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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

™️ As someone with a predominantly performance marketing background, what made Adam aware of the importance of branding.

🎲 Why branding is far less important for games than it is for high-involvement, emotional products like fintech apps.

📈 How Current’s brand and performance marketing efforts are integrated.

🧐 Why complete focus on performance can erode your brand – and eventually hurt performance.

🧘 How Adam recommends approaching branding for a performance marketer that is looking to become more brand-conscious.

🔦 How the evolution of mobile has resulted in the natural shift to an increasing emphasis on branding.

KEY QUOTES

The silent yet solid impact of a brand

I didn’t even recognize it at the time, but I look back on that and I recognize now how within that vertical how important our brand was that we were able to brand ourselves Topps, which in the world of trading cards has this really strong impact. And, even though nearly all of our marketing was direct response focused that brand actually really helped us.

Why hyper casual games don’t need to bother with branding

There might not be a single vertical in the world in which brand is less important than hyper casual games. You need to think about a number of factors: I’d start with just basic human behavior. I don’t need to trust a mobile game or a casual game to download and install it. Trust is really not why I’m installing that app. And there’s no major friction points.

These games are optimized to be completely frictionless; maybe not to even require a registration so much as for me to give them my name before jumping in and engaging. There’s not a moment where I need to be like, wait a minute, do I really want to do this. It’s a pretty seamless process. And also, just human behavior, in terms of when we make the decision to install a game, nobody’s ever seen an ad for a hyper casual game, and then decided three weeks later to install it.

Striking the right balance

If you’re spending $10 million a month on performance marketing, you could really benefit from some brand marketing to support that. But if your budgets are a lot more modest, then it doesn’t make sense to have some huge brand marketing budget, when nobody’s going to see your performance ads. And so, again, especially in our case, at a more modest scale, it’s just totally integrated. We’re not talking about two completely different things here; it’s integrating our brand and making sure that our values and the message that we’re trying to deliver is still being delivered through our performance ads. And we’re not going down this route of performance over all else which over time erodes your brand.

Branding mistakes are expensive to recover from

What you thought was tremendous growth in those two spaces—this is not talking about five years ago, unlike 2015—but everybody hated FanDuel and DraftKings. And like some people hated them because they use DraftKings, they lost some money and they heard they cheated or something. But everybody hated them because of their ads, and that’s an example of how you totally eroded your brand. In a way that’s really hard and really expensive to recover from over time.

Simple but critical

It’s astonishing to me how few people will spend millions and millions of dollars marketing a product and literally never once speak to an actual user on the phone or in person.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Adam Hadi to the Mobile User Acquisition show. Adam, welcome to the show. 

Adam: Thank you so much Shamanth. It’s, an honor to be here. I’m an avid listener, and to be among the many esteemed guests that have been on your show is, yeah, that’s nothing but an honor. 

Shamanth: Yeah and you’ve been on our other podcast How Things Grow, you told some very fascinating stories about what’s inside of the influencer world; and a lot of your past background is also one reason why I want to dig into our theme for today, which is the case for brand marketing in the world of algorithmic performance marketing.  And I’m interested to dig in this with you because you have been an out-and-out performance marketer for a long time, you’ve been very performance focused, you’ve been very direct response focused, and in your latest role, you’ve done a lot of work on the branding side, on the brand marketing side. So certainly something I’m very curious to dig into, both your learning process, and also how you look at the world, differently. To start… 

Adam: Yeah. 

Shamanth: Yeah, to start with, Adam, what were some of the first instances that first made you aware of the fact that you couldn’t just be focused on performance but you had to be balancing brand and performance? And if there are examples that come to mind, please share. 

Adam: Well, I should say, you know, you’re, you’re completely accurate, in that my background is totally in performance marketing, right. And me, just as a person, my skill set is, it really lends itself to performance marketing. There’s nothing I’d say like inherently about me that make me some amazing brand marketer, right? I mean, I’m colorblind, right, like, like my sense for design, my sense for creative is not… 

Is not exemplary, right, that, my skills don’t lend itself there, but I think it was kind of more about the ability to recognize the importance of brand marketing is like, in many ways, more important than actually being able to execute upon it, at least as a performance marketer. 

