Steering Group Specials: Mobile In-App

You're listening to the IAB UK podcast and welcome to our Steering Group Specials, a three-part mini-series in partnership with the IAB Steering Groups. Our Steering Groups bring together leading experts in mobile in-app video and display advertising to work on initiatives that help drive sustainable growth within digital. In this episode here, from members of our mobile and in-app Steering Group, as they share and answer some of the questions which advertisers want to know about advertising on mobile and in-app. But sometimes just don't want to ask, "Here's Sarah Schneider from IonSource, Russell Birdon from AppsFlyer, and Richard Smith from Add Just, speaking to IAB UK CMO, James Chandler." Hello and welcome to the IAB UK podcast and a series of special episodes, bought to you courtesy of the combined expertise of our industry steering groups. Today, it's the mobile and in-app Steering Group and we've assembled some of the most asked questions from agencies and advertisers and some that clients maybe feel like they can't ask. But the next 25 minutes or so is a safe space, nothing's off limits, there's no such things a bad question or a bad answer, of course there are such things as bad questions and bad answers, but we're not going to do any of those because we've got a stellar group lined up for you here and introducing them now is Richard Smith, senior partnerships manager for Amir Add Just, Sandra Schneider, VP strategic partnerships from IonSource and Russell Birdon, partner developed director at AppsFlyer and a really warm welcome to you all on the podcast today. Great, thank you. Thanks for having us. Hello. I have deep sympathy for some of these questions that you're getting and these are genuinely questions that you're getting asked right. Yeah. On their regular basis. So this is a little bit of fat finding for some people and like I said maybe these are some of the things that you feel like you should know that you can't ask and maybe you don't want to ask your agency or you don't want to ask your rep so we're going to clear everything up for people today in terms of in-app. But maybe one of the biggest misconceptions of all Sandra is the idea that when you think about mobile in-app it's literally just all games, it's people sat on their commutes and any spare time they got just playing games. Actually a lot of it is yes but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing because games are by far the top vertical in the App Store today so they make up more than 25% of the apps that are out there and I read that sensor tower is expecting that 70% of iOS user revenue this year is going to come from games only. So it's actually a very interesting vertical and in addition to that mobile gaming is among the most cross demographic activities as well. So I think that you can really find your audience in games and especially for brands so just giving an example puzzle games right 63% are female and 60% are over the age of 35. I could go on and on but it really shows that there's not one stereotypical gamer out there like really everyone is playing games today and it's a way to reach your audience. Do you think gaming does get tarnished with that very sort of old stereotype now that it is 14 year old spotty boys in bedrooms playing games just from the stats that Sandra said it's not the case is it? No it's not, it might be the odd one of course. Yeah for the whole part Sandra's point is very valid that the demographic might not be what you assume it to be. I think the other really interesting thing with gaming supply is that it's off you could argue that it's the most engaging app that someone might have on their phone that people are really invested in the time they spend within this gaming app. So at that point you could argue that they're most alert, they're most responsive to advertising and therefore it's a really provided the ad is served at the right time. It's a really sensible place to be speaking to your consumers so I would always argue quite heavily for that level of engagement with gaming. Russell, when you think about gaming there's a, and you come into this topic of rewarded video there is an argument to be said that if you're going to allow someone to play a game and you're going to go from level to level but in order to get to the next level I'm going to force you to watch a video is there that argument that actually a brand isn't getting that much engagement because ultimately they have to watch it to go on so they much just sort of zone and they're only doing so they want to go to the next level what do you think about that? I'd probably agree with that in a way at the same time as well you do have that aspect on display channels as well obviously when you do look at attribution models for example view through attribution is always considered relatively high and people do look at that and they do put a lot of weighting behind that so why wouldn't it be any different if somebody views an ad in a mobile game yes as Rich just mentioned they're highly engaged in that app itself they're engaged within the game itself so they are going to see it they are going to probably have some form of brand recall to seeing that ad yes they might not engage with it but I'm sure there is some form of positivity that can come from that. Just wanted to add one more piece of research that is the Kendra Miller Brown research that actually shows that brands that are running on a rewarded video get it two times more positive brand association and 26% increase in purchase intent and I think actually it's entirely opt in right like they are not forced and I think that's like maybe the misconception that the industry has because the user is choosing to watch that video and it's a value exchange feature at