ABOUT OUR GUESTS: Danika Wilkinson(Social Point)  | Andy Carvell(Phiture)   | John Koetsier(Forbes)




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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🛠 The new breed of tools to help automate creative strategy

🎨 How the tools will impact creative strategy

👩🏻‍💻 The importance of human insight to get creative wins

🏂🏻 The evolution of growth marketers in 2022

🎧 What does the competition look like for subscription apps

🎰 How to ace subscriber acquisition

🛋 The rise of predictive modeling

📝 Retaining your users through valuable content

☎️ Re-targeting churned users

📱 A list of tech and tools that will help with subscription optimization

📬 Did Apple stick to “no fingerprinting”?

🪟 What about app tracking transparency?

📜 How do marketers still get the data if not from Google & Facebook?

KEY QUOTES

Can AI breathe life into creatives?

 At the end of the day, our audience is human and the way that they perceive and react to our creatives cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence. I believe that while we can use more advanced tools to tag, analyze and automate creative production, the emphasis when it comes to brainstorming and ideation still has to be very much human driven. 

The rise of hybrid growth and creative marketers

In 2022 we will see the emergence of user acquisition specialists who are more creative minded, and artists or creative directors who are more data driven, we will start to see more hybrid performance creative marketers becoming key to the success of games.

The different touch points to reinforce an app’s benefits

You want to be already pushing the benefits of subscription in your ads, really nailing that in your app store listing and your app store presence, deliver that in your onboarding experience and reinforce those in your paywall where you really want to then optimize for conversion based on this value prop.

What does paywall optimization include

Adjacent to the idea of paywall optimization is the concept of price testing. So figuring out what users will pay, dynamic pricing – not offering the same price to all users but figuring out segments that will pay more or less and optimizing your overall LTV based on this will be critical. 

Is app tracking transparency a myth?

We know that in 2021, ATT, iOS 14.5 came in – no tracking without permission and that  explicitly included “no fingerprinting”. However, basically everybody continues to use it and Apple not only turned a blind eye to it, but is kind of in backdoor conversations saying, “hey, that’s fine, we’re not too worried about it. Especially if only aggregated probabilistic information comes out.” 

In other words, ATT, app tracking transparency is kind of a symbolic thing.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

SHAMANTH

Welcome to the Mobile User Acquisition Show – and welcome to the first episode of our Mobile Growth Crystal Ball series to round out the year 2021! 

We’re thrilled to share with you forecasts and predictions for the year 2022 from some of the smartest folks in the mobile marketing space. 

In today’s episode that is the first of our Mobile Growth Crystal Ball series, we are excited to feature Danika Wilkinson – product marketer at Social Point, Andy Carvell – Co-Founder at Phiture and John Koetsier – analyst and journalist at Forbes.

In this episode, Danika Wilkinson(SocialPoint) talks about how creative automation will proliferate(and the place for human insight in the landscape); Andy Carvell(Phiture) holds the magnifying glass to the components of subscription optimization that will emerge; and John Koetsier(Forbes) predicts a blow up on iOS due to fingerprinting grey-areas. 

Let’s get right in.

Danika Wilkinson has worked primarily on creative strategy and is responsible for the overall, high level marketing strategy of one of Social Point’s games. Danika’s predictions highlight the evolution of creative strategy during 2022. We are already witnessing the emergence of a number of tools that enhance creative processes – can these tools automate and execute creative briefs going forward? If they do, where is the place for human insight in the process?

Let’s listen to what Danika thinks…

DANIKA WILKINSON

Hi, my name is Danika Wilkinson, and I’m a Product Marketer at Social Point, a mobile gaming company based out of Barcelona. My main predictions for 2022 are creative focused.

I believe that in 2022, we will see a strong emergence of tools that aim to systematize and automate creative wins in mobile marketing. A lot of these tools will claim to be AI driven in the sense that they can read and analyze marketing assets, break them down into different components or building blocks, tag these components and then link them back to patterns in performance, and then automate briefing or even automate production and testing. 

When I say components, I mean things like the visual treatment of the creatives, its intro and outro, length, format, the gameplay it shows, and other additions like using real or cartoon hands, devices, wins or fails, etc. 

I will also say that I believe a lot of these tools won’t be successful because they will underestimate the importance of human beings and the creative process.

At the end of the day, our audience is human and the way that they perceive and react to our creatives cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence. I believe that while we can use more advanced tools to tag, analyze and automate creative production, the emphasis when it comes to brainstorming and ideation still has to be very much human driven. 

I also believe that as a result,

In 2022 we will see the emergence of user acquisition specialists who are more creative minded, and artists or creative directors who are more data driven, we will start to see more hybrid performance creative marketers becoming key to the success of games.

especially in the face of privacy changes on both operating systems, giving us less and less levers to play with in the way of specific user level targeting.

SHAMANTH

Danika is right – it often takes human insight to take creatives from good to outstanding. While automation can pattern match, it often takes intuition and insight to truly ideate and create.

In the next section, Andy Carvell takes over. 

Andy is the co-founder of the growth consulting firm Phiture. Before founding Phiture, Andy led the retention team at Soundcloud, where he helped drive some massive experimentation-driven growth. He is also known for his Mobile Growth Stack, a framework that was built on a 15-year career developing mobile products. 

Andy talks about subscriptions and how the next year is going to be big on optimizing the various components of the growth stack of subscription apps. 

Over to Andy.

