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Ep. 72 Tracking the Future: Oren Kaniel on Mobile Attribution, Privacy & Persistence
00:29:46
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- [00:00]
Ad Tech God
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- [00:32]
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Ad Tech God
Your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host Ad Tech God. Welcome to the AdTech Godpod your go to for conversations with AdTech company founders. Today I'm happy to welcome oren Canyol, the CEO and co founder of AppsFlyer. For those who don't know AppsFlyer, it is a mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform. Oren's been working on AppsFlyer for almost 14 years, so I'm excited to hear about how he started the company and the direction that he sees the company moving towards. Oren, I'm really excited to have you here. Thank you for being my guest. Welcome to the pod.
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Oren Canyol
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
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Ad Tech God
So before the podcast we were talking 14 years. Oren. That's a long time.
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Oren Canyol
Well, it's the first time I hear 14 years because it's getting to 14 years. So actually almost 14 years ago me and my co founder Reshef started playing around with different things and we ended up well we think that attribution is really needed for mobile applications and and it kind of created start working on the product kind of mid-2011 and we kind of had like initial product by the end of 2011. So getting to 14 years, what was.
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Ad Tech God
The gap in the market that you felt you needed to fill? How did you lean into this? Because I think prior to this were you working in advertising or were you engineering? What made you kind of jump into the industry?
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Oren Canyol
I think that this is, this, this is really interesting because I had nothing to do with advertising, nothing to do with marketing, nothing to do even with the Internet as an economy. I was software engineer and then I just got to know this serious gap that is going on in the market. And back then in 2010 and 11, I was, had this kind of program with the Wharton and I was spending time in Philadelphia and over there. This is where I actually started to work in my initial steps into the digital ecosystem and the Internet and advertising. And I had some really kind of life changing kind of realizations. One thing is, I clearly remember is the first day that I had my first iPhone. So I purchased kind of a used iPhone from Craigslist for research. I was using BlackBerry and I was sure that BlackBerry is the thing and that Apple do not have kind of a chance. It's kind of funny because the iPhone was around for three, four years, but I didn't even try it because I was living in Israel, in Israel. It was kind of hard to, hard to find. And then I was really intrigued by, by using the, the iPhone for the first time. And I, I thought that okay, this is, I, I must do something that is around smartphones. And then I saw kind of the beginning of the mobile app gold rush that applications and app developers couldn't measure. And the strategy, the well known strategy was pray and pray without measurement. You just been, you know, throwing money here and there, hoping for the best. And it just didn't make sense for me as a kind of a logical engineering mindset and really felt like this kind of a gold rush. And it really reminded me kind of the Levi story, how can we provide tools for these app developers to be successful in this market? And we thought that measurement and attribution is a critical part and specifically for mobile applications that were kind of invented without cookies from the get go. So everything that been working for mobile didn't really work for mobile applications. So it just didn't make sense to us. And I clearly thought that someone need to solve it. And I thought that whether it's going to be us or someone else, I wanted to solve it for the ecosystem. This is going to grow exponentially in the coming years. You know, smartphones and mobile applications and being part of this incredible ecosystem, we couldn't resist and we started to build this technology.
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Ad Tech God
And from an engineer's perspective, I could understand that you probably want to connect all the dots and understand how things are being attributed and how things are being measured. You're right, it was a gold rush in the beginning, and it definitely was a spray and pray kind of strategy. What do you think over the last 14 years, when was that aha moment where you realized, okay, I'm onto something, I've bought a dev device, I've figured out this mobile app ecosystem and we are finally figuring out how to address some of these concerns in market.
