In this episode of the podcast, I speak with Anindya Ghose from NYU and Vilma Todri from Emory University about their recent paper, The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness, which is available in pre-print. In the paper, Anindya, Vilma, and the other authors assess the performance efficacy of three types of ad creative:

1. Creative entirely crafted by humans;
2. Creative crafted by humans but modified by generative AI;
3. Creative entirely created by generative AI.

The authors also quantify the impact of disclosing that creative was produced by generative AI tools. In the paper, the authors run a field experiment (buying display impressions on Google Display Network) as well as a lab study where they collect qualitative data. We discuss the results of these in the podcast.

In addition, we cover:

• The genesis of this paper and the motivation to explore this topic;
• The four research questions the authors pursue in the paper;
• The methodology used to interrogate those questions;
• The principal conclusions from the studies the authors ran;
• The authors' finding that lower creative constraints on the genAI tool led to better results;
• Possible explanations for why a Generative AI tool benefits from total control with the visual modality whereas textual generation performs better with a structured, chain-of-thought process.

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 Rishabh Jain, the CEO and co-founder of FERMÀT Commerce, an eCommerce advertising optimization platform. Rishabh most recently joined the podcast in June for an episode of the MDM Mailbag.

In this episode, Rishabh and I discuss the impact of chatbot discovery on eCommerce sales, including over Black Friday. Among other things, we speak about:

• The current state of AI search with respect to eCommerce, and how are chatbots are influencing eCommerce purchases now
• The likely trajectory of "agentic commerce" over the next 12-18 months
• How eCommerce retailers are adapting to chatbots and other forms of AI search
• ChatGPT's Instant Checkout and whether that reflects a durable business opportunity for OpenAI or other companies

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

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Mikołaj Barczentewicz, a professor of law at the University of Surrey and the author of EU Tech Reg, a blog dedicated to following developments in the EU regulatory machinery.

In this episode, Mikołaj and I discuss the digital omnibus package that was recently proposed by the European Commission and which aims to reform and simplify, among many other things, the GDPR. A draft version of the digital omnibus had been leaked a few weeks before we spoke, but we waited until the formal version was unveiled by the EC to record this podcast.

Among other things, we cover:

• The genesis of the Digital Omnibus package: why was it proposed in the first place, and what it aims to achieve;
• The specific changes to the GDPR proposed in the package;
• The scope of the opposition to GDPR reform;
• The implications of digital omnibus reforms on the EU's domestic AI industry;
• Whether any genuine progress been made against the recommendations made by last year's Draghi report;
• The current status of Pay or Okay in the EU and in the UK;
• Whether the DMA might be softened in response to pressure from the Trump administration.

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

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