Season 7, Episode 21: The AppsFlyer investment and the new dynamics of mobile attribution (with Olivia Kory)

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I've been meaning to have you back on and the perfect opportunity presented itself when yesterday we all learned that an investment syndicate consortium comprised of Meta Google Unity and MoLoco have invested $1 billion into AppsFIRE and given you know your attachment to the measurement space. I thought you'd have a lot of fascinating insight on that news. So welcome back. Thank you and before we started recording I mentioned this to you but when the news hit I was thinking to myself like man I wish I could talk to Eric about this. So this is perfect timing and excited to be here. But you didn't see this coming which I saw you posted that you didn't see this one coming which is surprising. Usually you're like 10 steps ahead of the industry here. No so you know full disclosure. I'm an advisor at Unity Day definitely kept me away from that news. Which you know good for them not that I would reveal anything but you know I had no idea and it was as I said news to me maybe before we dive right in for those who didn't hear your previous episodes and most people probably fall you on Twitter and elsewhere but could you just introduce yourself? Sure so Olivia Corey I am the chief marketing and strategy officer at house. I think the reason why you and I get along so well is I usually kind of just talk about my brand side experience when I'm introducing myself but I have a pretty deep background also in the ad tech space and I've kind of seen this industry from a few different angles so actually started my career agency side of publicists and then I moved over to ad tech to a programmatic DSP called two mogul and their big pitch also in you know 2013-14 was independence neutrality they were going up against the likes of big tech in Google and Metta trade desk ended up winning out but they had a pretty successful acquisition to Adobe so I saw the the ad tech ecosystem from that angle and then I moved over to the brand side spent a few years at Netflix I like to say Netflix is where I got my MBA and incrementality testing and really learned from the best and then I moved on to Quibi which is where I got the mobile app experience and then to Sonos where I got the e-commerce experience and then was doing incrementality testing at Sonos and saw the impact it was having on the organization and enjoying my founders at get house in 2022 house was kind of like born from the ashes of iOS 14.5 and built really the business with him been doing it now for four years and we have a couple hundred customers so we've seen a lot we have a lot of a lot of battle scars from this movement from you know attribution if you will over to incrementality so you'll find me maybe a little more tired and maybe perhaps burned out than I have been in past appearances but transformation isn't easy well it also congrats on the promotion thank you yeah remember that was what like three months ago or something I remember you now said it's pretty recent it was a few weeks ago but I'm excited I figured if I'm gonna be giving advice to CMO's all day I need to to prove myself well well deserved okay so maybe just let's I just want to get your kind of high-level general thoughts on that investment so what what was your initial reaction how did you interpret that news yeah I I mean this was just fascinating and I bet you can imagine from where I sit it's kind of a a novel a novel way to think about M&A in the space I think so if you have to rewind a little bit let's rewind maybe five six years to the app love and adjust acquisition and and I think you know we we experience this all the time we talk about this in the context of house quite a bit is like independence neutrality objectivity is our biggest asset it is why brands work with us it is so core to our mission to our value prop we're we're really nothing without it and there even moments where we we really put the customers at the center of everything we do it is it's very core to our mission but you can think of an example like like ad credits for example where if a customer signing up with us we have this thing called the partner benefits program where a platform and ad platform will provide our brands our partners with ad credits to test a new channel and even in that moment it starts to become gray area of like oh are we are we out kind of beyond our skis in terms of our involvement here in this this partnership between the ad platforms and the brands and so we we really try to be very thoughtful around objectivity and so you have this acquisition of adjust by app love and and I want to talk to you about this like I don't think anybody would say that is a success and I don't know if if we'll ever really know why it could have been a clash of cultures it could have been for reasons separate from the neutrality piece but I think I I often point to that is like kind of an example of what you don't want to happen where this thing that was kind of prided on being independent ends up in the hands of the platform that is perhaps creating their own homework and so I don't think anybody would point to that and say that that was successful so then here we have this news yesterday of and this is why I think it's novel of I mean apps flyer by all accounts is doing well I think they feel ubiquitous to me in this industry that feels like they've emerged as a clear winner attribution we can talk about this is still table stakes in this space and so they're doing well they want liquidity and instead of selling to one entity they sell to a consortium and thus not they know it's it's the case that no single kind of entity here can bias their platform their results in a way where they're putting their thumb on the scale and in that way I just feel like it's a win-win you know apps flyer gets the liquidity the team gets liquidity and meta Google unity and local like they get to keep a good thing going in terms of this like independent arbiter of truth and so I we loved it the team here was was really applauding the acquisition but I think perception is reality the open question is like will brands will advertisers perceive them as neutral with this deal and I think that's the open question that I've been wrestling with is how do brands feel about it and I haven't really talked to them yet you see this all the time with things like meta's