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Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Episode 113: In-app measurement with Brian Quinn of Appsflyer, plus lots of M&A news
00:49:39
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- [00:00]
Ari Paparo
This episode is brought to you by Zeta Global. Do you know what it takes to transform marketing into a data driven profit center? Are you able to align the C suite around your AI vision and strategy? Zeta Global has the playbook to help you get started. Download Driving growth in the AI era today at ZetaCMO AI Book. Again, that's Zeta CMO AI Book.
- [00:41]
Eric Franchi
Welcome to the Market Extra podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I'm joined today by Eric Franchi and our special guest, Brian Quinn, who's the President and GM of AppsFlyer. AppsFlyer is a mobile measurement company and there's been so much stuff going on in the app marketplace, we thought it was great to get an update. We have things like applovin and its various controversies. We have Apple and ATT being litigated in the European Union, bunch of other stuff. How much do you keep track of this stuff, Eric?
- [01:10]
Ari Paparo
You know, like the app measurement space and just like mobile apps in general, I think of it as like the, the second or third ring around Saturn, right? So if like Saturn is ad tech and our people of like programmatic and you've got the next concentric rings, theoretically, like maybe retail media and ctv, like mobile app is the next one out there. So it's like part of the planet, but it feels like it's a, it's a hop outside of it. So I'm excited to learn from Brian because it's a very big market, it's a very important market, but one that is, you know, just like beyond the typical, you know, kind of ad tech focus.
- [01:44]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, I agree with you. And one day we'll have Jim Payne on the show, but he keeps putting me off. I think I'm like five months into trying to get him on the show. The guy doesn't have a job and he won't come on our podcast. I mean, what's he doing? And I know he listens, so that's why I'm giving him a hard time. Okay, housekeeping. So this week, AdTech God. You folks should listen to the AdTech God podcast. It's pretty different from this one. It still covers kind of what's going on in ad tech, but, you know, he's kind of a nice guy as opposed to all the snarkiness you get here. So adtech God this week had a special pod with double verifying rockerbox, you know, straight from the headlines. Ripped from the headlines. So give that guy a subscribe and listen to his podcast. And then I also want to remind folks that the new marketure TV website is where you get all of the content on architectures. That includes our paid vendor interview videos as well as the free newsletter. There has been some confusion because separately, it was on a different website. It's all there on marketecture tv. So I'd encourage you to check it out, bookmark it, and do anything else necessary to get involved. All right, with that, let's get into it with Brian Quinn from AppsFlyer. All right, Brian Quinn from AppsFlyer, thank you so much for being here.
- [02:56]
Brian Quinn
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [02:58]
Eric Franchi
So we haven't talked about the In App Marketplace, the giant in App Marketplace, in a while, and we're happy to have you to talk about a lot of topics of relevance. But let's start at the beginning. What is Apps Flyer today? I think probably a lot of people have heard of it, but maybe aren't sure exactly what the company is.
- [03:14]
Brian Quinn
Sure. AppsFire, we're the market leader in the mobile attribution space. We're a tech company that builds tools for app developers and marketers. So think measurement, attribution, deep linking, fraud, cost reporting, clean rooms. So we're building a suite of tools to help mobile teams grow their mobile business. 1400 people globally, 20 offices. You could think of us as pretty good penetration in the mobile app ecosystem. We're the third most deployed SDK outside of Facebook and Google. We have about 65% market share of the mobile app marketplace, SaaS revenue.
- [03:53]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, this used to be called the MMP market, right?
- [03:55]
Brian Quinn
Correct.
- [03:56]
Eric Franchi
Is that market still exist or is it sort. It feels like after Apple att, it sort of fragmented and went in all kinds of weird directions. You know, applovin owns an mmp and I guess one of them kind of pivoted. Is it still a kind of a robust marketplace?
- [04:12]
Brian Quinn
It is a robust marketplace. It's an interesting question of if the industry still exists. The MMP is sort of a moniker that came out of Facebook's mobile measurement program that this industry sort of adopted as the name of the industry. In one sense, it's very limiting because most of the players in it are doing more than mobile attribution, including Apps Flyer. But I would say that it's still commonly referred to as that. In one sense, all the companies in this space more or less worked the same way. Prior to ATT, you know, everyone had deterministic data, 100% identifiers for mobile. Postbacks with the walled gardens sort of operated in a very similar fashion. So the companies competed on other aspects of their business. But since att it really became a question of how do you manage multiple flows of data, Fragmented data, for example, you got consented IDFA and GAID data flows. You have Apple Search ads, you have probabilistic data. You have to sort of unify that into a consistent way of looking at measurements. So it much more is around data science and modeling. And so there's a lot of different ways that companies can now compete than prior to AT&T. I'd say.
- [05:34]
Eric Franchi
Yeah. After ATT, everything changed. Right. So Apple released its SCAD program and they've since changed the name. What's the new name? Just to inform us. What's SCAD called now?
- [05:45]
Brian Quinn
Ad Attribution Kit.
- [05:47]
Eric Franchi
Ad Attribution Kit. Okay. I've heard from, I guess Eric Suford, I think, has kind of said, well, like, SCAD's dead. That's like a one input, but people don't really use it so much. But I don't really know what the current state is. So from a marketer's perspective, I guess how important is SCAD as a signal of truth versus other data points?
- [06:07]
Brian Quinn
It has plateaued in adoption. I think last year we were looking at around 27% adoption rate and now it's down to sort of 25 in the US so it's sort of plateaued. It's not dead. I would say it's still an important signal, but by no means is it all, you know, encompassing. It's one of, you know, I think an important flow of, you know, iOS growth, but it's certainly not. It's not growing. And I don't know that Ad Attribution Kit is got a lot of momentum either. I think the most important and interesting thing around this is that Apple brought together sort of the web and the mobile frameworks under one and what that could mean for the future of different flows and measurement. But Scan in and of itself, I think is sort of plateaued in adoption.
- [06:56]
Eric Franchi
And they also just recently added viewthrough on the App Store. So I'm sorry, I keep going. SCAD Scan is now showing you attributions from people who searched and then later installed an app, which maybe it's good. I mean, I think it's not overriding other attribution. You know, it doesn't take credit for other things, but it is kind of a factor in understanding everything.
- [07:20]
Brian Quinn
It is a factor. But again, the hard part for a marketer and advertiser is kind of resolving SCAN with other types of, you know, flows. And I think this is really the challenge because the Fragmentation that Scan is, has created is a challenge for marketers. And I think they, you know, many of the advertisers we talk to, they look forward towards, well, what. What is Google going to do? And is the world going to get even more complex, you know, along these lines? So I think again, it's one input, but at the end of the day, advertisers are looking for simplicity and a unified way of looking at the world.
- [07:54]
Eric Franchi
That's a good question for you is when an advertiser comes to you, how much of this stuff do they have to understand? Because I really think this might be some of the most complicated stuff in ad tech, this mobile attribution stuff. Are advertisers coming to you and say, we're signing up with AppsFlyer because we don't want to worry about any of this, just tell us what worked. Or is it the opposite, where they want to know how every single thing is calculated and they see you as more of a tech stack to enable that.
- [08:18]
Brian Quinn
I feel good to hear that you think this is some of the most complicated stuff in ad tech. That makes me smile because it is pretty complicated and it's constantly changing. To answer your question, you know, we get such a range of different, you know, knowledge bases on, on this topic. We have very, very large, sophisticated mobile businesses that are really pushing the boundaries and are coming to Apps Flyer because the precision of our measurement and fraud detection. They have teams that study this stuff and are looking for a competitive advantage. We have other businesses which are huge household names, big brands with decent sort of mobile app programs, but a very limited understanding of all of this dynamics. And, you know, they might be advertising on Meta and Google and they want to test Apple and they want some basic measurement and deep linking tools to bring more of their existing customers into the mobile app environment. We see this, you know, across the globe, every app category and vertical, big and small clients. So we see a very, very large range of understanding of the intricacies of mobile attribution.
- [09:30]
Eric Franchi
Because, like, for some companies, it's life or death. Like the mobile. If you're a mobile gaming studio, you care about this stuff intensely. And if you're more of a mainstream brand who has an app and wants it installed, you maybe aren't nitpicking every penny as much. Is that a good characterization?
- [09:48]
Brian Quinn
I think so, yeah. I mean, if the app is your business or if the app is the main product and you look at that product from a. This is how I acquire customers. This is how I drive revenue and lifetime value of my business, then this stuff is pretty important to understand. If the app is a companion towards your experience, if it's increasing better engagement and loyalty, then it fits into sort of a larger picture of what your strategy is.
- [10:18]
Eric Franchi
In the app world, there's this perception that everyone is actually secretly fingerprinting and just doesn't want to talk about it. And Apple is sort of not willing to bring down the hammer on people unless they say on their website, hey, we're fingerprinting. You're pretty much getting away with it. Care comment on that perception?
- [10:37]
Brian Quinn
Yes, certainly. I mean, I think, you know, fingerprinting is talked a lot about for a long time. You know, Apple has clearly stated that it's not acceptable by policy. Privacy regulations like gdpr, ccpa, you know, forbid it. We've always discouraged the use of fingerprinting, particularly in environments like iOS where it's. Where it's permitted. I think the nuance and the important thing to understand is we see fingerprinting as an intent to create and maintain a persistent ID of a user without their knowledge and the ability to use that persistent ID to kind of track that user across multiple apps and websites and collect detailed information about that user without their, you know, consent or knowledge. You know, there's a lot of nefarious use cases when, when you look at it from that angle, and we don't support that, and it's not. That's not really relevant to our business.
- [11:36]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, I sense there's a but coming.
- [11:38]
Brian Quinn
There's a but coming because actually, it's actually pretty important. There is something that we describe as probabilistic modeling, and this is now where we collect publicly available data points of a user for the sole purposes of determining whether there's a likelihood of a conversion from a media touch point. And there's no persistent ID in this use case. And so I think it's easy to just label this entire kind of domain as fingerprinting and whether it's allowed and what it's not allowed. But the reality is probabilistic modeling is a critical piece of measurement methodology and it's widely used. And, you know, Apple will put out policies around fingerprinting and all kinds of techniques and tools around, you know, limiting the ability to collect specific data from a device and what you can do with that data. But at the end of the day, I think these are very different practices and it's an important distinction for us to call out.
- [12:43]
Eric Franchi
So the nuance you're making, which I'll repeat back, what I heard, is that if you take people's environmental data and create a synthesized ID and then use it just like a cookie or an idfa, that's fingerprinting and that's a violation. However, if you say see a user and then later a different user converts and you correlate some of their elements to create a report, that is kosher.
- [13:08]
Brian Quinn
More or less, yeah. I think what we're trying to do is to say we're trying to understand the effectiveness of measurement and marketing. And if that's the intent and that's all we're trying to do, then this is a very different use case.
- [13:20]
Eric Franchi
Okay, let's talk about Apple again. So I mentioned earlier their search capabilities. They've been making quite a bit of money on search ads in the App Store. They recently expanded that to track view through. Do you think that they are preferencing themselves versus everybody else in the app marketplace and is it fair?
- [13:39]
Brian Quinn
Yeah, I mean, they've built a very strong business in a short amount of time, Apple search ads. And you know, coincidentally or not, this business started to scale after they rolled out att and they don't subject the Apple search ads business to the same requirements that they put the rest of the industry through. Right. So I think that there is a natural and ongoing conversation of, you know, how this is operating. I think, you know, to their credit, we hear from a lot of our advertisers that, you know, advertisers understand search and intent advertising for a long time. Apple is a trusted name. They provide kind of a consistent, high quality, secure experiences. So they get a lot of traction. But if I take the point of view from a sort of independent measurement company, it does raise questions about transparency and fairness. I mean, we're not measuring and doing attribution on Apple search ads. We're reporting what they're saying. They're effectively grading their own homework.
- [14:42]
Eric Franchi
Right. Self reporting.
- [14:43]
Brian Quinn
Correct. Which is a key tenet of, in my view, in order for the mobile app economy to grow and be trusted and be healthy, it needs an independent, unbiased sort of referee. That's the position we see ourselves in. And so from that perspective, I think that there's, there's questions around, you know, the fairness and the opaqueness of how they're, how they're doing their reporting. But it does return strong results. Otherwise it wouldn't, it wouldn't grow. And so, you know, I think, I think you can look at it a number of different ways.
- [15:16]
Eric Franchi
It's, I mean, they're hanging around the bottom of the funnel. It's like Kareem Abdul Jabbar standing next to the basket.
- [15:22]
Brian Quinn
Yeah. It makes you wonder, why wouldn't they do this sooner? But, yeah, they built a strong business.
- [15:28]
Eric Franchi
Have you been following what's going on with France and Germany investigating att?
- [15:32]
Brian Quinn
Yeah, I'm reading the news.
- [15:34]
Eric Franchi
Do you want to explain it to our audience in case they don't know?
- [15:37]
Brian Quinn
So ATT rolled out, what, four years ago?
- [15:40]
Eric Franchi
Right. Just in time. Europe's on it.
- [15:43]
Brian Quinn
Just in time. Just in time. Four years. Now, questions that this industry was asking, you know, four months after that happened, but, you know, effectively what this did was it defaulted to a user prompt, where a user. Anytime you download an app on iOS, you have to, you know, explicitly consent to sharing your device id and you have to do that both in the advertising app and the publisher app. So there's kind of a. There's sort of two components. There's. It happens about 20% of the time. So we went from a world where, you know, 80 or 90% of device IDs were being shared to now sort of probably around 20. And this can really impair Apple's competitors in the space. You know, meta was famously hit hard years ago, has since recovered very nicely, but it really changed the dynamics of the entire, you know, industry. And it's a question of, you know, is it, is it fair, is it anti competitive? And, you know, France, Germany, UK are all looking at this and I think the news is sort of speculating, will they have to sort of roll it back? Are there fines coming? If it happens in a couple of major European countries, does it happen across the eu? If it happens in the eu, what does that mean for the us? So I think it's an interesting story to watch, albeit four years after things actually happened.
- [17:09]
Eric Franchi
Yeah. If they made them, say, change the prompt to be a little more fair, what is it going to increase? Opt in for 20 to 30 to 40%. It doesn't change the overall structure of the industry.
- [17:22]
Brian Quinn
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of conversations over the prompt and just for the listeners here, the prompt is set by Apple. It's very, very specific languages that you have to put in your own app. You can't customize the language on it. So it seems very onerous to a lot of apps.
- [17:37]
Eric Franchi
I could get on my soapbox here for one second, which is that, you know, Apple required everyone to use the same negative language. They don't allow apps to ask for it more than once. They don't allow apps to give a trade off of functionality for approval. So the basic good idea of maybe getting rid of a universal identifier like IDFA is clouded by a lot of overreach that Apple kind of jumped into the fray with. And the worst aspect is that Apple has a different prompt that's much friendlier that has to do with them collecting data. So there's a lot of kind of messiness around this.
- [18:12]
Brian Quinn
And I think, you know, after years of conditioning users on iOS to these prompts, if it was to change now, I really wonder what does that do to human behavior?
- [18:22]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, exactly.
- [18:23]
Brian Quinn
You know, and like the way we're all clicking through Accept All Cookies, like, I'm not really sure that we're aware of what they're consenting or unconsenting.
- [18:31]
Eric Franchi
Last general topic. I mean, we can't talk about App Install Marketplace unless we talk about Applovin, which is the darling of the stock market and maybe the enemy of the short sellers. And there's a ton of controversy. And maybe you don't, I assume you partner with them in various ways and probably don't want to talk too badly about a competitor. But I do want to kind of drill in on a couple quick things. Which is first, one of the controversies or the things I found shocking in the various reports about Applovin is that they do kind of a side loaded automatic download of their advertisers where a user can click on an ad in an app and the advertiser's app is being downloaded to their screen without them going to the app Store or hitting approve or download. Should I be shocked by that? Is that really common? Is it Android only?
