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- [00:00]
A
Before we jump into today's all killer no Filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The DTC Podcast is brought to you by Pilot House, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing DTC brands in the world. Creative Media and Customer Journey all under one roof. Performance and brand without the trade off. Every Friday we hand the mic to a Pilothouse operator to break down what's actually working in their space right now. Want a team that treats your growth like their own? That's Pilothouse. Head to Pilothouse Co and now on with the show.
- [00:30]
B
Applovin is it's growing pretty quick. We're seeing variety of results across our clients, but for the most part they've been very strong. There is quite a large new audience to tap into. It's not just like, oh, only these three verticals will work. All verticals potentially can tap into an audience here because their apps that their network consists of is just so wide. It's not just certain types of games, it's games that 20 year olds are playing, it's puzzle games that 60 year olds are playing.
- [01:05]
A
Quick word from Paramount Ads Manager if you've been living in paid social, you already know the problem. You're paying more every quarter for an ad. Somebody scrolls past in half a second. Paramount Ads Manager puts you somewhere totally different on TV's biggest shows across Paramount Plus CBS, CBS Sports, Pluto TV and more. Paramount Skydance content makes up about 1 in 5 of all streaming minutes viewed in the US and Paramount plus drives 21% higher ad attention than other streaming services. And it makes sense because these are non skippable full screen spots running right next to the shows people actually sat down to watch. No scroll, no skip, no little square buried in a feed. Just your brand in front of someone who's paying attention on the biggest screen in their house. Sign up today@paramountadsmanager.com get your brand on TV's biggest shows by tomorrow. It's all killer. No filler. This is the DTC podcast and I'm here with Pilothouse's Head of Meta Jacob, who is here to give us a bit of a breakdown of his experience with the platform. Applovin Big fan of this platform. Been following it for a while. Got a few hesitations about it. I love that it was named after a super bad joke and that even though it tried to rename itself Axon, people were just like no, that's not a thing. It's still going to be called Applovin. Can you just walk me through to start your sort of experience on the platform and give me a sense of how it's working compared to a platform like Meta today for some of our clients.
- [02:32]
B
Yeah, I mean Applovin is, it's growing pretty quick. We're seeing variety of results across our clients, but for the most part they've been very strong. You know, a lot of the instances. It's very similar to what we're seeing on Meta in terms of CPA return on ad spend, even things like impression costs and all that. And it's an interesting platform, right? It's, it's a little different than your standard social platform like Pinterest or Meta or TikTok. It's, you know, if you've played a mobile game, if you've ordered delivery, if you're browsing apps to kill time, which pretty much everyone is these days, you've probably interacted with ads that have been built on Applovin and they've recently opened up to the public. You know, historically, the past two years it's been more of like an invite only kind of exclusive platform. They're sort of testing the waters with certain industries verticals, but they've just recently opened up to the general public. So we're getting a lot of requests from the clients we manage. We have a service built out and yeah, it's growing, growing fairly quick. It's, it's an exciting platform, honestly and excited to get into it a bit more.
- [03:42]
A
It had really high minimums before and those are now down now. What are their minimums on the platform now?
- [03:47]
B
No, no minimums. They, they sort of recommend around 250 bucks a day minimum just to, you know, get the data that you need. But they have some incentives and things like that if you are spending a little quicker out the gate. And from what we've seen, it's, it's worth, you know, putting at least a few hundred in a day to get your initial data.
- [04:07]
A
And if you look at the platform's growth, it definitely tells a good story. You compiled some stats for me here about how quickly the platform has grown, how big it's getting so quick. It's also I came across the fact that they sort of have like they sold their app business actually in 2025. So that's like the company itself is all in on this E commerce engine, which I think is a vote of confidence for sure. What do you have to say about their growth? I guess?
- [04:35]
B
Yeah, I mean they've grown about 60% year over year. They're doing like almost 2 billion in revenue. In the first quarter of this year. So like they're, they're a massive company. They've, they're kind of been like a secret engine under the hood that a lot of people aren't aware of. They just obviously you're aware of ads you're getting on mobile apps but for the most part that's, that's coming through AppLovin. 60% growth. Yeah, tons of money. Their margin is also strong so they're, they're quite healthy. They're actually publicly traded on the Nasdaq and you'll see like their, their cost per share is quite high. So they have a, a large market cap for sure.
- [05:14]
A
Walk me through an example without giving me the brand necessarily of, of a client who it's really, really worked for. Maybe walk me through the process of, of because I'm always interested in like I've heard, I've heard stories about brands being able to come out of the gate and spend like at a level that you could potentially spend on meta which is kind of unheard of in this world. So maybe walk me through a really like best case example of, of how it worked and how long it took to get to scale.
