My guest on this week’s episode of the podcast is Alex Schultz, the CMO and VP of Analytics at Meta. Among other things, Alex manages marketing, analytics, and internationalization for the company and directed its rebrand from Facebook to Meta. Additionally, Alex recently wrote a book, Click Here, which is currently available for pre-order.

Among other things, we discuss:

• Alex’s background and long tenure at Meta;
• Alex’s distaste for the term “performance marketing” and his philosophy around full-funnel management;
• Whether Alex’s background in analytics has made him a more effective CMO;
• How AI will impact the marketing profession in the near and medium terms;
• Whether the marketing function necessarily becomes more product-focused when AI-enabled automation can handle campaign optimization, audience segmentation, and creative production;
• How marketers can better embrace AI;
• How the quantitative frameworks for growth change when a company reaches 1BN+ user scale;
• The aspects of growth marketing least understood by the general public. 

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

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

• ⁠⁠⁠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.
• ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

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

My guest on this week's episode is James Borow, the Vice President of Product and Engineering at Comcast's new Universal Ads effort, which was introduced this January. James was previously the Global Director of Product Strategy at Snap.

The topic of our conversation is the evolving TV advertising ecosystem. Among other things, we discuss:

1. The current state of performance advertising on TV;
2. The historical process of buying linear TV advertising inventory;
3. The boundaries between CTV and linear TV advertising;
4. How advertisers approach measurement with CTV;
5. Where YouTube fits into the CTV space;
6. What linear TV can do to provide performance capabilities to marketers;
7. The demographics of TV that make it attractive to marketers.

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

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

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

The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

This week, I speak with George Hadjia, the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Bristlemoon Capital, a long-short hedge fund. George publishes regular insights on his firm's blog, including a recent post on Match Group, the company that operates Tinder and Hinge. The topic of our conversation is the dating app market and its prospects for growth after the tumultuous COVID era.

Among other things, we discuss:

• The impact of COVID on the dating app market;
• Whether consumer attitudes have soured on dating apps;
• The demographic component to the decline of these apps, and how engagement varies by age;
• The upper limit on how large any one app can get;
• How defensible these scaled dating app businesses are;
• The match-making dilemma;
• Whether advertising is an opportunity.

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

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

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 podcast is Antti Jäderholm, the founder and COO of Ray Browser, a web browser built and optimized for gaming. In our conversation, we discuss:

• The history of browser gaming and where it stands today;
• The limitations that have historically prevented the browser from becoming a mainstream platform for AAA-quality gaming;
• The forces of change that are expanding the browser gaming category;
• The current size of the browser gaming market, and it is expected to grow in the medium term;
• The web technologies that enable high-fidelity browser gaming experiences;
• Whether most console streaming services will end up in the browser.

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

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

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

My guest on this week's episode of the podcast is Jess Jacobs, the CMO of MDVIP, having previously served in senior marketing roles at Shopify and Wayfair. The topic of our conversation is Brandformance marketing -- or brand-oriented marketing pursued with specific sensibilities around directly-measurable business objectives.

Among other things, we discuss:

• The definition “brandformance," and differentiation between brandformance and traditional brand marketing;
• The approach to measurement that best integrates top-of-funnel brand marketing into a performance marketing workflow;
• The common characteristics across marketing teams that are effective at utilizing both brand and direct response tactics;
• What companies tend to get wrong about brandformance;
• Why brand marketing is incorrectly viewed as less analytically rigorous than direct response marketing;
• The optimal level of integration between brand and direct response efforts;
• Whether a CMO can capably manage both brand and direct response initiatives.

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

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

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 episode of the podcast is Terence Kawaja, the CEO and founder of LUMA Partners, a boutique investment bank focusing on the digital media sector. Terry is a high-profile advisor for transactions in the marketing and advertising spaces, and LUMA Partners publishes the infamous LUMAscapes market maps for those ecosystems.

The topics of our discussion include:

• Terry's general perspective on the digital advertising fundraising and M&A environment at the start of 2025;
• Why 2024 was so slow regarding digital advertising fundraising and M&A;
• Whether AdTech M&A follows the general business cycle;
• Whether the social media platforms are acquisitive;
• How the changing composition of the FTC impacts the outlook for ad tech M&A;
• Which companies might be underestimated as buyers of AdTech;
• Whether the widespread adoption of AI tools within the digital advertising space is an accelerant for M&A;
• Whether the current digital media environment is closely comparable to any historical point in time.

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

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• ⁠⁠⁠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.
• ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

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 episode of the podcast is Rishabh Jain, the CEO and co-founder of FERMÀT Commerce, an eCommerce advertising optimization platform. This is Rishabh's third appearance on the podcast (see one and two).

I invited Rishabh back to the podcast to provide a broad overview of the state of eCommerce advertising at the outset of 2025. Among other things, we discuss:

• Rishabh's outlook on eCommerce this year;
• Meta's opportunities with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC);
• Whether Meta is purposefully slow-rolling the introduction of generative AI tools for ad creative;
• Whether generative AI for ad creative will be captured entirely by the big platforms by necessity;
• TikTok shop;
• How Shopify's advertising products might evolve over the next 3-5 years;
• The rise of incrementality among eCommerce merchants;
• Rishabh's spiciest AppLovin take.

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

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• ⁠⁠⁠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.
• ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

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

My guest on this week's episode of the podcast isMikołaj Barczentewicz. Mikołaj has appeared on the podcast a number of times -- he's a professor of law at the University of Surrey and holds a PhD in Law from the University of Oxford. He also regularly publishes thoughtful commentary on the EU regulatory landscape on hisSubstack.

In this episode of the podcast, among other topics, we discuss:

• The EU's AI Act, which was passed in July 2024;
• The broad status of AI regulation in the EU;
• The Hamburg DPA's proposal that large language models do not store personal data and whether that view might be adopted broadly;
• The EDPB's updated guidance on the ePrivacy Directive;
• Google's decision to route cookie deprecation in Chrome through consent and whether the CMA is likely to accept that.

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

• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
• ⁠⁠⁠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.
• ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

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

My guests on this week's episode of the podcast are John Lynch and JP Dube. John is the University of Colorado Distinguished Professor at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado-Boulder, and JP is the James M. Kilts Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Together, along with a number of co-authors, they have written a draft paper titled The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Privacy Regulation for Consumer Marketing, which is the subject of our conversation.

Among other things, we discuss:

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

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

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half."

Knowing the context of his work, my view of the infamous quote attributed to John Wanamaker is that advertising measurement is fundamentally and necessarily uncertain, even in success. This surfaces another, in my view, invalid interpretation of the quote: that advertising is only effective when it can be measured perfectly, absolutely, and with total precision. To my mind, this has been the prevailing view within digital advertising sector: that advertising measurement is inherently defined by total, deterministic precision.

This is the measurement myth.

In this podcast, I’ll unpack the measurement myth and why I believe the digital advertising ecosystem is abandoning it in favor of more holistic, statistically sophisticated, and scalable approaches to advertising attribution and measurement. I’ll discuss some of the methodologies at the frontier of advertising attribution that are alleviating the need for deterministic identity in advertising measurement and how their use allows advertisers to materially expand the reach of their messaging, and what the implications of that are for the digital economy.

Resources referenced / cited in this podcast:

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

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

The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on: