post-identifier future.

By the way, Eric is also a guest mentor for our workshop series Mobile Growth Lab - and everyone that registers by the 25th of July 2022 will receive his 2 hour workshop ATT survival guide. If you’d like to sign up, go to MobileGrowthLab.com.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS
🌰 Eric’s transition from analytics to UA

🧃 Self-learning that happened through a blog that eventually opened doors

🤿 Common misconceptions between ASO & SEO

🕹 How UA on mobile different from other media

🛠 The biggest mistakes made in UA during the early days

👾 AppGratis that closed down after a policy change by Apple

🧉 Bot installs were definitely a thing back in the day

🧊 The evolution of apps in terms of being professional and how it impacts their presence on the App Store

 🐧 Working at Rovio on the Angry Birds franchise

 🐥How the Angry Birds crossover became a hit

 🔧 The kinds of challenges that companies will present to a consultant

 📌 Agamemnon and what made it a distinct Saas product in the UA industry

 ✂️ The low down on programmatic - why it’s challenging & how to make it work

Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/mobile-user-acquisition-eric-seufert-mobile-dev-memo/

**
Note:
1.  Mobile Growth Lab
Doors are open to the third edition of our workshop series The Mobile Growth Lab, designed to help you break the shackles of ATT’s measurement and performance losses and win in a post-IDFA world. The workshop kicks off on the 26th of July, 2022. 

We have some exciting sessions planned and also some awesome guest mentors - Matej, Thomas, Claire & Eric.

Sign up for the free pre-course email series here: https://mobilegrowthlab.com/mgl3/
Register for the workshop here: https://mobilegrowthlab.com/

2. Join The Mobile Growth Slack.  A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/
If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

**
Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com

Mobile marketers have been in the dark during the past couple of months over the measurement mess in iOS. MMMs have been around for a while to help with channel attribution. 
Recently, Facebook released their open source code Robyn to build MMMs, which we’ve written and spoken about. Today’s episode talks about Google’s solution: their LightweightMMM library.

In today’s episode, Michael Taylor, Co-Founder of Vexpower walks us through Google’s LightweightMMM, how it’s different from Robyn, and how it’s set up. 

This audio episode is an introduction to the  video walkthrough on Youtube, where Mike takes you through a screenshare of LightweightMMM and how it’s configured.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🌰 How is Facebook’s Robyn different from traditional MMMs

🧃 Why Facebook’s Robyn seems to more acceptable than traditional MMMs

🤿 Robyn’s open source makes it an easier model to learn

🕹 The entry of Google’s LightweightMMM

🛠 Understanding the Bayesian model, and how it’s different.

🛠 A Bayesian model is more descriptive when compared to an MMM on Excel

Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/google-lightweight-mmm-mike-taylor-vexpower/

The Youtube video is here:  https://youtu.be/oRYN0V6sPlM

**
Note:
1.  In a few days, we will open the doors to the third edition of our workshop series The Mobile Growth Lab, which will help you break the shackles of ATT’s measurement and performance losses and win in a post-IDFA world.
Sign up for the waitlist here: https://mobilegrowthlab.com/

2. Join The Mobile Growth Slack.  A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/
If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

**
Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

In today’s episode, we’re re-broadcasting another episode from our previous podcast, How Things Grow.

Our guest is Gina Gotthilf, co-founder at Latitud, a platform dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs and companies in Latin America. Prior to this, Gina worked as VP Marketing/Growth at Duolingo and worked as International Marketing, Growth and Community lead at Tumblr. 

In this episode, Gina talks about how she began her career in growth marketing despite having a degree in Philosophy and not a lot of quantitative skills. She describes how learnt a lot on the job through Googling and trying-things-out. She learned and grew her skills to a point where she was able ascend to a position and steer Duolingo’s growth from 3 million installs to 200 million installs with very little paid marketing: Gina describes her journey in this episode. We talk about her start with Duolingo, how she drove international growth through PR, how she transitioned to product growth, some of the very unconventional product experiments and wins that drove widespread adoption for Duolingo - and much much more. 

KEY HIGHLIGHTS
🌰 The meeting with Barack Obama

🧃 Launching Tumblr in Brazil & other parts of Latin America

🤿 The Global Ginga 

🚵 Getting hired by Duolingo as a consultant

🎧 Building the Duolingo brand

What were the first priorities to grow the brand?

🎰 Staying away from paid advertising initially

🚊 How did different markets across the world react to Duolingo?