- [19:26]
Brian Quinn
So when I've read these short seller reports, it's not clear to me if the sellers are or if these short sellers are sort of pointing out preload flows, which are very common and standard in our industry. And it's something that Applovin has an offering around or sideloading, which is something that you've described. I think it just, it speaks to the lack of kind of, you know, real understanding and precision in those reports, to be honest with you. I mean, Applovin is a, is a good partner of ours. You know, from a media standpoint, I don't have a, you know, if it's.
- [20:00]
Eric Franchi
Sideloading, maybe I use the wrong term in the notes for this. What is preloading in your opinion?
- [20:05]
Brian Quinn
So preloading is when a company goes to an OEM and pre negotiates a deal to have that app installed on the device. So when a user purchases a new device and goes through the Onboarding process. These apps are already there.
- [20:23]
Eric Franchi
That's digital turbines. Bread and butter, right?
- [20:25]
Brian Quinn
Correct.
- [20:26]
Eric Franchi
So do you think Applovin has deals like that?
- [20:28]
Brian Quinn
I believe they do. I believe they do offer preloading. I mean it's very standard and it's accepted. And you know, again, if this is what the short seller reports are kind of targeting, I'm not really sure why.
- [20:41]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, that seems like something like that would be on the up and up because you know, 100% weird deal with the carrier or the OEM.
- [20:47]
Brian Quinn
And the apps that do this are typically the apps that enjoy massive brand appeal and consumer reach. It's in the OEM's interest to have.
- [20:55]
Ari Paparo
These apps that does this. I remember YouTube used to be native to the iPhone like when you would get a new iPhone.
- [21:00]
Brian Quinn
Yeah.
- [21:01]
Eric Franchi
The allegation was that the user just has to click on the ad in the app and it's already on their phone. So I don't know what the mechanism is. I guess we're just speculating at some point. How do you feel about Applovin owning a measurement company? How does that affect you and your customers?
- [21:17]
Brian Quinn
I see it as a conflict of interest when I think you're referring to Adjust and when Applovin, who's been a great partner of ours for a decade, when they acquired Adjust, I think it was a big concern of the industry because at the time and they were a big gaming studio developer and a lot of Adjust customers are also game studios. And so they sort of bought a measurement company which they, they would compete in the same market for those customers. And I think, you know, that to me coming from a perspective of an independent, trusted, unbiased, you know, measurement business is a conflict of interest. And so you know, we continue to, you know, compete with Applovin on that side of their business. But yeah, you know, it'll be interesting to see what, what, what happens with that as, as you know, Applovin is looking to sell off the game studios, drive more efficiency. I think their metric is, you know, adjusted EBITDA per employee and you know, I think they're doing very, very well on the advertising technology side. So it'll be interesting to see what they do with the measurement business kind of moving forward. But I don't know that it's great for the industry to have a media company own on a, you know, a third party measurement tool.
- [22:34]
Eric Franchi
Do customers single home or multi home their measurement.
- [22:37]
Brian Quinn
Generally speaking you, you, you adopt one measurement company. Now if you have multiple apps in your portfolio or you can use an app One company for attribution, another for deep linking as an example. We do see scenarios like that. But I think to get at your question, I think most companies choose one MMP or one measurement platform and that's who they go with, I guess.
- [23:03]
Eric Franchi
Last topic is my favorite company, Google. So we're recording on Thursday and on Friday. Tomorrow when this comes out, I believe there's going to be a hearing about the remedies in the antitrust case, among which are the potential spin out of Android. And it was reported by Bloomberg this week that Google says they shouldn't be forced to spin out for national security reasons. So I won't ask you to comment about national security, but I will ask you to comment about how Google's actions both relating to Android and privacy as well as their ad stack affects helps hurts the app ecosystem.
- [23:40]
Brian Quinn
You know, I'm not sure that it has a very immediate and large impact on the app ecosystem from what I'm following in the news right now. I think more broadly, you know, independent ad stacks give more choice to consumers and more choice to advertisers, I meant to say. And so, you know, separating ad technology from, you know, major media companies I think generally is a positive for competition. It's hard for me to see the impact specifically in the mobile app space from what I'm hearing now, but maybe we learn a lot more this week and then becomes a lot clearer of the implications.
- [24:20]
Eric Franchi
All right, but that's about all you can ask for. So this is a great conversation. We have a ton of news this week, so we're going to take a break, come back with our M and A week with the refresh. So hold on one second.
- [24:35]
Ari Paparo
I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve.
- [24:42]
Brian Quinn
And it does without me lifting a.
- [24:43]
Ari Paparo
Finger so I can get in more.
- [24:45]
Eric Franchi
Squats anywhere I can.
- [24:46]
Brian Quinn
1, 2, 3.
- [24:49]
Ari Paparo
Will that be cash or credit?
- [24:51]
Brian Quinn
Credit.
- [24:52]
Eric Franchi
4 Galaxy S25 Ultra.
- [24:55]
Ari Paparo
The AI companion that does the heavy lifting. So you can do you get yours@samsung.com compatible with select astrocars through Gemini account. Results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy. All right, and we're back with the refresh. Where do we begin?
- [25:09]
Eric Franchi
Deep breath.