- [05:39]
B
Yeah, 100% in terms of best case. Brands that have sort of a, a unique product that catches your attention obviously is always good but something in that like 30 to $150 range would kind of be the magic magical range. Based on what we've seen it's not the best platform for like $500 products. Thousand dollar products. A little more consideration there. And when people are you know, browsing on their mobile they're, they're in more of a like an act now sort of like if you're playing a game and an ad interrupts you, you're going to be a little frustrated. If it's a thousand dollar product your consideration is likely going to be very low unless it's something that you've been thinking about for a while. So we've seen those products in that kind of $50 range honestly come out the strongest. We have like a, a health product that essentially you hook up to yourself and it, it helps with your muscle relaxation, things like that. Very benefit oriented in the sense of. Yeah, people that are maybe active, people that are, are you know, out running whatever that is. We put that onto Applovin. We figured the fit is good. Once they're kind of home relaxing maybe that's when they're, they're sore right after their activity and giving them something benefit oriented that is perfectly aligned there so we've gone in, we developed creative, mostly video creative with a bit longer length, like don't rush the content. The 15 to 60 second ads for the most part are unskippable. So you do want a little bit more of a longer video. It allows you to build that narrative, tell the viewer what it is, why it solves a problem, why they should care. We developed a good bank of videos. Some of that we already had from Meta, but we've also developed some specifically for Applovin. Really hooks the viewer, you know, here's the product. Are you sore? Are you, you know, do you need this type of muscle exercise? We got the perfect product for you. Gets right to the pain point. Then there's the end card. So you actually have the ad. They click that, it translates into an end card, which is like an HTML file. It's like animated. It's kind of like the call to action that comes after the ad and it will have an offer potentially. And they click that end card and that's like, brings them right to the product page. So in a way the end card sort of acts like a middle step and it allows you to sort of, you have your video educating all these things. They click it. The end card is more action oriented. By the time they click through that, they're ready to go and there's an animation on there and everything. And that's another difference of, you know, Meta or Instagram. There's no end cards. It's add to landing page. This is add to end card to
- [08:25]
A
landing page or it's a product page directly. In that case, your landing page might be a bit more the end card and you're taking them to a more purchase ready page.
- [08:34]
B
Yeah, distinct CTAs on that end card. Social proof. And there's sometimes, you know, if, let's just say you have a basketball product or something, the end card will have like the animation of the basketballs firing into the hoop. Those kind of, you know, five second loops that you see things like that to capture, you know, that attention. So yeah, they, they clicked through that and we sort of went wide with those, launched them all. I think we were doing like 500 a day right out the gate. Campaign setup was fairly simple. We just had a couple campaigns set up. For the most part, broad targeting let the algorithm do its work. And then as we started dialed in on, okay, these types of videos are obviously bringing in better metrics. These types of end cards are bringing in better metrics. Let's get in there, let's add Some variety. Yeah. We scaled up basically a one to two month timeline. We turned it around and they were profitable like in month two. So pretty quick learnings were quick. Nice thing about Applovin is the actual campaign management setup isn't, isn't super complex but it does require a lot of love, it requires a lot of creative, it requires a lot of. Yeah, loving. There's bidding and you can do all these, you know, unique pieces of it.
- [09:51]
A
But what about exclusions? I'm always interested in a platform like this where you might have like a lot of kids. You know, I just saw a tweet from Shereen Aubert actually talking about how she watches her kids in real time clicking the ads to try to get out of them quicker when, when they're on there. Are there any like I. You said targeting. Are there any valuable exclusions or do they even allow exclusions or do you just have to trust the algo.
- [10:15]
B
Yeah, no, you can exclude a lot of the time your products. You know, if you're doing like an alcohol product or something, you're going to have to exclude under 21. So you can do age exclusions. You can also just do audience suppression. Like if you have lists that you don't want to hit for whatever reason.
- [10:31]
A
You can load existing customers for instance if you really want to prove that it's incremental or new customer acquisition channel.
- [10:37]
B
Yep, a hundred percent. Yeah. Your existing customers and then yeah, the filtering and content controls based on your product you do have in terms of kids content. Applovin will like automatically not show ads for people they know are under 13 years old. But that doesn't address the issue that you said where a kid maybe is on their mom's phone or whatever. So that, that is just part of it naturally. But yeah, for the most part you can exclude and their policies will want you to exclude a lot of the time as well.
- [11:08]
A
And then when it comes to things like incrementality, people are always looking for places to generate new customers. Are you pretty confident that like when I think about it, I think this whole world of people on apps is maybe different than people on their metaphone. You probably are reaching a new audiences. Are, is the data kind of bearing that out?