conversion of product or Google's open source meridian like brands even if it's built with the best of intention they just don't want to trust the platform who's grading their own homework so I think big open question around how brands feel about this but I think it's it's you know I think it's certainly interesting and unique in the way they've approached it and I saw what you your coverage and I want to hear your thoughts I think we also just need to talk about the why and the apple of an of it all and and whether this was just to keep it out of apple of his hands yeah so I don't think it was to keep it out of apple of his hands my sense is that it just has been for sale for some time I don't think I don't believe that apple of an sees that much strategic value in that asset anymore so like going back right so I wrote I wrote why did apple of an by-adjust in February 2021 and you know my argument was okay it's financial engineering because apple of an had these kind of like locked in service contracts these long-term contracts it just did you know there was a revenue boost the apico system component of it because apple of an was still aggregating games at that point in time and you know they had the idea of bees and there's maybe ways you could line IDF bees up across publishers if you use the IP address and then conversion value management which was going to be the new thing everyone thought in the wake of SK ad network you know 2.0 being launched with ATT right and I think none of that really ended up being a case what they said was that look they've got a great sales team and they can upsell their clients on our ad network their ad network was still growing it you know they're growing a lot now but their ad network was kind of like an underdog at the time and you know that made some sense my sense was that they saw ATT as just an opportune time to get good valuations on assets and they just bought a bunch of people to this approach right digital turbine for instance like Zenga they just bought stuff because like this we're gonna get good prices and we'll find a way to assist all together and my sense is adjust probably never really materialized as like a meaningful part of a strategy obviously Apple have is like a totally different company now than it was then I mean it's not an underdog anymore it's the dominant you know it happens to all network in many cases you know I'll go in and look at what companies are spending money on and it's number two behind Google might even be number one in a lot of in a lot of cases ahead of both Google and Facebook and so I do know that my my belief is and you know I've talked to people that works at the company and they said they really did keep a firewall between those two entities like they had you know one guy showed me he's got an adjust slack and there's no app love and slack and like they had no access my understanding and this is what I've been told you know I believe this to be true they had no sort of like mutual back end access, right? So, okay, so they kept those two things separate. I don't think that they would want to buy AppSplire. My sense is A, it was a defensive maneuver against Apple oven by those companies because Apple oven is dominant in mobile gaming now. But I think also the existing investors wanted out, right? I actually advised the 2017 series D, I think it was, or series C, Goldman invested. And I said, look, I think Apple is going to deprecate the IDFA. I don't know if an attribution company's a great investment right now. I wrote my piece, the coming war between Apple and Facebook in 2017. That deal was 2017. I remember believing at the time that's the whole thesis of my that coming war with Apple and Facebook. The post was that I think Apple is going to get the IDFA. I think they don't want, I think that's a good way to stave off these companies from sort of like usurping the direct customer relationship and building these big ad businesses and cutting Apple out and cutting Apple out of not just the ads piece, but the commission piece and also control the app store. And so that's what I told, you know, the investors at the time. And so like my sense is like, this is just core infrastructure now. And the existing investors wanted out the IPO fell through the acquisition by PE fell through. If they really wanted out, they would have probably forced to sail maybe to somebody that you just wouldn't want controlling that critical infrastructure, right? And there are a number of companies that probably fit that description. And so my sense is that's what it was. It's like, look, attribution, like you said, attribution has been very like it's been a very durable practice. But and we'll talk about this. Measurement is evolved beyond just attribution. No one thinks of measurement as attribution anymore, which that used to be the case of that advertising. And so it's just part of a it's a part of toolkit. And for, you know, even like, you know, a lot of gaming advertisers, it's part of a toolkit. And so I think like, you know, these companies might have said, look, we require stability and predictability with the largest single attribution platform. It's worth it to us to put money into it to drive the valuation up beyond what any company would reasonably pay. And so that just sort of protects that interest. My sense is, and I don't have any insight information about this. I don't have any information whatsoever. My sense is the vast majority of that billion went to buying out the existing investors so that now they've got a lot more patient investors that are behind them that are not going to try to force a sale anytime soon. You know, I don't know how much of that hit the balance sheet and it and will be used for R&D. My sense is this was just exchanging these investors that wanted to pay out again that 2017 investment. They did a 2017 investment in 2020 investment. 