- [25:11]
Ari Paparo
What is going on out there? People said this would be the year of M and A and I think that everybody took that as you really need to make this the year of M and A. So we got four deals to talk about today. I think we should start with the one that broke this morning, which was publicist buying Lotamy. Is that so? Number one, Am I saying that correctly?
- [25:32]
Eric Franchi
As far as I know. I think it's definitely Publicis. Not Publicis.
- [25:36]
Ari Paparo
I meant the target. Load of me. Is that. Is that correct?
- [25:39]
Eric Franchi
It is load of me. I guess you could say it as low tame, but that would be incorrect.
- [25:44]
Ari Paparo
All right, trivia on Load of me. Don't open up a new tab. What does load of me mean?
- [25:50]
Eric Franchi
It has something to do with Lord of the Rings.
- [25:52]
Ari Paparo
Absolutely wrong. Somewhat like. Somewhat like.
- [25:56]
Eric Franchi
I'm sure it was Lord of the Rings.
- [25:59]
Ari Paparo
Somewhat like where Teed's the Explanation shook us to our core listener. Brace yourself. When Lotami was founded in 2006 as the first DMP, the name meant Locate target message.
- [26:14]
Eric Franchi
Oh, my God. That's really. I'm impressed. This could be a good name if they stuck with that. I thought it was like some cousin of the elves running around the Shire. I was sure it was a Shire related name.
- [26:28]
Ari Paparo
No, sir. All right, break this down for us because this one took everybody by surprise and this seems like a really significant deal. Talk about it.
- [26:37]
Eric Franchi
I assume this has to do with Lodamy's ID. So the Panorama ID is among the most popular probabilistic IDs. It's in the marketplace in various ways of being used to transact. They sort of pivoted a little bit. Load me between being just a data broker DMP to being an enabler of these transactions. And Publicis obviously has a huge data footprint. They own Epsilon. And so being able to extend that is very important. I've heard people say that the geographic coverage is very important, that Lodami was really strong in Europe and Asia, whereas Epsilon is not. That's as much as I know. I think there are smarter brains than me talking on Twitter about why this is like the deal of the century. It's so important. People really seem impressed. I'm a little less, though, just because I'm a little more ignorant.
- [27:28]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, I saw Adam from Chalice was all in your mentions. I mean, he was very excited.
- [27:34]
Eric Franchi
Yeah. And he was being pretty positive too, to bring that good vibes to Twitter. Adam, we want to see more of that.
- [27:41]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, yeah. Folks should check out Ari's mentions for that one. It was actually very enlightening. What is the word on the street as it relates to the acquisition price? You hear anything, Ari?
- [27:52]
Eric Franchi
I haven't heard anything. I think it's a big one. I don't think Loadami was a desperate seller by any means. I think their business was strong and they'd raised a lot, so my guess is it would be a hefty one, but I wouldn't have an exact number.
- [28:03]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, this is fascinating. So a 19 year old business, Strong Global Footprint, last raised 10 million Series D in 2015, so presumably it's been profitable for some time now.
- [28:15]
Eric Franchi
Do we know what bankers did we hear from Terry or any of the other usual folks? I didn't see a tombstone come out.
- [28:23]
Ari Paparo
No, I've not seen who the banker was on it because I know that would be where the first DM slide would happen.
- [28:30]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, the DM slide, exactly.
- [28:33]
Ari Paparo
That's the reason why you were asking. No, I didn't see that. And also I've been doing the day job relentlessly today, so I'm catching up. So we shall see. I'm sure this rumor stuff will come out. Congrats to Andy. This is great. The guy's been at it for almost 20 years. Okay, let's go number two. T Mobile is back with another acquisition, their second big acquisition of the year. This time they're buying the DSP Bliss. That's Bliss with 1s for 175 million. Bliss not necessarily on the radar with a lot of folks as they, you know, kind of look at the big DSPs here in the US. I think it's a European DSP with, with a strong European business, but it's a neat product. You mentioned it before, Ari.
- [29:15]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, I'd mentioned before I had an opportunity to see it demoed and I was very impressed because it aligned with my vision for the future of dsps which has integrated testing, integrated measurement and entirely not cookie based, it's entirely location based. So I think that's really interesting because the default take on this will be like, oh, let's use the telecom data. But Bliss is actually a specialist in not using data and using location, which is a form of data, but it's not identity. I think there's also pretty strong conversation around T Mobile's investment in digital out of home because the combination of a DSP that's location based and digital out of home, you know, makes some sense. I'm excited about this one. It's a little unusual. It's, you know, telecoms have a bad history here, but looks like T Mobile is really pressing the strategy and I want to see how it ends up.
- [30:07]
Ari Paparo
Aggressively pressing the strategy. The second acquisition in this quarter and they actually announced them together because they closed Vistar and they announced Bliss. So together it's, you know, they deployed $775 million in cash. And the numbers on this is interesting. So they expect them together to generate over 1 billion in annual revenue and in these deals specifically add 250 million of that 1 billion plus in revenue with 75 million in EBITDA. So these are real deals. They have, they have real upside.
- [30:40]
Eric Franchi
I think it's fair to say that outside of the really premium companies like JC Teco, that T Mobile is the leader in digital out of home. Right. They now are, they are strongly the leader. There's lots of other interesting companies here, but they're taking the pole position in the US at least.