the end of the day he gives his attention for 20 seconds and in return he'll get whatever alive or a gem or something in the game so I really and I want to point that out because this opt-in angle is really important here for the results that we see and maybe just one more thing if I could to add is that the clues in the name right it's a rewarded video so like these consumers are getting a reward off the back of this and that reward is obviously tied to the app that they're engaged with so it's a win really for everyone. Yeah and of course we're not pretending that every single media channel you have a video that you have to watch that you're not rewarded with so maybe we've been talking loads and loads about about the open web of late all sorts of things going on around identity only this week we're talking about user identity and open web when it comes to in-app though versus mobile web where do you guys feel like the benefits are? I think the first and most important one would be scale and maybe reach because I think that mobile apps are just so much more frequent in terms of the time that you spend there and I think also specifically for younger audience like mobile web is actually not a place where you would find these guys I think it's three hours a day that they spend only inside apps and I think the second biggest benefit that I would add and I'm sure the other two guys can really add to that is data right anything that you run in an application you actually have a bit of a better way to measure data on and when you run a campaign especially with what we call and we can talk about creatives a little bit later what we call and playable ads or interactive ads where the user actually engages with the ad itself you can measure their engagement with your product because you have there some on the screen really so those points I would definitely make yeah and I think I would add as well for in-app I'd argue that there's so much more accountability with measurement and tracking for a fact that X and Y has happened with an engagement with an ad or an interaction with the user so there's so much more performance metrics behind it and also the other thing is like the other benefit of in-app advertising is by far the most consumed content everyone spends so many hours a day on media the majority of that is within an app so the biggest advantage is speaking to users where they spend their time I think that's sometimes overlooked yeah I'm just going to add on to that as well it's not only speaking to the users is being able to understand who that user is so you can really make that messaging more relevant for them and again if you know exactly what environment they're in you can again make that messaging relevant to that moment in time whether they're on their commute or they're at home or whatever it may be yeah and I wonder if there is that argument that if I sort of think about my own behavior with web it will usually be searches or quite functional things on mobile web but then I go deep in app whether it's stuff that I want to watch on YouTube or it's whatever it might be so I want to know because it's quick there and I guess the benefit of app is that it remembers me and what I've done and I've asked well let's talk about measurement that said there was a really good point raised there what is it that you can measure then in terms of what users are doing in app what do you talk about that Rich yeah sure as a whole like multitude of different like event-based tracking you can do so you can really get a good understanding of what the users that are using your app are doing so like product analytics for instance is such a powerful tool within app within app properties because you really get understanding of the things within your app that users enjoy doing therefore you work on that more and the things that people do in the app that you perhaps they don't like doing and therefore you retract that from future like the product releases the other super interesting thing to understand with measurement within in app advertising is you can understand how that user came to your app so what were the actions they took to actually go and seek out your app by advertising via just going to from off the own accord and then understanding okay those users are my most valuable and useful to me so therefore I'll build my future product iterations around those we mentioned identity a second ago and of course there's a big debate going on in in the open web Russell you were part of that panel this week where we're talking about identity what if anything is going to change obviously with cookies getting depregated on in web browsers what's the story when it comes to in app and particularly about what Apple have announced earlier this year? yes as many around obviously iOS 14 updates which is opt in the users having to opt in to be able to then share their IDFA which IDFA is ID for advertisers which is Apple's way of being able to track that user across multiple different apps they want to stop that from a user privacy perspective but again when you think of mobile UK market probably it's 5050 share Android in iOS currently Google and Android haven't made any moves they're going to take away the Google ad ID so in the sense when it comes to measurement it's still available from an Android perspective and I think a lot of advertisers still have to remember that it's not going away it's still completely there but yeah when it does come to the iOS stuff it's just the case if advertisers now have to figure out different ways to measure whether that's aggregated whether that's working with Apple solution the SK ad network working with different partners as well nice I think also to this point specifically for brand advertisers who know how to build an audience because that's