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Oren Canyol
Yeah, that was also a journey. It wasn't too long of a journey until we had this aha moment. So at the beginning we started to work on technology. I was starting mba and the mba, one of the classes, don't even remember, they're talking about the efficient market that doesn't really exist, but the market is close to efficient. And then we are working something that is so fundamental, I mean so basic, at least to our understanding, you know, understanding where the user's coming from, the user acquisition costs, connecting that to the lifetime value. It's so basic. And we've said to ourselves, how come something like doesn't exist? It just doesn't make sense. And it was also very hard for us to raise money for this because people didn't understand what we're doing. People understand how come something like that doesn't exist? Or people told us this is impossible, that people told us, hey, this is just a feature out of, you know, something else, you know, all kind of stories. And some, some VCs told us, hey, mobile applications is not visi fundable business. So it was kind of at the beginning of the gold rush, but people didn't really realize, especially investors. And then we thought, okay, let's just put the investors thing aside because we think that we are onto something. We think that we are building something that people really need. And we started to have some kind of friends and family, kind of customers, not really customers, but really friends and family and, and they found a lot of value in it. But the real aha moment that we had, I clearly remember that we had kind of a ride sharing app that was active in the uk and they had a campaign in uk, mainly in London. And they've been working with a bunch of ad networks and normally they would have like, you know, millions of clicks and impressions and all that kind of stuff. So everything kind of looked good. But as soon as they started to work with us with our attribution link, they still continued to have all this kind of engagement around the ads, like a lot of clicks and impressions and all that. But they couldn't find any rider, no installs. It just didn't make sense for them. And I remember that the network was really pissed off on us. I mean, what is this Apps Flyer and what is this link? It doesn't work, you know, and we didn't have a lot of confidence and you know, the software is really new. And I told Reshof, my cto, maybe you can take a look at the data. So we really got into the data and we were shocked. We saw clicks that coming from Asia, from Indonesia. It was the iOS campaign. And traffic was coming from Android, was coming from all over the world, like really random clicks that come from everywhere. And we were like, wow, this is incredible. Here you have an app developer paying for impressions and being paying for clicks. And this is what they got. They got junk and they've been paying for junk and they didn't even know that it doesn't deliver real users to the app. No real install. And when we said, okay, this is huge, because if this is how the economy works, let's just think what kind of incremental value that we can add, not only for the app developers and for the advertisers that will get really what they pay for, which is real users and real actions within the app, but also for the consumer experience what they see in their device. Because you don't want to see an ad on an iOS device that sends you to the Google Play to download an Android app, right? Or vice versa, or seeing something that is not relevant to you. So that was a very strong kind of validation. And for us, and I think that this is also when but this flywheel actually started, because then the network said, okay, maybe we can close this feedback loop. Maybe we can get this postbacks. And this is how the postbacks were kind of created. Okay, so if there is a conversion, we want to know about it the network so we can actually further optimize and bring you more of these users that actually been valuable to you. So this is really the beginning of the whole kind of mobile app install engagement kind of business in the industry. So that was significant aha moment for us.
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Ad Tech God
It's incredible to hear you say that initially people weren't interested in this or even that a client would look at you and wonder why you're not delivering on what they want. Because the industry just simply didn't have this as a. A mentality and as a solution in market. So when you're telling them, hey, these clicks are great, the impressions are great, but they're not converting to anything. They're just vanity metrics that aren't driving installs, I could see how people get upset when they're just generally used to those types of metrics and not looking at how this is backing out into a full install and where, where you're driving those installs.
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Oren Canyol
Well, you probably can understand the network that got used to get easy money, right? What do you want? You want clicks? I give you clicks. You want impressions? Exactly, Impressions, right? So that's easy money. So obviously they were not so happy about us and the competitors in the market. That said, okay, we have this measurement technology. We sell it to the advertisers, to the buy side, and this is how they buy media and measure it. But there was also resistance on the buying side, right, because they got used to the power of the habit. So they got used to do something in certain ways. And then we've been pitching, but we are measuring, we are measuring this and that. And then it takes, well, I said a little bit of time, but it took like a couple of years to really educate the market about the necessity of real measurement and real attribution. And that ROI is not something that is only on finance. It's really how you should think about your marketing budget. At least part of it or some of it when, when it can become measure. And then, you know, they really bought in. And then we saw Facebook starting, you know, the MP program back in 2011 that we've been part of. This is really an incredible story by itself because once buyers, the advertisers, the app developers see value and they can actually discover these kind of machines that they can put $1 into this machine and get $2 out of it. The size of the budget is really infinite, right? So once they realize that and managements realize that and CEOs realized that and board of directors realized that. So this is really when the market started to pick up budgets and becoming like this, tens of billions of dollars of industry just for mobile applications.