- [30:57]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, that's super interesting. So Brian, T Mobile's got to be a big partner to Apps Flyer in lots of ways. Just given the telecom business or am I off on that?
- [31:05]
Brian Quinn
I don't know if there's a specific partnership I'm going to wire. But no, they're not a major partner. There were previous investor early days, their investment arm but they're probably a client but I don't know that there's a larger partnership outside of that.
- [31:21]
Eric Franchi
They're in the app install business through I think they call it T Tuesdays or it might be Tea Thursdays. They have this promotion that the customers get all this kind of interesting free stuff once a week and it's like T Mobile Tuesday. T Mobile Tuesday. That's right. And it, it drives a lot of app installs and I think that's one of the ways that they currently touch the customers.
- [31:41]
Ari Paparo
Deal number three Viant acquires Locker Ari Did Locker ever do the architecture under Deep Dive?
- [31:48]
Eric Franchi
They did the Justify youy Existence. They did a quick one, got it. So they, they pivoted. So they're, they really had three businesses. So business number one was a email alias where consumer product, the consumers can have an email that allowed them to sign up for anything and have the emails routed around so that they didn't give out their real email to people. The second business was helping folks resolve emails. So if you're a publisher or an ad tech company with a lot of emails, Locker would help you figure out which ones were real and which ones were fake or routing. And then they pivoted a little bit about a year ago to do what they called identity bridging. So they had a tool that let publishers take whatever identity they had, look up other identities and then pass different combinations in the RTB streams. So I'm not clear which of those three was generating the most revenue or the most exciting for Vyant. Maybe this is an acquihire maybe I don't really have any of the details here. It seems like a small deal overall.
- [32:51]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, no, I don't have any details either. Just pulled a piece from the ad exchanger write up, which I think was a good analysis. James Hersher, Shout Out. So the goal is to connect the identity locker gets from its publisher tech with Vyant's identity graph. So to basically bolster the identity of Viant, which I think makes sense. Just getting more publisher data.
- [33:11]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, Vyant has a strong identity play, right. They, they still own MySpace and they have an identity graph. So being able to push that into more places, use it in more places, seems like it makes some sense. I think in the same way T Mobile is being super aggressive with acquisitions. Vyant being sort of a economical buyer. I don't want to use a different word, but I'll just say they're going for low cost acquisitions to bulk up their stack.
- [33:36]
Brian Quinn
I haven't heard MySpace in a while, so thank you for that.
- [33:38]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, it's important. Do you have an account? Do you have a wall with your favorite bands and stuff?
- [33:43]
Brian Quinn
Let me check and get back to you.
- [33:45]
Ari Paparo
I don't remember who's in your top eight, Brad.
- [33:49]
Brian Quinn
Oh man, you guys are putting me on the spot here. Now my new top eight is certainly going to be Ari and Eric, but besides that, I have to go figure that out.
- [33:58]
Ari Paparo
Oh, good. So this was announced as part of Vayant's earnings and Viant had really good numbers. And the market, I think just is one of those cyclical periods where, you know, no matter what you report, everything goes down. And you know, they, they look for reasons to, to, to be critical. And Chris Vanderhoek, who is like just amazing, he had this post on LinkedIn. Did you see it?
- [34:24]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, it was pretty good.
- [34:25]
Ari Paparo
Oh my God. We'll link to it in the, in the newsletter. The post is. We said revenue was up 40%, not down 40%. And it's a picture of the stock chart going from like 20 to 14 overnight. So that guy is, he is like super talented at social media.
- [34:43]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, he's pretty aggressive and out there. And I really believe that CEOs of any, any but the largest companies need to be out there talking about their book, talking about what they're doing. And he's doing a great job with it.
- [34:56]
Ari Paparo
They're absolutely crushing it. Okay, one other one, a little bit less ad tech, but we talked about this previously and I think it's just kind of interesting. So apparently the management of RGA has been trying to buy out RGA from ipg, especially in the whole wake of this Omnicom merger. And it's been, you know, kind of somewhat. Rumor has, it's somewhat difficult, contentious, but they completed it. So management now owns rga. RGA is like a legendary agency. Some of the best creative work I think of all time has come out of rga. So it's going to be interesting to see what they do as an independent company and they have a PE backer. So I just think it's an interesting deal, you know. All right, let's move on. Amazon. So Amazon launches Complete tv. Great name. It is a new CTV buying and planning tool. So the description is a unified platform for managing both linear and streaming TV ad buys. Ari, what's the take on this?
- [35:55]
Eric Franchi
I think this is a big deal. I think this is a very big deal.
- [35:58]
Ari Paparo
I got that sense from you.
- [35:59]
Eric Franchi
Yeah. So first of all, I think the need for this kind of product is way overdue. I've been hearing about the need for this product since I was the product manager for dfa and that was a long time ago, so that was like 20 years ago. Basically, this idea that you're buying a whole bunch of stuff and only some of it is digital and you want to keep track of all of it and then enhance it digitally, specifically, as early relates to upfronts and programmatic guaranteed deals and stuff like that, it's a product whose time has come. I also think they say in the press release, I don't know if they say it explicitly or obliquely, that you could then actually execute the deals as well, presumably on Fire TV and the other Amazon video products. So, first of all, it's a big investment by Amazon in TV and video buying, which was not something that the Amazon DSP was known for. Secondly, it's a little bit of a shot across the bow of MediaOcean and their recent Innovid acquisition, because Innovid with its harmony was doing very similar things. And MediaOcean with Prisma has that TV data in it. And so that's very clear. And thirdly, and this speaks a little bit towards what Amazon said a couple weeks ago, Amazon has gone from we want to be a player in the DSP market to they literally told Ad Exchanger, we want to be the dominant DSP in the open web. We want to be. And the cheapest. And if I was Trade Desk, I'd be very scared of this activity and this, this statement that they made a couple of weeks ago. It feels as though the Amazon DSP has gotten the confidence that it didn't have for many years when it was all known as being like shopping only and not very good and missing all these features.