all they do on all other channels the challenge here because performance advertisers are able to they have to measure the actual like revenue they make on each user that installs their game for brands I think this it will be a challenge but it will be a little bit probably easier to set into this new environment because building an audience you can still do that because of the actual source app that you're showing on so if you know who plays that you can actually target that and that's good enough should we talk about SDK we've gone this long without talking about it someone give us an overview I remember doing this in my agency days and doing lots of presentations on basics about mainly about why you need to put it into your app in order to get stuff but someone just outlined for us in very simple terms what an SDK is and what exactly what it does I can do that so SDK software developer kit is basically a piece of code that an advertiser would have to put into their app which would then fire back to whoever the SDK comes from if it's a measurement partner like app slow or adjust or if it's a media partner like Facebook or someone like that or if it's product analytics like mixed panel etc so once the advertiser puts it in they can then customize and configure what data and what events you actually pull from that app and again what you pull from that user's phone you mentioned James that you were talking about it when you're back in your agency days we've done a lot of training with agencies recently and the question still comes up what is an SDK do I need to do it what do I need to do with that sorry it's still there from an ad network perspective for us an SDK more on the supply side so on the actual publishers where you're running your campaigns what is important to understand here is that because a networks SDK is actually integrated in the code of this specific application there is a diet relationship right between that network and that app developer which guarantees that the SDK is probably curated because they are performing well enough and they are stable and so low levels of fraud that is the first thing that comes to mind and I think it's really important to understand and also from the side of the supply of the supply angle yeah anything to add rich I think yeah I've never quite understood why SDK isn't stuck maybe it's a slightly better term that isn't cookie or pixel related yeah but yeah it's just a necessity for app developers brands whoever it may be in order to achieve all of those great things about inapp advertising that we spoke about throughout all of this so you need it for measurement you need it for product analytics you need it to serve ads you need it to understand which of all users are good for you and potentially not so good for you so it's an integral part of the app ecosystem and it's genuinely not a scary thing which is perhaps need to rebrand it but yeah very good I think it's like running a web campaign and not putting a single pixel or a cookie on the website yeah like you just would never do that in a million years so it's the same when it comes to app that sort of leads nicely into there's clearly a whole raft of agencies and advertisers who are running app campaigns and get this stuff but if you're new to the game you've got a brand new app we've got an app that's been in the app store but you're looking to put some promotion behind it what other sort of things you should be thinking about before you start before you talk to an agency or you get in touch to one of you guys yeah I think like first and foremost you need to try and understand who you actually want to promote that too because that will make like huge differences in terms of the marketing partners that you choose to run with the types of campaigns you choose to run with as well and also what you're looking to get off the back of it so it evaluates the different marketing platforms that are out there and then also have an understanding about is this just a pure branding exercise to try and get natural or organic installs or is it pure performance based or are you looking at like post install events like I only want to drive installs for users that actually take a taxi ride with my tax assistance so I would get all of those things in place first before you actually start implementing campaigns putting measurement and tracking in place and then going on certain things live yeah nice Russell yeah I was going to add it's also then once you've gone through that journey the rich mentioned is what's the next iteration is it cool I've got this app I've got people to install I now need to re-engage with them so then again it's thinking about how you're going to re-engage with them is your customized messaging do you want to blueprint your CRM systems do you want to bring in your whole marketing system and look at it from that perspective it's what is the function of the app I think as a mark Parker from Nike said when you're talking direct to consumers in digital it's mobile and in mobile it's app if you want to have a direct one-to-one communication with your consumers you go straight into the app yeah once you have that's when you have that ability to do that so I think if advertisers are going on that journey and like this is the core function of what I do then they really need to think about how it ties into everything that they're doing do you think that a lot of in-app advertising gets bucketed into performance and maybe quite rightly but is there a role here for you know brand-led campaigns you talked about organic installs and things like that but is it right that it's mainly performance advertisers or is there a role if you're looking to build brand you can use in app as well I would argue that maybe it is skewed more towards performance because