And so you mentioned really well, like what made me aware, it’s really was my consulting work, right, like early on in my career, I just dealt with companies that were much more, that lent themselves much more to direct response marketing to performance marketing than it did to brand marketing, I worked with a lot of companies in like the gaming space and daily fantasy sports which is somewhat in the same realm. But it was really through my consulting work that I’ve gotten exposed to lots of different clients and really began to recognize that this wasn’t some big, like, oh it’s either brand marketing or performance marketing, it’s that depending really on what your vertical is and what your situation is, brand can be really, really important. 

In fact, you know, I’ll give you an example from early on in my career, you know, I used to work at Topps, the baseball card company, right, and we had launched a digital apps division for digital trading cards.

I didn’t even recognize it at the time, but I look back on that and I recognize now how within that vertical how important our brand was that we were able to brand ourselves Topps, which in the world of trading cards has this really strong impact. And, even though nearly all of our marketing was direct response focused that brand actually really helped us. 

And I kind of noticed things like that, as I moved on with other brands that maybe didn’t have that, right, in terms of like building like, you know, validity, right, and trust. And so, yeah, I’d say that’s, it was really being able to work on, across different verticals that made me realize that. 

Shamanth: Sure. And it sounds like you saw brands like Topps that had decades of branding behind them, and you saw other apps that didn’t, and you could see what sort of impact this could have, right?

Adam: Yeah, and I would say, a lot of this, honestly, was in hindsight. I’d love to say like I had a clairvoyance to view it directly at the time.

Shamanth: Yeah.

Adam: But a lot of it is stuff that I recognized later on. 

Shamanth: Certainly, you know, and marketing has become increasingly quantitative, algorithmic, automated, and as we know, there’s like billion-dollar gaming companies that are basically built just because they’ve mastered user acquisition, they’ve mastered performance marketing, you know, they’re companies like Playrix and I think this was our friend Eric Seufert who said basically, I think in one of his articles, he’s like there’s no way a company like Playrix would ever hire a brand focused CMO just because the entire business is built on performance marketing. And, you could say the same thing about very many hyper casual games, they would just not have any case for a CMO or a brand focused marketer. How would you reconcile what you said about branding, what your experiences are around branding and, versus this perspective that there are areas, there are spaces where brand marketing many would argue is not very meaningful or impactful? 

Adam: Well, really, it’s actually not an argument against that, I am in total agreement with Eric in that argument, right, because it is for Playrix, as it is in, you know, hyper casual games.

There might not be a single vertical in the world in which brand is less important than hyper casual games. You need to think about a number of factors: I’d start with just basic human behavior. I don’t need to trust a mobile game or a casual game to download and install it. Trust is really not why I’m installing that app. And there’s no major friction points.

These games are optimized to be completely frictionless; maybe not to even require a registration so much as for me to give them my name before jumping in and engaging. There’s not a moment where I need to be like, wait a minute, do I really want to do this. It’s a pretty seamless process. And also, just human behavior, in terms of when we make the decision to install a game, nobody’s ever seen an ad for a hyper casual game, and then decided three weeks later to install it. 

That’s just not how, how humans and consumers interact with that, right? And that’s very different than, let’s say, a dating app, right, where, you know, you may see like, you know, a 100 ads for a dating app and have never converted, maybe because you’re in a relationship or maybe because, you know, it’s not really what you want, and then there’s an event that happens in your life, right, maybe, maybe you go through a breakup, maybe you decide yeah, you know, you know, I need to search, and that’s when, when you engage and you download. And so I think it’s, you know, and, and if we were talking about dating, I think having a, you know, a big portion of your budget dedicated to brand marketing and having brand marketers, you know, really at the high levels, maybe not, you know, necessarily at the highest level, is very imperative, right? 

Shamanth: Yeah, and it sounds like because Fintech or finance is something that’s very emotional, requires a lot of trust, that’s why in your space definitely it looks like having that brand component is so crucial as compared to games

Adam: Yes. Yeah, yeah, certainly, right, like so, so I should mention, plug here for Current, I’m VP of Marketing at Current. Current is a mobile bank based here in, in New York, and we’re really making and offering bank accounts that are accessible to people regardless of income and age. And, and so that means that, you know, a good portion of our users are paycheck to paycheck, right, and our goal is to really bring on their, their direct deposits, to have you switch your direct deposit over to us where you won’t pay minimum balance requirement, you won’t pay overdraft fees. And, you know, that is a big ask of, of our users, there’s tons of friction in that process, right, and there’s tons of trust, you know, and, and what we see from users is, for example, I mean, they maybe with like a Wells Fargo, right, and they might hate Wells Fargo. But Wells Fargo is, in many cases, the devil they know, like, Wells Fargo charges them, you know, $16.99 a month and then they get hit with a $34 overdraft fee, and they can’t stand Wells Fargo. But they know that Wells Fargo isn’t going to run away with their money, right? 