- [37:37]
Brian Quinn
I think this is interesting and a big deal. I think, you know, connecting this to Amazon's marketing cloud and I think looking at, you know, deeper analytics and insights here, it's going to really help the industry move a lot more towards ROI and performance in, you know, TV campaigns. And I think this is a promise that we've been kind of like waiting to see realized in the CTV sort of landscape. So if this helps drive kind of more efficiency and effective media planning and buying and better ROI in, I think this can really sort of accelerate the whole CTV space.
- [38:11]
Ari Paparo
Makes a ton of sense. All right, what does TTD do strategically in response to some of this pressure that Amazon is putting on? What can they do?
- [38:20]
Eric Franchi
Well, I think one of the flaws to TTD's CTV strategy has been that it's programmatic only and they have resisted building an ad server. Although I pointed out on this pod a couple weeks ago I was hearing rumors they were looking to build an ad server. So an ad server gets them kind of some visibility into all the other video that's out there. I think that they also don't have a cross channel measurement play the way Innovid bought TV squared. And so there are certain sort of blind spots I think for the trade desk and how they're approaching the TV market. Very insistent on it going all through programmatic pipes and I think they should rethink that a little bit.
- [39:02]
Ari Paparo
That makes a ton of sense and just, you know, jus opposed with Amazon. Also what Amazon has is just a ton of O and O. After they flipped prime video to just being ad supported, you know, they just like flooded the market with A inventory and B their own inventory. And then obviously they've got now all these rights for other stuff. So it's a very compelling offer.
- [39:22]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, I mean the same game plan that grew DV360 on the back of YouTube could be executed by Amazon. But Amazon also has all the shopping data. So now they have two pillars of unique data and inventory. Which are, which are the keys to building a DSP and the trade desk has some of that, but not as strong a unique play in either data or inventory.
- [39:44]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, no, it makes sense. We got to watch this one. Okay, move on. Google asks the Department of Justice to stop the spin out for national security reasons. You alluded to this in the previous segment and you know, we'll link to the article, but basically I pulled a quote out. It's previously suggested that Android and Chrome would be less secure because Google invests in updates that may not happen as frequency as frequently rather without Google's backing. And they also basically said they should be allowed to invest in AI for the same reasons, just to be able to update it. From a security perspective, do you think this is real or do you think this seems a tactic?
- [40:23]
Eric Franchi
I think it's a tactic. It could still be real, but I don't think Microsoft would accept that explanation that they can't keep their browser secure enough so we have to outsource it to Google. I think the meta info here is that like I said at the beginning of the session Friday is when the remedies are really being discussed in the monopoly trial. I infer some things, which is if it's true that Google is trying to lobby the executive branch on this, that implies that they're not having the luck they want on the judicial branch. So this news tells me that they're not happy with the way the remedies are going in the monopoly trial, the search monopoly trial, and there was no mention of the Virginia trial, the ad tech trial, which is over two months past due. But there's speculation there's been some bargaining. I don't think there is because if there was, they wouldn't have to lobby the president, they would be going directly to the judge or dealing with it in court. So I think this kind of shows a little bit of a weak hand on Google's part.
- [41:26]
Brian Quinn
Once you pull the national security card, I don't know if I have.
- [41:32]
Ari Paparo
I.
- [41:32]
Brian Quinn
Don'T know if I have an informed point of view anymore because that can go a lot of different directions. And who knows how a current administration is thinking about this.
- [41:40]
Eric Franchi
Let me follow up though and ask you, have national security issues arisen in the app marketplace? Because there's this feeling like, well, the real time bidding and other things passes so much consumer data around the world. And there was those instances where people on duty in the military were seen in their Strava account bicycling around secret bases and stuff like that. How has that affected your business?
- [42:04]
Brian Quinn
My only kind of perspective on that is what I read in the public. It's nothing kind of internal, through our company whatnot. I think the biggest story there is probably TikTok and you know, the confusion over, you know, the risk that that presented to the US Whether it was data collection or, you know, what type of national security concern that sort of been So I think that's probably the biggest story in the mobile space. But no, I can't say that this has impacted our business to any material degree.
- [42:37]
Ari Paparo
I would assume everybody that listens to this POD subscribes to the marketexture newsletter.
- [42:42]
Eric Franchi
Fair assumption, but they don't really, I.
- [42:44]
Ari Paparo
Think it's really all right. Well you had a really, really good one this week on the mountain. S1 for those. Didn't read that, didn't read it. What's just kind of the TLDR on Mountain after you did the deep dive on it.
- [42:57]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, Growing very fast. Borderline profitability. 93% of their advertisers have never advertised on TV before. Those are the positives. On the less positives I would say the S1 is pretty light on any real distinct in the product. When they talk about their unique reporting attribution it was pretty light. It's basically view through attribution based on IP address. They have some deals with publishers. Doesn't sound that unique. So I think there was a lot of questions that I raised but also that should be pretty obvious about the defensibility of the business.