the metrics are that much more accountable every single cent that you have spent for every ad is leading to an action so because it's so much more accountable I think naturally it falls into performance I think in the past we've heard there's performance and then there's brand performance which is literally just brands doing performance I just think that's what mobile in app advertising lends do because the metrics are so concrete and I think as well is you are with when you talk about mobile and especially if you are promoting that app is you're literally driving someone to an absolute downloader so like you said rich you can measure all of that I think the only kind of brand recently that I've been seeing doing branding for their app is probably tiktok but then again that's more around user engagement most brands I see advertising their app there is a call to action which is download my app go into my app buy something within my app it's not here's an ad that talks about my app I want you to go to my store disconnect makes total sense and tiktok I'd imagine spending a few quid on a campaign and I quite of the moment as well in terms of scale I guess two questions really Sandra in terms of scale from a network point of view the scale feels like it's absolutely huge is there anything tools wise where you can start to look at quality of apps within networks or anything like that does it work in the same way as tools that we've got on the web I would say the first one is probably around viewability for brands that's probably the most important thing let's say you run a not you don't have an app you don't want to install so there I think mostly what you guys are doing the ibs open measurement SDK is probably what you want to use and then I think just as a general argument that I would make is that in app traffic in terms of brand safety is by definition brand safe because the supply partners are applications and those are very frightened regulated by the app stores we just see now what is happening when I was 14 and Apple has the total power there to do whatever they want so this virtual learning tease and environment without issues of whatever inappropriate negative content and running against stuff that you don't want to run against and that's the one thing and I also think that in terms of apps fires actually doing twice a year performance index where you can see all the demand sources ranked and that's also a good place to look at and I will add here that last one we that came out our answers was number three after Facebook and Google so nice just as an FYI nice little mic drop moment in there like to do in the plug that I didn't have to do you're referring to the sort of the epic fortnight thing where they've come out and said look we don't want to play by Apple's rules thanks for actually on their own and Apple have written a very nicely worded letter to say actually we've got users at heart and you've got to play the same rules as everyone else let's talk a little bit about creativity because maybe this is the other one as well because perhaps when you think about performance when you think about driving installs and you're thinking about lifetime value perhaps creativity doesn't come to for like it should do you think that's a misconception as well how creative can you be in some of these environments what would you think rich I think that's a huge misconception because I think when people think of creative on mobile in app they probably still think of a tiny little banner at the bottom of the screen which to be fair has its place like we talk about scale and reach that probably offers you the most so it's not to be discarded yeah in my opinion on a trial of them like that the beauty of mobile in app supplies you can a b test to be blue in the teeth so I would just keep going with a whole range of creative formats to find out which one suits best for the target audience you're looking to achieve so whether you're looking at video we talked about rewarded but whether you're looking at 30 second video or even shorter interactivity with playable ads are obviously hugely popular now yeah yeah and the final thing I'd note is like the mobile offers so many cool like features that you can play around with as well so even if you're just using basic stuff like location there's still like augmented ads that you can play around with this obviously QR code is still alive somewhere so there's a whole host of different things that you can do in mobile that you just can't achieve on other platforms yeah nice at your take on creativity Russell now I was going to say I agree as well as you can become a lot more creative because there's so much more about that user what they're doing what their behaviours are how they engage with the app how they like to engage with the app whether it is push notification or whether it's an ad on a certain media channel and it's then it's when you again talk about that re-engagement it's the deep linking functionality being able to take them straight to that product page like anybody either you talk to and you show them deep linking they're like oh wow that's so great that's made my life super easy you don't really get that functionality is so much on other properties and on app it's a real benefit for it definitely and I think I know what the answer is Sandra but the stuff that you make be spoke for these environments creatively is going to work better than stuff that you're running everywhere else and you just slightly just repurposed and as Rich said you've just taken a banner you're running online and made it in eighth of the size and hope it's going to work but the stuff you make be spoke which uses all those features that Russell's talking about that's going to work better right? yeah definitely we are doing a lot around