2017 was was Goldman. And then the 2020 was the series D with I'm blanking on who led this series D, but it was big. It was $270 million. Okay, well, that's six years ago. And the 2017 was nine years ago. They want a return. They want money. And so I think that's probably what that was. It's just swapping out these PE funds that are going to want to sell and they need to return with much more patient investors who see a lot of strategic value in having this be independent and neutral. And, you know, not sort of influenced by a buyer that might not have those same interests. Yeah. Okay. I have a few questions for you on that. Number one, like, whose hands does this get into in terms of the wrong hands? Like, who who are Google and meta in Unity and Maloko nervous about? If not out Apple, and of course, one of them. But who like, where else does this end up? Where it hurts them in terms of the ad networks? I mean, there's like, there's kind of any, you know, so you could you could imagine like a bite dance. Now that's there's issues there. I mean, I don't know that they can just pull that off. But, you know, you can imagine an Amazon, you know, you can imagine like, so I think about like who Google says there's different sets of competing or like competition fears, right? Like Google and meta have won. And Google and meta that may have been more about creating a stable base that sits in opposition to adjust. But, you know, you could like, there's gaming companies that that could afford, you know, like, let's say that because they were trying to sell at 1.9. Apparently that, and this is just reported on by Calcala's, the PE funds thought they, you know, they should pull back on that valuation. I think because they are stuff. And I guess the existing investors won't accept that. But think about like, okay, two billion is pretty big. But, you know, you could think about an open AI. You could think about any of these companies that directly compete with that will directly compete with Google and meta for advertising dollars. And I mean, yeah, I would put, you know, bite dance, Amazon, you know, open AI with its advertising ambitions. And like, you know, that's two billion dollars. So them is is Trump change, right? They spend 150 on TVPN. But like, there's any number of these kind, and then, and then you see like kind of now, and we'll talk about this. I hope, you know, this sort of consolidation with CTV, like having this kind of be like a cross channel measurement, you know, system makes a lot of sense, right? So I think there's just like from the Google and meta perspective, there's a lot of like defensive value there. And then from a different set of competitors. And then from like, Unity and MoLoco, I think you could make the case that you wouldn't want private equity owning that and doing like another roll up. Yeah. Right? I mean, you know, so now imagine, you know, a lot of these assets are cheap now. And so you see private equity saying, hey, wait a second. We can buy a measurement company. We can roll a couple of other things into their other types of advertising surfaces, maybe even some apps. And then, you know, take another swing at like the sort of circa 2020 app love and approach, which was owning a big content portfolio plus the measurement. And then, you know, having all that data from everybody else. Like so I think there's, and so that's like the MoLoco, maybe the MoLoco Unity perspective. But I think there's also just and also to your point, app love and owns the other, the second largest attribution platform, the first largest we should ensure that it's just neutral and going to put independent. Yep. I think you're right. When you talk about attribution is infrastructure at this point. But the question I've always wondered and I'll ask you while I have the expert is like, if attribution is in front, if it's more or less commoditized at this point, like, why don't brands do this in house? Like, this was one of the things that I couldn't believe when I joined Quibi, when I, you know, we went and we learned about the ecosystem. Like, nobody would ever build this in house. Everybody has an MMP. It is just not something that you, but whereas in other industries, like a lot of brands have their own in house attribution model. So like, if it feels like in for a why don't more people build versus buy? That's such a good question. And I'm working on a long form like, you know, to solo podcasts with that is a history of the MMP program because you have to because of Facebook, it's a protected, it's a cottage industry that Facebook established with the MMP program. So going back, Facebook called this the PMP program, product marketing partner or something like that. Yeah, it wasn't FMP, right? There's FMP. It was FMP, FMP, Facebook marketing partner. That's right. It's FMP's Facebook marketing partner program then became the MMP program. But if you wanted to attribute Facebook installs, you had to use an MMP and they got to decide who got to do that. It was a total cottage industry. They create so like the thing is I remember King had its own attribution when I was at a company called WUGLE. We built our own attribution system and we did attribution for everything but Facebook. And if you wanted to attribute Facebook, you had to go through an MMP and they didn't give any exceptions. And so, you know, the tech is kind of, I don't want to say commodity. I think that's like that minimizes the complexity of it. I think, but you could build it if you had, you know, you could, you could build it and maintain it. And you know, we did, right? And WUGLE wasn't like a huge company. The only reason you had to go through an official of a company in the MMP program was that was the only way you got access to the API to do Facebook attribution. That was it. So they kept this whole segment essentially and they prevented real competition from emerging. And so like these people got to kind of charge, I think, prices that were not consistent with like the quality of the service, right? So you talk about like the Apple tax. I think there's an MMP tax. I mean, it's pretty expensive. And now they, they, you know, a lot of the MMPs offer, you know, ancillary services and like a lot of companies basically use MMPs for like core analytics now. And so that's why there's like a lot of resiliency built in. But that's why that's why you have to have an MMP because otherwise you can't attribute Facebook app installs and a Facebook is, you know, your number one number two and maybe number three, you need to be able to do that. And so you kind of build everything around that. Yeah, we'll talk about this in terms of, you know, we talked about like how are MMPs trending over time? And it still feels ubiquitous. And I guess my question was just why and that that helps answer it. It was propagated by Facebook. Mobile game developers no longer need to pay up to 30% in major app store fees. With XOLA webshop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5% and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards and analytics. Start today at xola.com. That's xsolla.com or use the link in the episode show notes. What is your perception of how customers and how the market perceived the app love and adjusts deal? Like do you think that part of the reason that hasn't been a very strategic acquisition is because the value of the asset was diminished by it belonging to app love and in the first place? Well, first of all, I love that you're flipping the table here. It's asking me the questions. Yeah, a little bit, but not to the degree, not to the degree that you might have expected. Like I, you know, I, yeah, this was kind of like when I'm in my consulting day. So I worked with a lot of studios at the gaming studios at the time. And there are people, you know, they explore the prospect of switching, but switching costs with MMPs are high. It's not a trivial task to swap out MMPs. And there was a question of like, well, you know, app love and says they're not accessing the data. Again, I believe that they weren't, you know, in the main. And so like it was, what's the real risk here? And it's just given the given the lift, given this sort of like engineering resources and, and you know, the distraction of swapping out MMPs. It doesn't make sense. Like, I would say that the number of defectors, call them defectors from the Adjust Platform, was a lot lower. as a result of the acquisition, then the number of people that stopped working with apps flyer when they launched their gaming studio. Like when they actually officially launched line studios, that there was more, I wanna say there were more sort of like scaled gaming companies that said we're not gonna work with Apple even anymore after they announced their own gaming studio initiative, then there were people that switched off of adjust to other MMPs, at least in the short term. Now I do think that you saw apps flyer eclipse adjust in terms of like feature set after the acquisition, just because they're sort of a portfolio company, essentially, of Apple and that's other treated. And so I don't think that they invested as much in R&D as as fire was. And so you did see more of like a trickle of people away from adjust, but I think they've got a pretty stable customer base. I don't know that it's like dwindled down to something immaterial to the company. So there wasn't though that sort of immediate exodus that you might have expected. - Yep, I think that that bodes well for the steel, for apps flyer in terms of, and I mean this is minority stay, no influence, and a consortium of platform. So we'll see, but I think that to know that there wasn't a mass exodus in the hands of Apple in makes me feel pretty confident that brands and advertisers are not gonna see this as problematic, which I think is exciting, 'cause I think it's the right thing for the industry. - Yeah, and just one more thing on this, 'cause you keep saying brands, but we're talking about app advertisers. And for an app advert, an app advertiser is like mentality but all of this is very different than like a traditional brand. And so, it's kind of like, and even with the gaming studio stuff, it's like, okay, well, apploven is now a serious competitor of ours when they are publishing games, but what are we gonna do? Like where are we gonna go? If we cut apploven out of our mix, like what, we're just basically cutting off a stream of revenue. And so I think that's kind of how they think about it, so they can be just much more calculated in those kinds of decisions. But okay, let's talk to me about, what were you seeing in terms of app install attribution before this? Like what were the trends? And what kind of insights do you think app advertisers were most interested in? And how did their measurement stacks been changing and adapting to support that? - Yeah, okay, yes. You can get back to asking me questions now, Eric. I won't ask you anymore. Attribution trends, so these MMPs are still very much ubiquitous and I think one of the last times I was on here, we were talking about this evolution in terms of measurement from attribution to incrementality. And that is very much happened when it's happening, it's underway, but we still see that there is a role here and that attribution has value. And the reason why is despite it being clicky, right? Like it's clicky, like it picks up these lower funnel channels, it gives you signal on lower funnel, it really misses impact in terms of upper funnel, view based channels, YouTube, CTV, OpenAI, you know, ChatGPT ads, like it's definitely biased, but these advertisers need two things. They need daily signal and they need ad level granularity. And we have seen time and time again, that is like non-negotiable for them. And so what we're starting to see is like incrementality, adjusted attribution in that we understand the bias, like we understand the ways in which attribution is biased, we can adjust for that bias, get to an incrementality kind of adjustment, but still give them what they want, which is the daily ad level granularity. Like you said, you just made a joke about like these are app advertisers and I think you know this ecosystem even better than I do in terms of like, they're in meta ads all day. They're in Google all day, they're clicking around all day long, like to expect that they're just going to be able to like, hand wave and say like, no, we'll get you that incrementality, read out at the end of the month is just unrealistic. And so that's what we're seeing in terms of this movement of like, we're actually bringing the best of these experiments and causal data into the kind of dashboard, if you will, MCP, they can put into their system, but into the view that they're used to looking at, like hourly, if not daily. And so was that a function of like that, that you know, having that incremental lens on it, was that a function of exploring new channels, or was that a function of kind of like leveling up and probably evolving from the last click kind of mentality that dominated, I would say app install advertising from like 20, call it 12 when the practice really took off to like let's say 2019 or 2020, even going into ATT, was it was it was an evolution or was it just, well, actually we need more channels and then we can't use less click on those so we need a new approach. - Yeah, I think it's both. So the bias in terms of correlation and click based attribution, I think is well