- [43:34]
Ari Paparo
I was talking to a banker this week and they brought up the fact that they have a convertible that's coming due.
- [43:41]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, they do.
- [43:42]
Ari Paparo
Which is, yeah part of the motivation behind doing this, which makes a lot of sense. Interesting news piece. So you know Mountain, everybody loves to point to Ryan Reynolds being I think an exec there. Right. He's got, he's got a role.
- [43:55]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, Chief Creative Officer is his title.
- [43:57]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, Chief Creative Officer. So he came there via acquisition of his agency, Maximum Effort and probably as part of this whole S1 process they're divesting that agency. So he's going to be out on his own or perhaps he'll still have a role at. At Mountain. Pretty fascinating.
- [44:15]
Eric Franchi
I guess you jackman get to hang out and bemoan their business opportunities. I guess I think my take on this is that when they acquired Maximum Effort it was very much focused on solving the problem that many of these advertisers didn't have creative. So their business plan was to go to these small medium sized businesses, get them to buy TV for the first time and they had no creative. They would want to run YouTube ads or something like that. It didn't work. So the problem was solved with creative. And that was I guess now three years ago and you know, AI has happened and if you look at their counterparts, the TV scientifics and vibes of the world, you know they're not buying Creative agencies, they're trying to build AI solutions and I just, you know, there's a lot of companies out there doing that. So it seems like this was just kind of a bridge solution, the stopgap. And now they're spinning it out.
- [45:11]
Brian Quinn
And I would expect Ryan to have gone there because of his deep passion for attribution. But I do think it's a great let's wish them luck in this IPO because it could be very good for ctv. It could be good for sort of the measurement and technology space in general.
- [45:30]
Ari Paparo
And yeah, there's so many wild tools for creative generation using AI. We're going to showcase a couple of them at architecture. It's very impactful what you said, Ari, and that three years ago they acquired a creative agency. Today, what you can see being done in 30 seconds using AI is fairly mind blowing. So yeah, it's a sign of how fast things have moved in three years.
- [45:55]
Eric Franchi
As respectful investors in tv, Scientific and Vibe. I think we're hoping for the best for this ipo.
- [46:00]
Ari Paparo
Absolutely. Yeah. Cheer it among from the sidebots. Total sidebar. If you ever ask the subreddit programmatic about Mountain, the chirping that happens is wild. Like, you know, there's a couple of threads that, you know, people say, hey, what's up with Mountain? What's going on? There's a lot of opinions out there. There are a lot on Reddit.
- [46:23]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, them and Applovin. Like, I mean I think that any of these kind of less, less transparent business models bring out the chirping.
- [46:31]
Ari Paparo
I think that's right. Hey, once to close it out, just a quick shout out to some folks that have been in the space for a really long time. So Jonathan Heller, who you probably worked with Ari back in the day. Right.
- [46:41]
Eric Franchi
I never actually worked with him, but I know him very well. He's an investor in architecture.
- [46:44]
Ari Paparo
That's right. Disclosure Investor in architecture Jonathan heller was Early DoubleClick, the inventor and co founder and CEO of FreeWheel. And Michael Rubenstein, who was also early Doubleclick, then co founder and president of AppNexus, started an AI company called Firsthand. They raised a 26 million doll Series A. We were an investor at Aperium and I'm so excited about this business because there's basically like two things going on in AI right now. There are businesses that are emerging to solve a lot of the technology issues as it relates to AI. So automate planning, automate workflow, build custom algos, like all this backend stuff and there are fewer, but the opportunity around the what does AI look like as a advertising medium? Like how do people interact with this in the wild? How does this, you know, kind of change advertising? This is a business that's focused on that. So I'm super excited about it because I think there's real big businesses to be built there and these guys are a team that is quite formidable.
- [47:46]
Eric Franchi
Could you elevator pitch what it is they do? Because I have a little struggle explaining what they do exactly.
- [47:52]
Ari Paparo
Consumer facing agents for brands. So if you as a brand want to have an interactive experience with users, with customers, with prospects anywhere, they can enable that. And then equally they built some interesting functionality for publishers as well. So just think of it as like consumer facing agents with an eye towards building an advertising marketing service experience.
- [48:16]
Eric Franchi
Sounds great. I'm looking forward to it.
- [48:18]
Ari Paparo
No, it's exciting biz and there's so many of these again, we're going to see a lot of them architecturalize and I think this is a good time to call it.
- [48:24]
Eric Franchi
That is a good time to call it. So this was a great discussion. So much M and A and great stuff about the app marketplace. So Brian Quinn from AppsFlyer, thank you so much for being here.
- [48:34]
Brian Quinn
Thank you guys. Eric thanks Brian.
- [48:36]
Eric Franchi
Always, always a pleasure.
- [48:37]
Ari Paparo
It is. See you next week everybody. Thank you for subscribing to Market. New interviews are added every week at marketecture tv.
- [48:46]
Eric Franchi
And your favorite podcasting thank you for listening to the marketecture podcast. New episodes come out every Friday and an insightful vendor interview is published each Monday. You can subscribe to our library of hundreds of executive interviews at marketecture tv. You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News Market tv. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant Slack community that you can apply to join at adtechgod. Com.