⛩ Challenges faced in foreign countries

🚀 How did Tim Ferriss impact the brand

🎢 The transition from PR to growth

🎡 How the team picked experiments to apply to Duolingo

🕹 How Duolingo’s gamification came about

🛠 Adapting the product to suit international markets

**
Check out the show notes here:
https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/growth-language-app-gina-gotthilf-duolingo-latitud/

**
Note:
1.  In a few days, we will open the doors to the third edition of our workshop series The Mobile Growth Lab, which will help you break the shackles of ATT’s measurement and performance losses and win in a post-IDFA world.
Sign up for the waitlist here: https://mobilegrowthlab.com/

2. Join The Mobile Growth Slack.  A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/
If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

**
Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

SKAN is here to stay: but what happens to mobile measurement a few months or years down the line?

Today’s episode is the recorded version of a webinar that folks at Singular hosted a few weeks ago. The panelists included me, Sherry Lin - Group Manager, Marketing Technology Operations at Lyft, Nick Blake - VP, EMEA at LiftOff, Gadi Eliashiv - CEO & Co-Founder at Singular. Our panel was moderated by John Koetsier - columnist at Forbes.

In today’s episode we look at ramifications of SKAN and some of the ways marketers are managing it - while preparing for future iterations of both SKAN and Google’s Privacy Sandbox. How does Google’s Privacy Sandbox differ from SKAN? How are marketers using incrementality, media mix models and retargeting? How do they expect this to change in the near future, and distant future? 

We look into the crystal ball and talk about ways to be prepared for the future of UA and measurement. 

KEY HIGHLIGHTS
🎬 Preparing for Google’s Privacy Sandbox

🤾 How does the Privacy Sandbox differ from the SKAD network?

🧩 The biggest challenge in preparing and adapting to the Privacy Sandbox

🏵 Is fingerprinting here to stay?

🚧 Why has conversion model management been difficult?

🏖 Have targeting or creative strategies changed post ATT?

🌅 What are data clean rooms?

🎁 How has incrementality worked for the industry?

🧮 Are marketers leveraging Media Mix Modeling?

🔍 Role of an MMP in future

🔈 Retargeting solutions that can be helpful

**
Check out the show notes here:
https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/future-of-ua-webinar-skan-privacy-sandbox/

**
Note:
Join The Mobile Growth Slack. A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/

If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

**
Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

Our guest today is Adam Lovallo – and today’s episode is a re-post from our other podcast How Things Grow which ran for a while before we started the Mobile UA show.

We’re now featuring some of the most popular episodes from How Things Grow – especially as these contain some riveting stories and lessons for mobile marketers. 

Adam is the founder of Grow.co and also at Thesis. Before Adam started his conference and his agency, he cut his teeth in the whirlwind that was the daily deal space. He worked at LivingSocial, where he came in as an intern, and grew to be the head of UA and growth, managing 9 figure budgets and a team of 15 people. 

He saw the company grow from four to 5000 people. He saw from close up the meteoric rise, slow down, crash and steady state settling of the daily deal space. 

In this episode, we talk about LivingSocial’s beginnings as one of the leading Facebook app developers in the world. This was far before LivingSocial launched its first daily deal. We go into the unexpected rise of the daily deals business, the signs that it had started to slow down and how it all panned out. 

This is not just a fascinating story, but also has some incredibly valuable lessons from the signs that Adam saw at the time about the unsustainability of the daily deals model, about how incredibly challenging it was to transition from a business with digital products to what was essentially one that served local businesses digitally.

Adam’s experiences tell us all about the journey – and we’re excited to re-present this episode to you today. 

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🩰 The beginnings of LivingSocial

💼 How LivingSocial made products for the Facebook apps that went viral

🤜🏻 Keeping up with the Facebook ecosystem was hard and unsustainable for everyone

👰🏻 Common mistakes that developers made when leveraging Facebook at the time

🏂🏻 How did other social platforms perform when compared to Facebook?

🏄🏻‍♂️ The transition of LivingSocial into the deals space

🥐 Online businesses vs. local businesses

🥧 Adam’s responsibilities as the company was transitioning

🌯 Scaling budgets & cities

🥣 Impact of data from different countries

🧘‍♂️ When did things start slowing down?

