My guest on this episode of the podcast is Simon Whitcombe, the Vice President, Global Business Group at Meta. We discuss Meta's Business AI and the Meta AI business assistant, both of which were announced ahead of this year's AdWeek. I unpacked the potential of these tools to help advertisers cross the "ad-product divide" in Can Meta cross the ad-product divide?; in this episode, Simon and I deliberate on the non-advertising opportunity with platform AI tools like these.

Among other things, we cover:

• How Meta is bringing AI to bear for its advertising clients in non-advertising use cases;
• Other potential ways that Meta's AI tools can be used for optimizing advertisers' products or understanding of advertising performance;
• Meta's recent whitepaper on GEM, and whether Meta's attitude toward transparency with these types of systems has changed over time (especially in light of recent speculation about its Q3 update to Andromeda);
• How advertisers are using creative generation tools to expand creative diversity (versus merely increasing output volume);
• The tenor of feedback that Meta is getting from advertisers about Meta's AI business tools, and whether that feedback differs by company size, company category, geographic region, etc.;
• How the digital advertising landscape has evolved since COVID.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ⁠Xsolla⁠. With the Xsolla Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%, and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards, and analytics.
• ⁠INCRMNTAL⁠⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• ⁠Universal Ads⁠ is Comcast’s self-serve TV ads platform that lets you launch campaigns in minutes across premium inventory from NBC, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Roku, and more.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠⁠Marketecture⁠⁠.

In this episode of the podcast, which is a companion to ⁠Affiliate links, personalized ads, and chatbot revenue optimization⁠, I discuss the need for OpenAI to discover a scalable, durable revenue model, given its status as the avatar for artificial intelligence as a transformative economic and social force.

I then make the case for why personalized, conversion-optimized advertising is a superior business model for chatbots than affiliate distribution.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• Xsolla. With the Xsolla Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%, and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards, and analytics.
• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• Universal Ads is Comcast’s self-serve TV ads platform that lets you launch campaigns in minutes across premium inventory from NBC, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Roku, and more.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Luca Fiaschi, a machine learning expert who previously held executive data science roles at MistPlay, StitchFix, and HelloFresh. Luca is now a Partner for the Generative AI vertical at PyMC Labs, a consultancy that specializes in the application of Bayesian methods to business problems and which maintains the open source PyMC library for Bayesian statistical modeling as well as the open source PyMC Marketing media mix modeling library.

The subject of my discussion with Luca is PyMC Labs' recent paper, LLMs Reproduce Human Purchase Intent via Semantic Similarity Elicitation of Likert Ratings. I found the paper fascinating and wrote an overview on LinkedIn; the paper's authors (from PyMC Labs as well as Colgate) use an LLM to score product concepts, finding that the distribution of LLM-produced scores can be comparable to that produced by human panels.

Among other things, the podcast episode covers:

• Background on the paper, and how the partnership with Colgate-Palmolive came about.
• An overview of the LLM querying methodologies used in the paper and how they produced score distributions.
• The approaches used in the paper for calculating similarities between the LLM-produced and human-produced scores.
• The conclusions / findings of the paper.
• What the implications of the paper are on marketing creative ideation and the use of LLMs for evaluating product and advertising concepts.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• Xsolla. With the Xsolla Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%, and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards, and analytics.
• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• Universal Ads is Comcast’s self-serve TV ads platform that lets you launch campaigns in minutes across premium inventory from NBC, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Roku, and more.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

The sixth installment of the Mobile Dev Memo mailbag features app monetization expert Sylvain Gauchet. Sylvain formerly served as Babbel's US Director of Revenue Strategy and now works with a number of subscription apps on revenue growth as an advisor and fractional executive. Additionally, Sylvain runs the GrowthGems newsletter, for which he scours the internet for valuable content related to growth and surfaces the most relevant and actionable insights from it.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• Xsolla. With the Xsolla Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%, and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards, and analytics.
• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• Universal Ads is Comcast’s self-serve TV ads platform that lets you launch campaigns in minutes across premium inventory from NBC, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Roku, and more.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

In this week's episode of the podcast, I speak with Daphne Tideman, a product growth expert who runs the Growth Waves newsletter. The topic of our conversation is "zero-to-one growth": the tactics developers can utilize to validate and optimize their product to ultimately enable scaled user acquisition.

