Season 3, Episode 16: Understanding the UK’s DMCC (with Tom Smith)

My guest on this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Christoffer Holmgård, the CEO and co-founder of modl.ai, which allows game developers to deploy AI-empowered bots into their games to discover bugs and personalize game experiences. Our conversation is focused on the use of AI in game development. Among other things, we discuss: How AI is being used to assist with game development now, and how that might change or expand in the near term; Which of the less glamorous aspects of game development are the most natural places to apply AI;  How AI-assisted bots differ from those that were programmed with deterministic logic; How AI might play a role in live ops; How AI enables much larger and richer open worlds; How AI can be adopted by gamers; How AI can be used to radically personalize game experiences. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: Moloco. Moloco is a trusted and transparent advertising platform powered by machine learning. Moloco can drive the best outcomes for mobile app advertising through Moloco Ads as experienced by marquee brands such as Bumble, Draftkings, and Playrix. For retailers and streaming enterprises, Moloco also provides a best-in-class advertising platform powered by machine learning to build and manage their own ad businesses. Learn more at www.moloco.com/podcast. INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

My guest on this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Andrey Fradkin, an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Boston University's Questrom School of Business. The topic of our conversation is the role of antitrust in tech and the various design decisions impact consumer welfare. Among other things, our discussion covers: The role of antitrust law with respect to digital marketplaces; Whether digital marketplaces naturally trend toward anticompetitive behavior; How and whether certain consumer tech design practices can benefit consumers and still be considered anti-competitive; Amazon's treatment of its own products in search rankings (from Andrey's paper on the subject); Whether Amazon's branded search advertising product impacts the economics of retail on the Amazon platform; The tradeoffs that must be considered in the Amazon antitrust case (from Andrey's HBR article on the subject); How the impact on advertisers and consumers of advertising on the Amazon platform should be considered; How antitrust enforcement of Big Tech might evolve. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: Moloco. Moloco empowers businesses of all sizes to grow through advanced machine-learning solutions that deliver digital growth and performance for customers. INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

ho covers the retail media space through his blog, Media, Ads + Commerce. We discuss the current state of retail media, including: When the explosion in retail media began (when did Everything become an Ad Network?); Whether retail media budgets generally represent "new money" or are being redirected from elsewhere; The sustainability of growth in the retail media market; The measurement challenges that arise from advertisers' use of multiple retail media networks; Any forthcoming consolidation in the retail media segment; Which downstream categories (like eg., measurement) benefit from growth in the retail media space. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: Moloco. Moloco empowers businesses of all sizes to grow through advanced machine-learning solutions that deliver digital growth and performance for customers. INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

My guest on this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo is Fred Leach, a Vice President of Product Development at Meta. Fred published a blog post last month announcing three significant changes to Meta's advertising platform: new value-based optimization objectives, support for incrementality optimization, and integrations with third-party analytics tools. I invited Fred onto the podcast to unpack these changes in more detail. In our conversation, we discuss, among other things: How the Meta ads platform has evolved over the past 2-3 years; How Meta thinks about incrementality, and why it is important to advertisers; How Meta measures incrementality; The objectives that will be available for incrementality optimization; How integrating with third-party analytics tools contributes to improved advertiser performance; The new value-based segment targeting feature; Whether these changes will reduce the number of campaigns advertisers need to run; How these changes will ultimately combine with Generative AI for ad creative production; The rollout plan and timeline for these new features. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: Kayzen. A mobile-first DSP that is built to democratize programmatic advertising. INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