understood. At this point, you run like a UAC standard campaign in Google and it looks extremely efficient. And then you run a UAC video campaign that's delivering primarily on YouTube and other video channels in the video campaign looks horribly inefficient. The standard campaign looks great. You run an incrementality test and it's actually the reverse. I think it's, you know, you see that these things normalize when you're adjusting for incrementality and I think budgets are adjusting accordingly. Like you're seeing shifts out of the typical kind of lower funnel search, ASA, good example of just a channel that looks amazing on a last click basis in the MMP that you know tends to be less incremental. So that's happening and that's been, I think that's been underway for a while. And then you have the persona who just wants to expand in a new channel. There's this constant belief, again, whether, whether rational or not, I think there's some truth to it that meta in Google are kind of perpetually delivering to like circling the drain in terms of delivering to your existing customers and the people who are going to come in anyway. Like their algorithm is so good at finding intent that it tends to be non-incremental. And there is just this belief across the industry that this is what's happening with their models. And so when folks sign up with house, their number one use case is like, I want to introduce my brand, my app, to new audiences. I want to go break out of this bubble and go delivered in new customers to new users. And the way in which they see themselves doing that is both signal engineering in meta and Google, pointing it to kind of like shallower kind of signals, but also expanding into new channels. Enter CTV, YouTube, most kind of video-based advertising channels are seeing a huge rise in popularity. And then the like LLM kind of ad formats of the world as well. What's interesting here is they all come in really excited about this and then something like the tariffs happen or the, you know, there's a war in Iran and oil prices are going up and like the appetite to actually see through that channel expansion and to like have the patience to actually go crack those channels tends to be a little bit lower than perhaps it was when they started the year. So I'm not seeing like the rise in spend match like the rise in excitement, if you will, around a platform or channel like CTV, especially in the mobile app space. Like I'm not seeing CTV budgets taking like 20% share of wallet, even though again, you might think that based on the headlines. Like every time times get tough in terms of macro economy or pacing behind on goals, they end up back in Meta and Google. Yeah, like flight to quality, but flight to a perceived quality and like on the basis of, you know, the measurement which I think most people would agree is not very sophisticated or robust if you're just doing last click, right? But to your point, that's how they consume it. And it's like consumption defines the framework in a lot of ways. It's like as well to see if oh, it looks at this dashboard and whatever we replace it with has to fit in the dashboard and that's not as easy to do with like pure playing from mentality or whatever other approach, MMM. Yeah, what we are seeing though is the rise of the longer experiment. If the hypothesis is that these channels like a vibe, which I'm sure we'll talk about, or universal ads is introducing your brand to new audiences, which is again, what they want, what these, you know, they sign up wanting, then you need a longer test. That plays out over a longer time horizon. So, you know, one of the big learnings that we've had over the past maybe year or so at house is like a two week test is not, it's just not enough time to even see anything on a CTV channel. And what we're seeing is like a lot of that lift is coming in in the back half of a four or six week experiment. And that is a reality though that you do have to contend with of like these different channels have different payback windows and what is the value of a dollar that you get today versus a dollar that you get back tomorrow. So that it is one thing that we've learned is that you need a longer test, but that also comes with its own drawbacks. Well, yeah, right. So good luck going to a CFO and saying, look, we can't rigorously make any determination about this unless we spend 500K over three months, you know, like, well, you're probably not going to get approved, right? (laughs) Yeah, we're not very patient. Marketers, we're not very patient. And so you really do like you, and we have so many examples, we just published some data on this of most of that lift on CTV is coming in the back half, which is like, if you cut it at three, four weeks, you are missing all the value. So. - Right. And the interaction effects, I think people don't appreciate that. It's like, Yeah, it has value when paired with these other channels. And so, you know, that's a big piece of it. And a lot of MMMs don't even, they deliberately don't even capture interaction effects. And so you're not going to, you're just going to miss that completely. And, you know, like, it's, but it's like, even like, okay, we do a longer test, but at a very tiny budget, you're going to run into the same issues. It's going to get absorbed by the bigger channels. You're not going to really be able to distinguish. You have to, you know, like, I, you know, I don't need to tell you this, but you have to really deliberately and softly engineer these tests. Yeah. And people just don't. Or they'll have like, it'll be messy. And, you know, all of this and marketing is kind of, it suffers from co-linearity anyway. And so it's, it's very, it's a very challenge. Well, you know, it's the reason why, you know, house exists. Like, that's the whole point, right? So, to get that marketing expertise applied to campaigns. I want, I do want to talk about CTV. And I do want to talk about, you know, the vibe acquisition that I can, it's going to be out today. But before we get there, I think another takeaway from the this investment in the app slyer is that, well, okay, these companies clearly believe that SK ad network slash ad attribution kids going nowhere. If they thought like, no, this will evolve over time. And this will become something meaningful. They probably wouldn't do this. But no one does. This is dead, right? I mean, I was, I chose violence one day. I was, I was on a