- [11:26]
B
Yeah, there's, there's some overlap but for the most part there is quite a, quite a large new audience to tap into and not just like, oh, only these three verticals will work. All verticals potentially can, can tap into an audience here because their apps that their network consists of is just so, so wide Right. It's, it's not just certain types of games. It's, it's games that 20 year olds are playing. It's games like puzzle games that, you know, 60 year olds are playing. So it's really, really wide and yeah, definitely can tap into new audiences. We still would suggest using a MTA like triple Whale or something like that. Really dial into that, you know, what is my actual new customer cpa. Because just like any ad platform, it's gonna tell you one thing and the actual benefit might be different. But yeah, we're always using AAA, north beam, you know, MTAs like that to basically verify before we scale. But yeah, I mean right out the gate I'd say maybe, maybe 60, 70% of our brands are seeing similar new customer CPAs to some of their other platforms, which is great to see.
- [12:33]
A
Yeah, always great when a new contender emerges. I come from the mobile world. I had a startup back in 2013 called Tap for Tap and it was a exchange. It was like Applovin in the very early days. Should have stuck with it maybe, but back then there was a lot of, and I think there is some sec drama right now potentially about attribution, not theft but attribution, spamming or like when you get, when you have as many apps on as many devices as a platform like this has, there is a worry that you're going to, you know, that, that this platform might take credit for purchases that you're paying for elsewhere on Meta or Google. I guess obviously the MTA platform we're doing helps us dedupe that, but maybe speak a little bit to how confident you are that that's not happening.
- [13:21]
B
Fairly confident. It definitely is happening. But that's the, that's why you need that like mta. Like I mean for myself example, like I'm on Instagram, then I may be on Reddit or you know, some mobile game on Instagram. I see an ad for the product. Later on my game I see that Same ad app 11, you know, has their own sort of delivery system and all these signals and I don't know but you know, they can potentially see what you're, you're searching on the web and all these things that, you know, Meta can see as well and there's going to be recognized trends across, across apps. So it's like, yeah, Jacob likes basketball and it's going to show me basketball ads so that the chance I see similar products across Meta's platform. You know, my, my other app platforms is, is high. Maybe I'm only Interacting on Meta. Applovin takes a view attribution because I viewed that same ad on their platform but I purchased through Meta so that's always going to be an issue. But if you're dialing into triple Whale, it's only going to fire that one purchase and attribute it to one platform. Whereas not every platform is going to just fire half a purchase, they're always going to fire a full purchase. I'm very confident it's driving new value because we're seeing that in our MTAs on specifically new customer CPA. Not just CPA. New customer CPA. Yeah. In some cases it isn't nearly as high as the platform is showing, so you do need to verify that.
- [14:59]
A
And then what can you say about scale? Like when I think it was Sean Frank, I heard this was probably two years ago now, but he was just talking about, he was sort of blown away at the scale compared to something like Meta. You've been working with meta for long, long time now. What do you see in terms of the scalability of the platform versus something like Meta?
- [15:18]
B
Yeah, I feel like it's not quite as matured out as, you know, Meta. Like as you scale in general, your efficiency is probably going to drop a little bit. But if you do follow their best practices, we work very close with a couple Applovin reps who actually like, give us additional insights as we're scaling up. You know, you might see some, some efficiencies lost here. So you should actually tap into this avenue, things like that that we're developing a, you know, sop around. So the scalability is definitely there. It does take a little bit of testing. It's not just a proven out system where there's only one way to go about it. The key really is to be feeding lots of videos. You can't just run the same five videos for a year. It needs to have a lot of variety. People get pretty annoyed when they see that same unskippable 60 second video five times in a day. So that's kind of a key. And you do want to shorten the funnel. You don't want to make like eight different pages to click through. You want to make it as simple as possible, have that end card really engage them and because of this, less roadblocks, lots of video, lots of variety. You can scale up and you can hit people multiple times before they purchase. So yeah, I'd say like one interesting thing with applovin is about 80% of the purchases do occur in like the first hour of a user clicking an ad. But that other 20% that's, that does end up purchasing, it's always through another video. Like it's not through the same video. You're hitting them with maybe like a slightly different hooks, different messaging. So yeah, that, that kind of time to purchase is something that's interesting to, to validate through triple Whale as well the view through metrics and everything like that.
- [17:06]
A
And then in terms of creative volume, are we talking one or two new creatives? I guess it depends on scale obviously, as you say, I think it's a good, good to think in the customer's head about having to go through these, these creatives, having them be content, locked, wanting to make sure you're showing diverse aspects of the product and different looks at it. Talk to me, I guess a little bit about what creative volume looks like for one of the brands that we've achieved some decent scale on.