Shamanth: Yeah.

Adam: And  that level of trust, right, especially if you’re somebody who’s paycheck to paycheck, your next paycheck is all your money, right? So if I ask you Shamanth, hey, please give me all your money, that’s essentially the ask I’m making of all the people advertising to. Trust is super important. 

Shamanth: Yeah. 

Adam: It’s almost silly, it’s very silly to compare, you know, that type of marketing to marketing of a hyper casual game, right? 

Shamanth: Yeah.

Adam: It’s, you know, yes, we are both mobile apps, but that’s about where the similarities end.

Shamanth: Yeah.

Adam: Right?

Shamanth: Yeah. No, I think you’re describing how somebody living paycheck to paycheck would look at Current and Wells Fargo, I think that makes a lot of sense, and I would say Wells Fargo much like Topps has decades of that trust built behind them. So even if they charge $16.99 extra, people sort of put up with it and that’s what you’re coming up against, that’s what you have to combat, I would guess. 

Adam: Yeah. 

Shamanth: Now that we understand why it’s important to settle in your space, how does the brand marketing execution happen on a day to day tactical level, and how do the brand marketers on your team evaluate success? 

Adam: Well, so, on a day to day basis, it’s just that it’s super integrated, right? We don’t have a brand marketing team that only does brand marketing and a performance team that only does performance. It’s much more integrated. Now, given our scale, right, and I should mention, you know, at Current we raised our Series B this past fall for about $20 million, we’re not in position to dedicate a huge portion of our budget just to brand marketing, right? To me, brand marketing really exists to support your performance marketing, and kind of work hand-in-hand.

If you’re spending $10 million a month on performance marketing, you could really benefit from some brand marketing to support that. But if your budgets are a lot more modest, then it doesn’t make sense to have some huge brand marketing budget, when nobody’s going to see your performance ads. And so, again, especially in our case, at a more modest scale, it’s just totally integrated. We’re not talking about two completely different things here; it’s integrating our brand and making sure that our values and the message that we’re trying to deliver is still being delivered through our performance ads. And we’re not going down this route of performance over all else which over time erodes your brand.

Shamanth: Yeah. 

Adam: But again, to me it’s not, unless you really understand your consumer and what drives them, these aren’t very different worlds in my opinion. 

Shamanth: Right. And just to dig in deeper into that, right, when we say brand marketing, that could mean a number of different things. You could run TV ads in every single state in the United States, you could take out magazine ads, you can get OOH billboards. So at a super tactical level, what, how do you decide what to pursue, you know, and maybe you can even tell us what some of the top of mind things are right now for you in terms of initiatives you’re pursuing.

Adam: Well, you know, one thing I would look at, and actually a great example of this, and I’m familiar with it because it used to be in this space, was in Daily Fantasy Sports a number of years ago, right, these were performance driven companies when you talk about the FanDuel and DraftKings of the world. And, you know, they ran a lot of TV and they ran a lot of radio, and they ran a lot of podcasts, on all on all these different channels, and they were, they were very performance focused with those, but they were not very brand focused, even though those are on like, you know, what you could call brand channels, right?

What you thought was tremendous growth in those two spaces—this is not talking about five years ago, unlike 2015—but everybody hated FanDuel and DraftKings. And like some people hated them because they use DraftKings, they lost some money and they heard they cheated or something. But everybody hated them because of their ads, and that’s an example of how you totally eroded your brand. In a way that’s really hard and really expensive to recover from over time. 

And so that’s what I mean, I mean you can, you know, people are going to see lots and lots and lots of your performance ads, and if none of those ads are building your brand, you know, again, depending on your vertical, you’ll find yourself really regretting it later on. 

Shamanth: Understood. So it’s almost like when you do your paid performance marketing, there are certain brand guidelines you want to make sure you adhere to and you’re not just optimizing to hit a D1 or D7 target if the messaging is completely off. That’s what your… 

Adam: Exactly. 