flight. And I, you know, whatever it was, the last week. And I was like, are you kidding me, Apple? So you're just done even giving us updates. Like you pushed companies into adopting SK ad network wholesale. You convinced them this was the future. People spent millions of dollars. Like, I mean, I was attached to projects where probably millions of dollars were spent in a single company adapting to SK ad network. And you're not even going to give an update anymore. You're not even going to tell us what's new because nothing's new because you don't care about it. You just decided one day that you were going to, you were going to force everybody to adopt this new methodology under threat of basically being, you know, call it de platform, having your company be killed. Because if you get your app removed from the app store, because you were deemed to be non-compliant, I mean, you're talking about a potentially like existential threat. You're not even following through what this is five years later. You're not even following through with updates anymore. This is dead. This was just so disrespectful and so inconsiderate. And so, and so callous to the entire entire mobile app ecosystem that supports you. And you can't even dame to give an in update anymore about what the roadmap is or any new features if there have been any that have been added to ad attribution care. Are you kidding me? So it's dead, right? It's dead. Wow, well said, we've got to clip that. We've got to clip that. I think about this all the time. It's it is still infuriating. I mean, that they did it also like all under the guys of privacy, like with the billboards everywhere in 2020. And I don't understand what the end game was because my thought at the time when they did it is like, okay, they're getting ready to launch a big ads business of their own. This is like the only logical explanation for what they're doing is that they want to win in the ads business, but they're not really doing that. They're not really trying to build a much bigger ads business. At least it doesn't seem like that to me. Did they just not realize what they were getting into here? Did they not realize how hard it was going to be? And does that bode well for the apps flyers of the world? If they if this is just like kind of painful and and complicated, like I just the strategically it makes no sense. Like I feel like someone at Apple should have to explain themselves. Well, you know, I would hope they would have had to do that in a some kind of congressional testimony or something, but that never happens. And it just seems like they've abandoned it. Like they're not even giving updates anymore. It's not even like what's new. I so they've just left people with this complete completely dysfunctional incomplete framework. That is useless. It's effectively useless and walked away from it. Like as if that was going to solve any problems or fill this void that they created, that they sort of conjured up. Like and you can make, you know, and I don't want to get into the ATT stuff because that's old. That horses, that dead horse has been mutilated. But like it was just the fact that they can't even go through the motions of pretending like they're continuing to invest in it. Like they have completely moved on. Yep. They've completely abandoned it. There's no explanation for that other than they just didn't realize what they were doing at the time. It wasn't well thought out. Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. And I also think there wasn't a consensus internally. And there was just a lot of like, you know, people that made the case that this one have that big of an impact. Maybe the experience from ITP was like, was informed of that decision because the ITP didn't really change that much because Safari wasn't the dominant browser and people found work around. But yeah, maybe they just underestimated the impact. You know those channels your colleagues keep bragging about, the ones getting all the credit? Yeah, they might be doing squat. Attribution makes every channel look like a hero, even when it's a zero. Incremental tells you who's actually doing the work. It's like a lie detector for your marketing budget. Start using incremental today. Get your demo at incremental.com. That's INCRMMTAL.com. Mention that you came through the mobile dev memo podcast for a special 15% discount for the first six months. Okay, I want to talk about CTV because that's a really interesting. You mentioned that like you see the app, the app advertisers aren't shifting meaningful budget. But is it trending up in the CTV? Are they, are they, is there more experimental budget going there? How do app advertisers from your perspective view CTV? Yep. So I think what the vibes of the world and the universal ads of the world have done really well is we talked about this earlier, like good luck telling the CFO you're going to invest more money and for a longer period of time and you won't be able to show returns for six months. Like that is a very difficult conversation to have. And so where I think vibes winning is they've positioned TV as a performance channel. And so you're seeing the rise like in universal ads has the same messaging in market of like run this like your meta ads and like we're going to hold ourselves accountable to a performance outcome. And I think that's working really well now. And just to say because because I've experienced this with finance teams as well is like everybody talks about brand marketing and wanting to invest in building the brand. But the reality is they only care about brand and so far as it's driving downstream outcomes. And so you eventually have to tie the brand spend to an outcome or it's going to be the first thing on the chopping block. It's going to be the first thing that gets cut. And so I think vibes doing a really good job of that is like they're similar to apploven when they launch the e-commerce. Pilot is like they have leaned into third party measurement quite a bit. They're funding a lot of house tests where like they'll put credits up and they'll make it really low risk. Very easy to test universal ads the same way. And thus they can kind of the marketers and the teams can kind of justify it as a performance channel. Now that being said, I do like to be realistic about what's possible here. Like in we have some data now on how quickly you see the effects of a meta, how quickly you see the effects of an apploven. It takes a little bit longer to play out in terms of these effects like you are you're introducing your brand, your app, whatever it is to like often like new audiences. They're going to need more frequency. They're going to need more time. And so we again, we did publish this data, but for a channel like a CTV, you've just got around a longer test and you have to be realistic about about expectations there. And you have to make sure you can protect that long enough to see the effects. And that's the thing that I think to the teams that we work with struggle with of like letting the bet play out for long enough to actually make it an always on channel that is, you know, they're alongside the meta as the Google staff, lovins of the world. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's that that timeline is important to think about too because I think, you know, like no serious person would say brand marketing can't possibly improve my commercial prospects. Brand marketing can't possibly contribute to my marketing success. No serious person would say that. But you do hear a lot of people saying like, well, brand marketing will absolutely contribute to your commercial success. And it's like, well, that's just as absurd of a statement. You have to test it. You don't know that. And then the other like the other thing is like, okay, sure, but like I think it can. So like I believe that it can possibly, I believe that brand marketing can pop up for fun. Let's call up for fun marketing can possibly improve the, you know, my sort of like the impact of my marketing on my business on what timeline? Because it's also got to do it on a timeline that I care about. Right. And so if it's in five years after a hundred million dollars of expenditure, well, okay, maybe I'll leave some money on the table and not pursue it. Like yeah, I understand that I'm sort of like under investing by that standard or, you know, from that perspective, but like it's just impossible. Like it, you know, the the time value of money and like the prioritization and like the the return on other things is just greater, right. And so it's like I get that brand marketing could. I get maybe if I even say I bet, you know, I've done this sort of analysis, so I looked at comps and I bet brand marketing probably will improve the power of my marketing overall. But like given the timeline to of return on that investments and and this sort of like the hurdle rate in terms of how much I have to spend. to see that return, there are other things I can put that money into that would have just like higher ROI and so I'll do those things. It's not like, first of all, shouldn't be driven by like religion or like kind of like, you know, just blind faith, you need to test it. But second, you need to kind of just determine like, well, when I take into account the time value of money and I take into account the ROI on, you know, when I rank that expenditure against other places where I can put that money, is it going to be the best possible use of that money? I think like, that's an important exercise to go through. Yeah, the conversation I'm having a lot of right now is this comes up every year. Every year, the, you know, there's this big like, hey, we need to, we need to crack TV. And then they'll find reasons not to tell that this actually happens more in the world of linear TV than C TV because C TV is pretty easy to test and it's pretty easy to get going. But in linear, it's a little bit harder to run a geotest. And so every year, they'll look at doing a geotest, they won't run it. They might try it for a few months. They won't be able to see any, any discernible impact to the business. You mentioned clinearity, some multiclinearity problem where they're lighting up TV right around the time that their business kind of seasonality tends to ramp up. And then nobody has any idea what it delivered to the business. And then they turn it off and then they have the same conversation again next year. And so I've been pushing really hard of like, I know this is going to take longer and it's going to be more expensive than you would like, but you need an answer to this question. And so that's what we've been seeing a lot of. But I'm totally with you. We talk about this all the time is like these delayed impacts you're speaking of like it feels very imaginary in a lot of ways and we're trying to help these brands actually assign some data to it. And I think the research on this, the like existing kind of data on long term effects is like, not good. Not like there's not much of it. And so we're finding that we're just having to go and run these tests ourselves and collect the research. When you approach this, you know, it's important to have like some kind of measurement framework. I think a lot of the other people that advocate for like well brand advertising is is is a necessary. It's a critical. It's an indispensable part of the toolkit. You know, they never a lot of often times then they'll say something like, put a camp you measure. You know, and like, well, that's not really helpful. And like I had Carl Meila on the podcast and what I loved about his framework is like, no, he's measurement first. It's measurement first framework. It's like, here's how you measure that. I'm not just making a claim that like you must be and you must be building a brand. I'm like, this is the approach you should take to measuring it. And so and I like also they rooted that in a lot of kind of like financial metrics because then, you know, that's an easier sell to, you know, your, your finance team or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And we're like, you know, we are working with with some very large brands, but like for the most part, we're not talking to PNG here, like a big CPG conglomerate. We're talking to a series B series C startup that's like fighting every day to survive. And it's like the brand conversation is just a very, it's a very different one at that stage. And like again, you just, you can look at these like shallower proxy metrics. You can look at them, but like you need to tie them to downstream sales. And I think that's part of the reason we've been doing well as a business is like we speak and we report on the language that the finance teams understand. And the board is like we're speaking in the same language in terms of these metrics. Well, I also think that's what's important about then what's differentiating and meaningful