My guest on this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Garrett Johnson, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Boston University's Questrom School of Business. I was delighted to bring Garrett back to the podcast -- we recorded an episode about advertising auctions back in February 2022 -- because his seminal paper on the concept of Ghost Ads deeply informed my understanding of incrementality measurement in advertising, which is the topic of discussion in the episode. In our conversation, we cover: What advertising incrementality is; How a marketing team can measure incremental contribution from advertising; Whether incrementality is truly knowable; The concept of Ghost Ads; How ghost ads fit into an advertising workflow; Whether incrementality measurement necessitates prolonged advertising reaction cycles; The commercial risks of ignoring or neglecting incrementality measurement. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: Kayzen. A mobile-first DSP that is built to democratize programmatic advertising. INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with notable ad tech authority and former podcast guest Ari Paparo about the specifics of the Department of Justice's lawsuit against Google in its ad tech lawsuit, which recently went to trial. Ari is the CEO of Marketecture, which recently launched a new sub-site dedicated to Google's antitrust lawsuits called The Monopoly Report. I used this opportunity to speak to Ari to have him explain the various allegations made in the lawsuit (which I originally covered here). Among other things, Ari explains the specifics of: Google's restriction of its demand to AdX; Google's restriction of real-time bidding to AdX, while giving AdX "first look" (dynamic allocation); Project Bernanke / Global Bernanke / Project Bell; Header bidding and why Google wanted to suppress it; Project Poirot; Unified Pricing Rules / removing per-exchange price floors; Who was harmed by these tactics, and how. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: Kayzen. A mobile-first DSP that is built to democratize programmatic advertising. INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Bill Grosso, the CEO of Game Data Pros, a consultancy that specializes in experimentation for digital entertainment. Over the course of our conversation, among other things, we discuss: Experimentation as a concept in consumer products; Whether experimentation should exist as a standalone team or be integrated into the workflow of a product team; The tools needed for experimentation; How to ensure that experiments don’t conflict with or negate each other; Pricing experimentation; The most severe mistakes teams make with experimentation. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: Kayzen. A mobile-first DSP that is built to democratize programmatic advertising. INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Rockerbox. Get the clarity your marketing needs and navigate your way to success with Rockerbox. Visit rockerbox.com/maze today to see what it’s all about. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Rob Leathern, a trust and safety and business integrity executive, on the potential use of AI by bad actors to perpetrate scams and other forms of abuse on social media. Among other things, we discuss: The role of a business integrity function at a large technology company; How proactive these teams can be to new and emergent threats; The ways in which privacy vulnerabilities are exploited for monetary gain by malicious actors; How AI changes the threat landscape for things like business integrity, trust and safety, and privacy; How AI empowers large consumer platforms to fight malicious actors; Non-obvious threat vectors for consumer privacy. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Rockerbox. Get the clarity your marketing needs and navigate your way to success with Rockerbox. Visit rockerbox.com/maze today to see what it’s all about. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

My guest in this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Barak Witkowski, the Chief Product Officer of Appsflyer, a mobile advertising attribution and measurement platform. In our conversation, among other things, Barak and I discuss: The prevailing themes in mobile attribution; How advertisers have adapted to the rapidly evolving privacy landscape, and what separates the most effective advertiser initiatives from those that haven't worked as well; How the media landscape utilized by mobile app advertisers changed over the past few years; How mobile app advertisers should view the web as a potential source of installs; SKAdNetwork's transformation into AdAttributionKit and how should advertisers view that; How AI will play a role in marketing performance measurement. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Rockerbox. Get the clarity your marketing needs and navigate your way to success with Rockerbox. Visit rockerbox.com/maze today to see what it’s all about. Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

My guest on this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast is Offer Yehudai, the CEO of Arya, a product that helps couples re-ignite intimacy in their relationships. Prior to Arya, Offer was the President of Fyber, which was acquired by Digital Turbine in 2021. In this episode, Offer and I discuss the process and methodology of launching a consumer product. Among other things, we explore: Offer's philosophy for launching and growing consumer products; How to balance the desire to grow as quickly as possible and seize a market opportunity with the necessity of building a strong product foundation; The most appropriate focal metrics to optimize against as a product is called, and how those metrics might change over time; The right approach to thinking about audience targets at the earliest stages of product development, absent data; How to manage product optimization at the early stages of product growth; The right approach to monetization at the early stages of product growth. Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Rockerbox. Get the clarity your marketing needs and navigate your way to success with Rockerbox. Visit rockerbox.com/maze today to see what it’s all about.