Among other things, we cover:

• The purpose of early audience validation
• How monetization can be validated without actually being implemented in a product
• How developers can assess product-market fit at various points in the development cycle
• How a developer can recognize that their optimal audience isn't being served
• How user feedback can contribute to a developer’s understanding of product-market fit
• Whether and how a developer can quantify the scale of their product's opportunity
• How to recognize product-market fit in the soft launch / beta stage

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• Xsolla. With the Xsolla Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%, and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards, and analytics.
• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• Universal Ads is Comcast’s self-serve TV ads platform that lets you launch campaigns in minutes across premium inventory from NBC, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Roku, and more.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

In this week's episode of the podcast, I speak with Kate Minogue, a fractional CPO and advisor for consumer and ad tech companies. Kate also runs the AI Leadership Lab, an AI leadership course. Previously, Kate worked in marketing measurement at Meta.

This episode is the fifth installment of the MDM Mailbag series, in which I bring experts onto the podcast to answer questions fielded from the Mobile Dev Memo community.

The questions posed to Kate related to:

• The nature of being a fractional executive (including incentive alignment, compensation, and time commitment)
• Ad monetization for chatbots
• How companies can establish defensible moats when development costs are eroded through AI tools
• The capabilities needed to optimize AI-native products
• How AI-native apps should design for engagement

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• Xsolla. With the Xsolla Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%, and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards, and analytics.
• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• Universal Ads is Comcast’s self-serve TV ads platform that lets you launch campaigns in minutes across premium inventory from NBC, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Roku, and more.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

My guest on this week's episode of the podcast is Dan Pantelo, the CEO and founder of Marpipe, a platform that enables eCommerce companies to build dynamic product ads. In our conversation, we discuss:

• The necessity of exhaustive creative experimentation in eCommerce advertising
• Whether and how advertisers can create an effective feedback loop between advertising creative and product design / product concepting
• Current best practices with ad creative testing
• How AI can be applied to creative production currently
• The general health of the D2C ecosystem

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• Xsolla. With the Xsolla Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%, and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards, and analytics.
• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• Universal Ads is Comcast’s self-serve TV ads platform that lets you launch campaigns in minutes across premium inventory from NBC, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Roku, and more.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

In this episode of the podcast, I speak with The Wall Street Journal's Tim Higgins about his new book, iWar: Fortnite, Elon Musk, Spotify, WeChat, and Laying Siege to Apple's Empire. iWar traces a series of campaigns launched against Apple's control of the iOS App Store, including those from Spotify, Epic, Meta, and Elon Musk. Higgins chronicles the rise of the App Store from its launch in 2008, contextualizing Apple's vigorous defense of its iOS business practices with its broader pattern of testing the boundaries of legal and ethical standards.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• Xsolla. With the Xsolla Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%, and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards, and analytics.
• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• Universal Ads is Comcast’s self-serve TV ads platform that lets you launch campaigns in minutes across premium inventory from NBC, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Roku, and more.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

In this episode of the podcast, I speak with Daniel McCarthy on the topic of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV / CLV). This is Daniel's second appearance on the podcast; he first joined me in April to discuss his paper, Evaluating the Impact of Privacy Regulation on E-Commerce Firms: Evidence from Apple’s App Tracking Transparency.

In this episode, Daniel provides an overview of the CLV / LTV metric. Among other topics, we cover:

• The concept of LTV
• The commonalities observed across companies that utilize LTV successfully
• The analytical challenges in deriving LTV
• Which functional team within an organization should own the LTV metric
• The right dimensionality / granularity of user segmentation to use in calculating LTV
• The ways in which companies overcomplicate the LTV calculation
• How the LTV metric can be kept current
• Whether improvements to LTV through product or marketing optimization over time should be assumed when calculating LTV

Thanks to the sponsor of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• Universal Ads is Comcast's self-serve TV ads platform that lets you launch campaigns in minutes across premium inventory from NBC, Paramount, Warner Brothers Discovery, Roku, and more.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

In this episode of the podcast, I speak with Adam Singer about the general trend of brands pivoting their marketing strategies into anodyne and agreeable positioning (and why brands succeed when they don't). Adam is the VP of Marketing at AdQuick and runs the Hot Takes blog.

Among other things, Adam and I discuss:

• The "blandification" of marketing
• Why AI output won't displace creativity
• What David Ogilvy would think of the current state of marketing
• The role of a CMO and how it should be evaluated
• The backlash from marketers against the recent American Eagle ad campaign
• What went wrong with Crack Barrel's rebrand

Thanks to the sponsor of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.