about the approach taken by universal ads. It's not, it's not so much that it's measurable from a click standpoint because it isn't. It's about they let you be flexible with the budget with the targeting. And if because if you don't have that, there's no way to do real experiment based measurement. There just isn't. And if you set the bar for a campaign to be like, oh, well, it's a million dollars minimum, then we'll forget it. You're never going to get a smaller company investing in that. They need that sort of like money at risk has to be much lower than that. Yep. Vive has made it incredibly easy to do business with them. They are so accommodating. They're so easy to work with. And there's something to be said for that versus like a trade desk on the other hand with minimums and just a lot of barriers to entry. So that team just has been hustling like crazy. I'm really happy for them. All right. I want to talk about you. So you recently published a report on app loving they just today went GA with the self-serve. So you know, maybe it was I don't know if those are in spots to the the ass flyer news to try to suck all the oxygen in the room. But I think that's been on the schedule for a long time. Tell me about the report. What did you find? Were the primary findings of the report? You know that the conversation around app loving has been very polarizing for a very long time. I started off very skeptical just with a background in programmatic open web. It's really hard to like differentiate in that space. And there's like just not a whole lot of great inventory. So I myself personally started off skeptical. We started testing. We looked at you know, 15 months as part of this this most recent analysis. I'd say last year throughout 2025, we were very encouraged by results and we were posting them along the way. But this meta analysis looks at 15 months of data. And what we consistently see is that app is hanging in as like a strong number two or number three channel in the mix. We looked at how it's comparing to the other experiments running at the same time. And we saw as efficiency was 11% better than the average of other channels that those same brands tested. So it's looking good. It hits hard. Apploven works quickly and we know we just talked about this. That can be a feature. That can be a really good feature. Very easy in terms of of working it into your models and your your pay back cycles and whatnot. So it works fast and it is also primarily driving like D to C. So it lowers the measurement complexity because most of the impact is happening on digital channels versus like offline on an Amazon or a retail. I'd say those are the key stats. The big one that we looked at the big question was, is it hanging in as these brands scale the channel and the data there is is it's a more mixed story. So you know, but I think this is probably similar to a lot of new channel stories where you see really good efficiency. And then the next question is how is that efficiency hanging there when you start scaling the channel. And what we looked at was how is apploven performing versus the typical test run at the same time. So control for seasonality. And apploven was beating the typical test between like 60 and 85% of the time in 2025. So just consistently winning in terms of performance. But in 2026 that number has come down and it's settled to closer to like a coin flip, which means only half the time is it beating the average of other tests and other channels being run at the same time. And so that suggests that that like early edge that they have is normalizing as brands scale up spend. But they're we're seeing like apploven share wallet increase very clearly. We have data. I think it's yeah, 5% in January to over 8% share of wallet in May. So it does seem like brands are leaning in. Obviously this data is mixed. It's not great. Like it's not perfect in terms of the data on how it's scaling. But it is they're commanding a pretty respectable share of wallet in terms of of 8%. We don't see anyone else in terms of the secondary platforms growing at that clip. That's an incredible share. 8%. I mean, that's impressive in e-commerce space in the course of 15 months. That is that's API spend we can track. So it's like the core digital channels. It wouldn't include TV as an example. It's the meta Google apploven snap TikTok Pinterest. Wow. Okay. By the way, I just occurred to be you're not chatting to me from the beach and in can. I don't see a turquoise water in the background here. Yes. Then I wouldn't be here with you. This is what I live for Eric. So I'm better behind the desk. So I just saw them the most what I think is a very sort of like appropriate description of can from Matt Bologna. I'll just read it. Welcome back to what I'm hearing. Thankfully not coming from a can lion ad conference. I shouldn't have to say this, but everyone asking if albeit cans this year. Can is the festival to can a prestigious global film event where talented creative people display and sell their work and look glamorous doing so. Can Lion is not. It's a tacky business conference for selling advertising and announcing brand partnerships populated mostly by punchy middle managers and YouTubers. They call it an international festival creativity, but that's just to make the suits and the media people feel better about their soulless corporate boondoggle. Enjoy the rosé. Oh, man. I wish house was this house experience was like 10 years ago or 10 years from now where you know, my kids may be a little bit older or I don't. Yeah, it's just like it's so hard. It's so hard to justify. I agree with a lot of what he said. I hear you. Olivia, thank you for coming on the podcast and with little to essentially no notice. Appreciate your insights as always. Talk to the audience about house. Talk and learn more. House.io. We just launched a lot of very ambitious new products in terms of roadmap. We've been kind of building toward this since the early days of house in terms of like, you know, how do you reduce the friction from insight to action? How do we get better at operationalizing incrementality in a way where like you're actually using these tests to improve business outcomes? So our roadmap is all in pursuit of that and would love to just talk to more folks about what we're building and get thoughts and feedback from smart people. So of course, feel free to message me. My DMs are open. Thank you so much. Thanks, Eric.