ANDY CARVELL 

Hi, I’m Andy Carvell, co-founder and partner at Phiture, a mobile growth consultancy based in Berlin and New York. We believe that 2022 is going to be the year of subscription optimization. Here’s why:

Subscription optimization is going to become important because there’s a massive competition for the same share of wallet. Users are not going to have 10-20 subscriptions. You’re going to be competing with pretty much every other app in the store that’s also trying to do subscriptions. You’re going to be trying to become one of those few subscriptions which your users are holding. That means increased competition to not only acquire users, but also to retain them. Users are going to change subscriptions more often as well. We’re already seeing that trend. 

So let’s talk about subscriber acquisition. It’s already about having a really strong and clear value prop. What are the benefits, what’s the value to the user of not only downloading your app, but then also subscribing?

You want to be already pushing the benefits of subscription in your ads, really nailing that in your app store listing and your app store presence, deliver that in your onboarding experience and reinforce those in your paywall where you really want to then optimize for conversion based on this value prop.

Of course, you need to deliver on that value prop not just in the first month, but going forward too. We’ll come to subscriber retention in a bit. 

Another big prediction for 2022 is that signal testing is going to become even more important, identifying users who have a propensity to become subscribers before they do so. So what we’ll see is use of predictive modeling to identify signals that indicate that a user is going to purchase because you want to be able to optimize your ad spend and get a signal back to the the ad platforms quickly so that you can optimize for events which might not be a conversion or conversion to trial or conversion to purchase, but something earlier in the funnel. Use machine learning to refine that model over time, based on the actual results that you see. 

Once the user is acquired, you need to convert them to subscribers or trial. Trial is not necessarily the way to go, we’re seeing more apps actually going straight to getting users to pay right off the bat. In either case, you’re going to need to do paywall optimization. We do see a lot of apps now doing paywall optimization, but actually still quite a few that are not optimizing or testing new paywalls or different versions of their paywalls.

Adjacent to the idea of paywall optimization is the concept of price testing. So figuring out what users will pay, dynamic pricing – not offering the same price to all users but figuring out segments that will pay more or less and optimizing your overall LTV based on this will be critical. 

Once a user is subscribed, you need to retain them. In 2022 we’re going to see more emphasis on subscriber retention for sure. As people kind of max out their conversion rate on the paywall optimization, the challenge then becomes to retain the users to keep providing extra value for them. So that could be new content, for example, or recommendations. A lot of that could be delivered through CRM, things like push notifications in app messages, email marketing, but can also be exposed within your UX. It’s all about helping your subscribers to keep coming and seeing the value of their subscription.

Back to predictions and predictive modeling. Predicting churn or predicting payment failures becomes super important. It’s much easier to interact and intervene before something becomes a problem than after a user churns. If a user does churn, then you want to really get that user back as a high value user and you want to do everything you can even if you need to give a deep discount in order to bring them back. You might also want to do retargeting, which is still possible in Android.

You could also use email retargeting, for example, or other channels to reach out to that user and to try to bring them back because if they were paying once, maybe they’ll pay again. 

Finally, there’s a bunch of tech and tools which are going to support us. Another prediction is that even more of these tools and platforms will spring up in 2022. We see folks like RevenueCat, Purchasely, Qonversion, Superwall to name a few. There are other platforms springing up almost every week, offering help with things like accounting and analytics, paywall testing. We don’t see these kinds of new platforms on the predictive modeling side yet, but there are other platforms out there that can help you with those.  You could buy these or build them yourselves with your data science team. 

Those are my predictions for 2022. The year of subscription optimization.

SHAMANTH

Indeed, as the competition for subscription apps heats up, it’s going to be ever more critical to understand the components of how these apps can be optimized.

To take a slight detour from growth marketing processes, we have John Koetsier to fill us in on the broader landscape around Apple’s privacy policy changes. John is an analyst/journalist at Forbes and he has seen up close the changes in the mobile ad tech ecosystem over many years that have led us to this point.

Ever since the new updates came about, we have faced many challenges in terms of tracking on iOS – and what has remained a grey area is around fingerprinting. Has Apple really kept it’s word and stuck to its decision? What might some of the ramifications of this grey area be?

Let’s hear it from John.

JOHN KOETSIER

My prediction for mobile marketing and advertising in 2022 is that we will see a major scandal, news story or incident on iOS due to Apple’s failure to properly police and enforce its no fingerprinting rules. 

We know that in 2021, ATT, iOS 14.5 came in – no tracking without permission and that  explicitly included “no fingerprinting”. However, basically everybody continues to use it and Apple not only turned a blind eye to it, but is kind of in backdoor conversations saying, “hey, that’s fine, we’re not too worried about it. Especially if only aggregated probabilistic information comes out.” In other words, ATT, app tracking transparency is kind of a symbolic thing.

And we know this is only possible on 25-35% of the mobile advertising supply. We know that you can’t get the data that you want for fingerprinting from Facebook or Google or some of the SANS, but you can get it elsewhere. You can get it on a lot of devices because everybody goes all over the place. So we’re in the realm of differential privacy and aggregation. 

But who is to say how differential that privacy is, how aggregated that privacy is, how aggregated those device IDs are, those fingerprints are going to be? I think we’re gonna see this blow up sometime in 2022.

And that is my prediction.

SHAMANTH

The predictions are out, make your notes, start your planning and prep your team for what’s looming over us in the year 2022. 

Thank you Danika, Andy and John for sharing your predictions with us in the first episode of the Mobile Growth Crystal Ball 2022!

This is part 1 of our Mobile Growth Crystal Ball 2022 series. Stay tuned for our subsequent editions of the Mobile Growth Crystal Ball 2022 series – coming soon later this week.

Thank you for tuning in, I look forward to sharing the next episode with you soon.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

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Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!