creatives and you can go all in with this right like you can run a creative where the scenario is something that is more let's say on the negative side maybe I'm just imagining like there was a creative of of homescapes a while back I don't know if you know this game but it's a puzzle game where you need to build a house and in one creative the house was because there was like a fire or something like it got destroyed and in the other creative it actually was really like nice and designed and you can maybe test that and actually what we saw was that the more like let's say serious creative actually got better engagement so in terms of just rebuilding your story for brands as well like you can do so much and you have so much space you have actually 15-20 seconds of a video that can even be engaging so let's imagine you have a campaign for chocolate and you can ask the consumer which type do you like more dark or milk like you can be super creative here especially for for brands another question on scale there's a massive amount over 80% of the time spent in apps is with I believe five non-native apps does it mean that you can plan a campaign with direct partners I mean who are the top five and what sort of scale is there outside of them actually I think this number is from 2015 which is pretty long ago right when the ecosystem was very different just as an example I did some research before and TikTok which was back then called musically because you mentioned before had I think a roughly 70 installs in that year that came out so the ecosystem is entirely different today so I wouldn't be so sure that this is still the case and in addition to that I think the it's very different for each demographic and for each specific user and I think they also change frequently if you would look at the verticals you probably see mostly social and gaming that are being used but inside those it can change right so you can spend time on Instagram you can spend time on LinkedIn you can spend time on this game or that game and it also is really different by by demographic so female users between 30 and 40 would count myself here usually have social apps news apps and kind of puzzle and word games that they're spending time and so again like audience building is like such a big thing here right because you need to find the place where you can catch those audiences and if a game is that place or if you know a social app is that place then go for it but I think it's bit of a misconception we need to fix and it generally is thinking about audience first is it would be impossible to say that my five top apps would be the same as yours Rich exactly and I think that's what goes back to my original point around like firm measurement and like being able to target an audience like you probably don't want to go into an in-app marketing strategy and go I want to target this to these two apps it's probably the wrong approach what you want to do is you want to go into it and say I want to target this audience and therefore it's going to be across a whole multitude of apps but to like the original point about so much of it is gaming of course a lot of it is gaming but we seem to just forget I think when we talk about the in-app supply ecosystem that a lot of it is social as well like when we when brands talk about their Facebook strategy obviously I assume it's a large proportion of their budget but a large proportion of that budget will end up in-app as well because it's just where you use us are I think that's sometimes forgotten yeah it's a really good point time has flown incredibly quickly so I will finish as we we always finish with every podcast we've been asking questions about all sorts of things but the questions I would love to ask each of you and bear in mind I've sprung this on you I'd love to know the last app that you've deleted from your phones if you can recall Richie's giving me a sort of a knowing look like he might have deleted one this morning no I'm grabbing my phone to look for inspiration of what I may have deleted previously but I think it's rather sadly I've had a bit of overhaul and I deleted a lot of travel apps because sadly that obviously isn't happening right now so a lot of my flight apps booking dot com sorry to call them out and a few others have hit the bin for for the at least I hope for the short yes they may return of course Russell exactly this exactly the same yeah it's the travel apps yeah I would I thought it was like when Rich said that I was like I can't say that genuinely it's the travel apps that I just I've had like there's one app that I use called Bean which is basically tells you where you've been in the world and the percentage and I'm like why aren't you going to use that and Sandra over and above travel anything else that you might have deleted I think it was probably pepper pig because it's going crazy for that and I just can't dig it so I just still use it I know the app that's the worst bit isn't it maybe those travel ones will come back we hope so anyway but look thank you all so much for giving us half an hour it is surprising that there's still so much so many misconceptions around in app you've tackled all of those questions wonderfully thank you so much and yeah there'll be more information on the site we'll put a link in the notes but for now thanks Russell thanks Rich and thank you Sandra thank you thank you James thank you you're listening to our steering group special series thank you for tuning in to hear what the leading minds across mobile video and display have to say on some of the burning topics impacting digital today if you've enjoyed this session please share it and tag @ibuk on Twitter or Instagram subscribe wherever you're listening to hear all the steering group specials and for the regular iabuk podcast