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Ad Tech God
How do you feel sitting where you sit with the analytics and the data and the metrics that you have access to for probably a multitude of clients? How are you seeing all the user privacy regulations that they're rolling out, whether it's whatever, GDPR or att? How does that impact you in collecting the right accurate, actionable data for you to make the right decisions for the clients?
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Oren Canyol
So maybe I'll start from the beginning and maybe a little bit I'll try to make it quick because we didn't come from the industry. We came with a very fresh kind of perspective of this industry with kind of an empty mind. For example, one of them is measurement. And the other thing is Privacy. So at the beginning, if you remember, iPhone devices came with udid and we said, okay, well you cannot reset that, you cannot opt out. Something feels kind of wrong. Even if you compare that to browser cookies, you can delete, you can even back then, but with that u did you could not. Well, I have some assumptions why it happened and why Apple released the first couple of years with udid and then they changed that to IDFA and then improved privacy and changed the privacy regulation around the platforms. And the same goes for Android and Google. At the beginning, even our SDK didn't really collect that because we didn't feel comfortable collecting it. But it was kind of the common practice collecting the Mac addresses and all that. But we didn't RSDK by default couldn't collect it, but you had to kind of use kind of a setter. The SDK is not collecting that kind of automatically. So privacy was always close to mind for us. And once we've identified kind of the four pillars and how we're thinking about the things that never going to change, one of them is privacy and security. So we've been thinking about in this industry that is ever changing and so rapid changes and every day there's something new. We asked ourselves, okay, what are the things that never going to change? And one of them is privacy and security. So we've been investing heavily in privacy and security. So all these changes were not kind of surprises by themselves. But let's say the magnitude of iOS 14 att is something that I can honestly say that we were surprised and together with the entire market, we're surprised with magnitude of that change because normally Apple would kind of introduce kind of a more gradual kind of changes that was kind of really kind of an earthquake. So we've been thinking, how can we help the ecosystem to preserve privacy, comply with platform regulation and provide attribution and accurate attribution. And I think that we reinvented so many things around how we do things and the way we collaborate with the platforms and the way we collaborate with with the app developers. But I can tell you that back in June 2020, the number of phone calls from customers and partners that were very much worried about tomorrow. I mean, I'm talking about hundreds and thousands of different phone calls and the companies were very worried about their future apps. Life felt like a support center for Apple. And I think that that was from all this kind of headache of okay, we are in front of something big and the market needs us, it became.
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Ad Tech God
Our purpose right then that's important.
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Oren Canyol
So with this kind of hardship and constraint. This is where we kind of invented ourselves in privacy preserving technologies right now, four years, four and a half years after we are known for our leadership in privacy enhancing technologies for measurement and data collaboration. We invented products around data, clean room data collaboration platform, retail media and how retail media is actually collaborating with the data in a privacy preserving manner. We invented various ways of leveraging SK Network, combining it with modeling and deterministic attribution and creating a single source of truth. So we really reinvented so many things and the level of partnership and the commitment that we have with the market and working with the, with our partners and working with the platforms and working with our customers. It was really hard. The last couple of years were probably the hardest years for us as a company and we had a lot of challenges along the way like many other companies. But the last couple of years were really, really hard, but very satisfying because we didn't shy away from the challenge. We really leaning into the challenge. And I think that it was, you know, in a retrospective it was great. It was really, really hard, but it was great.
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Ad Tech God
What direction do you see things heading in in the mobile space? We know that connected television seems to be the golden child today. Although mobile app spend is multitudes more than CTV spend in market, I think it's we, we highlight connect television a lot. But we also realize that mobile is such a massive market and it really makes CTV look small in comparison. But what direction do you think we're heading in as an industry when it comes to, you know, performance marketing? Is there any cross device or multi channel kind of solutions in market that you feel are helpful? Is that something you're focused on seeing the growth trajectory of other mediums? I'd love to hear your perspective on that.