- [17:29]
B
Yeah, I mean, I would say like to start with, if you're spending, you know, 500 bucks a day type thing, you're going to want at least like 10 videos in there. This is based, if you're just going around one product, which I would recommend at the start, focus on like a hero product. Don't try to promote your whole catalog right out the gate. Something in that $50 range potentially. And then, yeah, you're, you are adding quite a bit. Ideally it's, you know, again, if you're spending 500, maybe to a thousand a day, you're looking up to about 10 to 20 per week. I would say videos, they don't necessarily have to be completely new concepts, but they might be similar videos with different hooks at the start. They might have, you know, different music, things like that. But for the most part, approach it similar to meta. You do want a lot of variety on different buckets of, you know, types of formats of creative and hooks. You don't just want like the same video a hundred times, right? So I would say yeah, if you're launching, you know, maybe about 10 at the start per week and then as you scale up, it might get closer to 20, 30 per week. And like I said, you know, mostly, mostly video. So you can kind of define quite a bit of a focus in there. And yeah, you just want to really want to feed it. You know, once you get to 5,000 a day, you might be needing 25, 30 new videos a week. Once you get to 50,000 a day, which is quite a bit, you're going to need a whole system built around that for, you know, potentially like 100 videos every week or two. But yeah, that 10 to 20 range per week is a good, good starting point and very feasible for most brands.
- [19:06]
A
You've got a few other points here on the creative. So maximizing the video length, take the, take the time that you have. You do want to try some 15 second ones, but you do want to try some 60 second ones as well. You want to hook the viewer, grab that attention immediately. Obviously I guess that's similar. But then you also say add captions. I think that makes a ton of sense because of how many players have their audio muted.
- [19:27]
B
Yeah, I think it's like honestly more than more than 50%. I'd have to double check that. But captions are needed I would say and even better if you can make them like engaging captions, not just your standard like white subtitles, but actually have the unique fonts and colors, maybe bolding certain buzzwords and things like that to really, really add some engagement through the captions as well.
- [19:51]
A
And then the end cards, are you uploading those wholly designed on your end or are you using templates that applovin provides?
- [19:57]
B
Both. We typically will start with our own full uploads. We you know, develop the HTML end card, the animation, but they do have built in templates as well to help with that. And you can sort of upload like images and then add certain animations and CTAs to it. They're nice and user friendly there. And you will want to test quite a few end cards. So just depends if you want full control for a full custom solution or you want to use their templates which as you're starting honestly both are good solutions but as you scale up and up you probably are going to want to go more the custom route for sure makes sense.
- [20:33]
A
And as you mentioned like if you're on a basketball app, you can have funnel congruency by having basketball be featured on the end card.
- [20:40]
B
Yeah, and it can kind of like you can do some unique like transitions and things as they click that into the unique product page which maybe has a similar animation or just similar imagery on it. I think in some cases you can even almost have it like a game within a game. Like the end card might have a quick game on it. Not that you can interact necessarily with the game but like if you're doing a puzzle game and you're selling a puzzle product, the end card might have like a like interactive like oh, try to match the two things and like things will pop up and you're trying to match them because the longer you stay on the the end card as well. You're your engagement scores like go up as well across Applovin and gives you more priority.
- [21:22]
A
And then just a couple quick notes on the campaign setup and the bidding. You have a note here about how essential the learning phase is. And once you get things set up at your budget, you know the 10 creatives you mentioned that you might need, you really don't want to touch it for the first seven days.
- [21:36]
B
Yeah, set it up. Go through the step by step on the setup. There's lots of little settings you're going to want to validate. Make sure they align with your goals. Yeah, once you know it's set up and you have your 1020 videos live, make sure tracking is working. Confirm the tracking. There's an app, love and pixel that you place across, you know, Shopify or your site, very simple to install and they'll even send instructions to support with that as, as well as we can obviously support with that. And then yeah, once you confirm, okay, tracking is working, things are set up. Got my utms, all this thing and is good to go. Just leave it for a week, maybe even two weeks. Don't go in there playing with it three days in, you really do need to validate the data. And Applovin does need some time to build up. I would say meta is a little quicker in that three to five days in, you kind of have a good feeling of what your metrics are going to look like. Applovin, you might not get any sales the first three days and then boom, day four to seven, it just starts to take off. So give it some time and then you can start to sort of optimize and build on it on a weekly basis.