 🎫 The red flags that Adam saw

🎳 Impact of businesses with high fixed costs

🎭 Merchant retention issues

⚓️ How downsizing affected the morale of employees

🛶 The beginning of Grow.co


**
Check out the show notes here:
https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/daily-deals-livingsocial-adam-lovallo-grow-co-thesis/

**
Note:
Join The Mobile Growth Slack. A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/

If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

**
Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

Our guest for today’s episode is Grace Ouma-Cabezas. Grace is a growth consultant at Go & Co, her own firm. Grace has previously headed growth at Poppy Seed Health, an app that supports individuals during pregnancy and post-partum. 

In this episode, Grace shares how using raw, vulnerable creatives that spoke directly to the pains, hopes and fears of their users: pregnant women, resulted in dramatic performance gains. She talks about the insights that led to this creative strategy, the actual production process of these ads – and how her team decided to keep the user experience as real and genuine as possible, even when these resulted in ads that were not sexy or happy, and even when these resulted in occasional ad disapprovals by platforms.  

In a world of clickbait-y, sales-focused creative strategy, Grace brings a unique perspective on the importance of authenticity, vulnerability and genuineness – and I highly recommend this interview for anyone looking to broaden their creative perspectives.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🤰🏻 Why Poppy Seed Health followed a non-linear path to portray pregnancy

🌵 How absence of IDFA informed the creative strategy

🐚 Unique depictions that drove growth and why

🍁 Building creatives that are favored by the algorithm on Facebook

🌼 Authentic creatives that were challenged by ad networks

🌊 The process of producing authentic ads

👨🏽‍🎤 Recruiting creators for UGCs

**
Check out the show notes here:
https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/creative-strategy-grace-ouma-cabezas-poppy-seed-health/

**
Note:
Join The Mobile Growth Slack. A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/

If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

**
Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

We’ve been talking about SKAN for a while now. However, it’s worth mentioning that SKAN isn’t the only game in town, which is one reason why mobile marketers have a tough time comparing performance metrics across different sources.

In today’s episode, Shamanth runs us through the different non-SKAN sources of measurement like Apple Search, Google UAC, Fingerprinting and web-to-app to name a few. He explains why it’s quite impossible to read the same data on these different sources – and what the best course of action is in situations like this.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🥗 SKAN isn’t the essence of measurement

🍎 Apple Search 

🧉 Google UAC

🎽 Relying on probabilistic matching

⚾️ Attribution on web-to-app

🎨 Different SKAN sources will have different results

**
Check out the show notes here:
https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/skan-measurement-ios-14-sources/

**
Note:
Join The Mobile Growth Slack. A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/

If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

**
Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

At Rocketship HQ, we’ve been an async team since the beginning. Most of the folks we hire come from traditional office spaces and it does take them a while to get the hang of our no-meeting culture. 

How do we make this work? One of the key factors that makes this all tick is that we spend time writing, not talking. 

In this episode on the Mobile UA Show, Shamanth gives us a comparison between a writing-first culture and meeting-first one,  and also tells us why going meeting-first can be particularly disastrous in a remote work environment. 

**
Check out the show notes here:
https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/remote-working-culture-writing/

**
Note:
Join The Mobile Growth Slack. A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/

If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

**
Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

This episode is the recorded version of the webinar “Omnichannel strategies for a post-IDFA world: winning strategies for web and app based products in 2022”, hosted by Rocketship HQ and Ruckus.

Panelists included Grace Ouma-Cabezas, Head of Growth at Poppy Seed Health, Evan Woods, General Manager at DT.Co, Matej Lancaric, Growth Consultant and me, Shamanth Rao. The panel was moderated by Anish Shah of Ruckus. We discussed how ATT has impacted web businesses and app businesses, what strategies have worked for our panelists for creative, measurement, channel mix and much much more. 

Check out this episode to understand what you can learn from web products and app products, irrespective of whether you are on web or app yourself.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

⚖️ Comparing the system pre and post-ATT.

🎯 How has performance changed over the last year in terms of metrics?

⏰ Why the first 24 hours data is important

💎 How bigger, established companies were at an advantage 

🦴 What kinds of creatives are working well now?

🛍 How to make decisions about creative investment

 How spend and creative strategy are related

🧪 How channel mix has an impact

🎧 The shift to Tiktok and TV

🎲 Web pages seem to bring about more conversions

📈 The evolution of ad networks

📻 Paid partnerships with content creators

🎢 Investing in incrementality solves some of the problems with measurement

**

Check out the show notes here:
https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/omnichannel-strategies-web-app-idfa-2022/

**
Note:
Join The Mobile Growth Slack. A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 200 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/

If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

**
Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:
http://RocketShipHQ.com
http://RocketShipHQ.com/blog