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Oren Canyol
Yeah. So first of all, when we're talking about multi screen, uh, we are talking mainly on western countries because if you look at mobile first, mobile only countries, it doesn't really exist. Right. So mobile is everything that they have. They don't have credit cards, they don't have wallets for many years. Right. This is one market and us market especially is very different because people, I don't, I don't have the statistics but right now for every person that like, I don't know, like 10 screens, eight screens the day, shifting around different screens. So obviously omnichannel measurement is instrumental to really understand the customer journey. And this is something that we have products and we continue to invest in solving this problem because it's not a solved problem. It's very complex because the transactions and where the interest is generated and where the action is taking place. Thankfully, big portion of the action is happening on the mobile and big portion is happening on mobile app. And this is where we are really shy and this is where we had so much value. So the triggers can come from CTV and the action can take on the phone. So normally you would watch TV and use your phone, right? So you can see something on your TV and then create this interest on mobile phone and maybe you can make this transaction on mobile phone or book this, I don't know, trip or vacation on mobile phone. So obviously this is something that the industry is moving to already and we are heavily invested because this is where the market goes and this is where our customers are asking us to develop solutions because there are not a lot of solutions at all, especially when the conversions happening on the mobile device. And another very strong reason is that we already developed all these privacy preserving measurements, right? If you're thinking about SK network now, Apple call it a attribution because it's not only for the store, this is also web to web, web to app, app to web and app to up, right? And we have probably the best solution and with the by far more experience working with the SK network or mobile applications, this is very, very convenient for us to kind of take this kind of technology that is combined with modeling, deterministic attribution and providing kind of holistic solution, holistic measurement for the customer. Same goes for privacy sandbox. I mean Google Privacy is going to. Cookies are going to go away this way or another. But we have so much experience in privacy enhancing technologies for measurement for mobile application because again we are not doing measurement with cookies from the get go. So we have so much experience in doing measurement without cookies. And this is just very natural for us to move from mobile attribution or mobile measurement partner to just a measurement partner that measuring basically everything.
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Ad Tech God
What keeps you so driven? You know, 14 years to work at, you know, to run one company, to pivot and survive multiple changes in the mobile ecosystem. What keeps you in the industry? What keeps you driven to keep innovating and pushing forward? Because I, I could imagine that in 14 years you've seen a lot of changes. But what keeps you going? What keeps you motivated?
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Oren Canyol
Or to be honest, I don't know. I'm just a passionate person. You know, I've been thinking about it a lot. Do I have passion to numbers and measurement? Do I have passion to working with people and solving big problems? Do I have passion to kind of look into the future and know that they don't know the future. And I feel comfortable with not knowing the future and just getting my satisfaction with not knowing the future and, and thinking about the things that never going to change and what is the most important thing in life and how to enjoy this journey and how to enjoy these challenges that come along the way and how to handle different conversations or situations. So I, I really learned to maybe enjoy is not, is not the right word for it because words are very limited in how they describe feelings.
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Ad Tech God
But sometimes it's just going along with the ride. It's, you know, you, you pivot, you, you work with good people, you want to solve a problem and you just continue to push forward. It feels like what options do we have sometimes Oren, you know, you look and you keep driving forward, you keep innovating, you keep building some works, some doesn't. But the goal is, yeah, the passion is a huge driver for a lot of entrepreneurs I've spoken to, they say really it's just passion to just do it. Yeah.
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Oren Canyol
You know, I'm so passionate about A.I.
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Ad Tech God
Right.