- [22:41]
A
Yeah, I was just actually talking with someone for our agency, community business, who runs like a radio business and radio advertising, which is we hardly ever talk about, but I think one of the reasons radio advertising works is it reaches an older audience and older audiences are more likely to have money. So when it comes to things like age targeting, for instance, are you seeing that older audiences are the ones to kind of prioritize here or is it dependent?
- [23:04]
B
Yeah, I mean in general I would say most the purchases are coming from the 30 to 60 age group, but certain products definitely are leaning younger, like 20 to 30. 65 has been a bit tougher to make work from what we've seen, but yeah, like that. 30. Not to say they're old 30 year olds. I'm 35, but 30 to 60 has kind of been the magic range and your product within that is going to automatically optimize. It's going to say, you know, Applovin is going to say, okay, we sent this, this ad out to a thousand people. The 50 to 55 year old seem to be interacting with it more. Let's, let's lean heavier into that. And it's a self learning system. So your, your creative is going to help a bit with who you're, you're targeting. And then if you're being forced into a certain pocket that you're like, hey, this doesn't align at all with our, our ideal demographics. You can go in and set the age targeting and sort of force it back. But again, at the start we would suggest it to just let it do its thing, let the algorithm really dial in. There's definitely older audiences to capture, younger audiences to capture. And you'll notice the apps you're showing on will differ quite a bit based on that as well.
- [24:22]
A
We've talked about the negative aspect or this idea that it's possible that there are some conversions that are being credited for Applov and that it might exist elsewhere. But there's also the alt, the alternate side which is like if you're able to really focus on new customers, if these new customers are viewing a 30 second or 60 second branded creative, it's got some of the potential to create Halo effects for other parts of your business. Just because you're able to, you know, really work that top of funnel, generate awareness for your product in this environment and there's really the positive potential of it providing much more top of funnel awareness for other parts of your funnel as well.
- [24:59]
B
Yeah, if you can just kind of get in their mind and stay top of mind. Again, when they're playing a mobile game, they might not be in the like buy now mindset. So they might not actually interact. But the people that are interacting, like I said, most of those purchases occur within an hour. So it's interesting in that sense. But all the ones that aren't interacting because the ad is full screen and unskippable, they might Google you later, they might check you out on Amazon later in the day. Something rings the bell. Oh yeah, I saw that full screen ad. Let's check it out on this other platform. So definitely some echoing Halo effects and again like an MTA might help with that a bit. Applovin does try to track view purchases as well, but it's not going to be perfect. So yeah, I think putting it all together, have benchmarks on all your platforms. Hey, we launched AppLovin two weeks ago. All of our other platforms are up 5%. You know, if you're, you're benchmarking that, good, good chance you'll see a Halo effect for sure.
- [26:01]
A
We've now built an offer on the Pilothouse side out for advertisers who are looking for app Loven services. Maybe just describe what that package looks like or what the process looks like for any of our audience members who want to get on it, but maybe aren't feeling up to running it themselves to start.
- [26:16]
B
Definitely, yeah, yeah, we have an app, love and service. It is sort of bundled in with social. So if you're a Pilot House client, if you use us for meta, if you use us for Amazon, pretty much any of our services we can add in Applovin as an add on and it's definitely affordable. We'll scope it out for you, give you a price. We'll do a little audit on how we would approach it. And then we'll also loop in our team at Applovin that we've been working with for nearly two years now and they'll support with all that. They'll give us kind of the inside scoop from their end. And then, hey, if you want to move forward with it, we'll get you that retainer and we'll get a buyer in there that's an Applovin expert. We have a few buyers that are starting to really dial in as Applovin experts and focus more on that. And then we have this whole team of creative minds behind us that are going to support in building the video and really it is like we'll pretty much handle everything and we just need the goals from the clients and the, the long term sort of strategy that we'll collaborate on. But we want it very, very low uptick for our clients and we want to prove it out to them that, hey, here's our three month plan. We're going to prove it out and then we're going to scale it to the moon from there.
- [27:32]
A
Beautiful. Well, and it's an opportunity to work with one of the true OGs at Pilothouse, working with Jacob. So go to Pilothouse Co, fill out a lead form or just email Jacob directly@jacobilathouse.co if you want to chat Applovin with him. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Looking forward to kind of keeping my finger on this pulse and seeing we got Applovin actually potentially coming in on the sponsor side of the newsletter, which I'm really excited about. So I'm excited for like an ongoing relationship that we build out and excited to hear how we continue to scale these bad boys up.
- [28:02]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. Thanks for having me on here.
- [28:11]
A
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer Co. And if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's all killer no filler services, take off to Pilothouse Co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the D2C podcast. We'll see you next time.