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Oren Canyol
For the last two years I'm just, my mind is blowing and we're so, as a company where we're so obsessed with it, whether it's internal or into the product. And I think that this is so exciting. I mean, doing what we do and providing this really mission critical platform for our customers and the ecosystem. We feel so much the, the responsibility that we have towards our customers and partners in the ecosystem. Look, we have this commitment to stay independent and stay unbiased to the market for so many years and, and having this kind of big part of this story and this amazing echo. By the way, the mobile ecosystem is really an amazing ecosystem. You know, Covid was kind of a challenge time for us because we couldn't meet everybody and now we're getting back in the last two years and because it's kind of so influential. But from one end, the mobile ecosystem, but from the other end is not huge. And when you're going to conferences and we go to our own mama or MAU in Vegas or these guys, you kind of see the same people. And for this so many years. And this is incredible. I mean this is really incredible. I really enjoyed the journey, I really enjoy the challenges. You know, I've been thinking about this morning. There are some challenges I would avoid. Right. So obviously you're not looking for just random problems and okay, let's create this problem by purpose. Because I'm enjoying having Problems, but sometimes you need to select the problems, right? And if you have problems that you didn't intend to, you need to really grab it with your both hands and, and lean into it. And there is absolutely some benefit for everything that is happening. Even the hardest thing that can happen. For example, in the early stage, all the people that told us and the investors and I met dozens and dozens and dozens that told us, no, it's not going to work. It's impossible. You don't know what you're doing. You don't know this. It's going to be just a feature. No one needs it. Mobile app is not something that it's only for, I don't know, stupid games. You know, just lately, I open kind of this Excel file that I've been following. All the meetings that I had with VCs and, and some of them I marked as kind of in red that I never want to talk with them again, call them with, you know, names, assholes and stuff like that. And like, and I looking and even other words that I don't want to mention in the podcast. And I'm looking at these words in this Excel file now. I did it like a couple of weeks ago, I think. I didn't open that Excel, maybe 12 years. I look at the words that I've been writing 12 years ago when we've been raising Garcia Drum, and I'm looking at the anger that I had back then. And my answer is very simple. I need to thank each and every one of them. Because in every meeting that they told me, hey, Oren, this is bullshit. It's not going to work. It's a feature. You don't know what you're doing. They give me more fuel to show them.
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Ad Tech God
Yeah, it built the fight in you to prove them wrong.
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Oren Canyol
Yes. It gave me the fuel, it gave me the energy, it gave me the fire to show them.
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Ad Tech God
I mean, it makes sense. I've had some people initially, like, where are you heading in this direction? Nobody's ever going to hire you now that you've created ad tech. God. Now we are a media company with podcasts, newsletters, conferences, parties, gatherings. And every time somebody said it, I actually would double down. I would post more, I would be more active. I said, you know what? I'm going to go with this thing whether it booms and becomes a multimillion dollar business or it crashes, but I'm going to, I'm going to ride this thing ten times harder. And now, I mean, we've, we've sold out of a Conference. We've thrown multiple events. We've done interviews and panels, and so it's been an incredible ride. And that drive that you have, I can hear in your voice, and I'm happy you guys are doing well.
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Oren Canyol
Yeah, it's incredible. I have goosebumps just by that. Because when you're doing something different, people will tell you different things. But determination. The determination.
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Ad Tech God
Yeah.
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Oren Canyol
Is a huge journey by some kind of a passion or some inner fire that every. No. Is actually getting you even more power. You want to wake up early, want to work harder.
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Ad Tech God
Correct, Correct. I agree.
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Oren Canyol
But, you know, I think that different people, for me, when I'm getting this, it gives me more power, but I think that people need to find their passion. You know, we just had an SKO last week. I met with one of our salespeople. He was so passionate about the product. He was so passionate about what he was selling. I was just, you know, from this person, whatever is he selling, you want to buy? He knows what he's talking about. He. He leaves the product, he leaves the market. He actually knows the in and out. And this is where his confidence and passion comes from. You just want to spend more time with him. And what are you selling? I want to buy.
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Ad Tech God
Right, Exactly.
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Oren Canyol
I think that this is what drives companies, what drives success, what drive careers. Look, according to my statistics, all the red people that I marked didn't do well in the last 12 years. It's not that I'm happy about it. It's absolutely not just my small analytics about how I perceive different people and their performance, and it's not surprising at all.
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Ad Tech God
Oren, I wanted to thank you. Thank you for your time today and thank you for staying so late in Tel Aviv. I really appreciate your time and appreciate you being my guest here today.
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Oren Canyol
Thank you.
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Ad Tech God
Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates. So follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget, ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.