Shamanth: Yeah. 

Adam: Exactly. Right. There has to be a balance there. And again for, for an early startup, that balance has to be tilted heavily towards performance. If you ignore brand, it erodes over time. 

Shamanth: Yeah. And you know, I do know you guys have done some interesting work with podcasts. I believe you guys had a podcast of your own. Tell us.

Adam: We, yeah, we developed a podcast around reading the terms and conditions of a number of big banks.

Shamanth: Yes. 

Adam: And it was really, I would say, this was not a serious attempt of entertaining podcasters, more so pointing out the hilarity which is, in ridiculous terms, that you’re agreeing to when you sign up with the banks, particularly around overdrafts. Right? 

Shamanth: Right.

Adam: And a lot of people just simply don’t understand what they are agreeing to. So that, that was our point there. 

Shamanth: Yeah, and for something like that, there’s no performance element to it at all.

Adam: At all.

Shamanth: At all, right. Internally, how do you justify getting the resources to do something like that, if at all you had to do it, yeah? 

Adam: The short answer is that that’s not very resource intensive, right, but, but kind of longer answer is that, that’s, it’s, it does, it does have impact, right? And go again to back to human behavior, now like, let’s say, let’s say you heard about that, that podcast, right? You were – there’s almost no chance that you’re going to download and sign up for Current at that moment. Right? That’s, that’s not really the goal there. 

Shamanth: Sure.

Adam: But what happens next time you get hit with an overdraft fee, right, like, and that’s the time when you’re most likely to convert, in the same way that, you know, I mentioned earlier with a dating example, right, when somebody, all of a sudden becomes single, that’s when they’re eligible to download an app, and that’s when they will, maybe when you get hit with an overdraft fee, when you have a bad experience with a bank, that’s when you’re like, okay, you know what, fuck it, I’m going to sign up with Current now. 

Shamanth: Right. Right. Right.

Adam: Because we’re top of mind, when it comes to how shitty overdraft fees are. 

Shamanth: Right. That makes sense, yeah. And understandably, brand marketing isn’t a precisely quantifiable thing. How do you think about evaluating the impact of brand marketing? 

Adam: So it’s interesting because, you’re right it’s not; and in many ways, what some people would categorize as brand marketing, things like TV, things like, things like  radio, to me, that’s not so much brand marketing as much as those channels are associated with brand marketing, but those can really be executed in a way that’s very, very performance, performance driven. So, so brand marketing, in its true sense is, is far more qualitative. 

Shamanth: Right. 

Adam: Right, and, and again, as, and when you talk about like, you know, traditional marketing organizations, some of that, some of the biggest consumer brands in America, there’s, there’s many, many ways to measure this very closely. But for a company, and more of a startup like ours, it’s simply going to be more qualitative. 

Shamanth: Understood. And what made you say it’s qualitative, what’s an example of how precisely you might want to do it, you’ll be doing it?

Adam: Well, so you, you need to talk to – I mean, you know, and not just talk to people within your company, right, because then you, you develop something that like people in your company want, but if your consumers are different than that, and I’d say like most consumer products are not directed or not targeted towards the people who work at that company, then you need to talk to your customers, right, and you need to gauge their impact. And there’s ways to do it via surveys and things like that, but honestly, nothing’s, to me, especially from a brand standpoint, nothing’s better than actually talking to people. 

Shamanth: Right.

Adam: And, ideally, you can talk to people who both know your brand, and people who don’t know your brand, who are within your targeted audience and engaging, hey, look at this, what do you think, what do you feel. And it’s incredible to me that people don’t do this, right, like a lot of people say they do this and say this is a good idea, and I think everybody knows it’s a good idea, but

It’s astonishing to me how few people will spend millions and millions of dollars marketing a product and literally never once speak to an actual user on the phone or in person.

Shamanth: Yeah. It’s certainly something that surprised me just in the last year or two as I’ve done work with a myriad of companies and apps just as well, yeah, that you’re right, yeah… 

Adam: And I’ll tell you, when you do this, it’s not necessarily fun, right, and it could be brutal.

Shamanth: Yeah, yeah.

Adam: And every single conversation you have will be frustrating to some degree, right, because like, your, your intention, you know, is never fully realized, right, and, and, it could be really satisfying when somebody says something like, oh yeah, well this, you know, made me feel XYZ, and it was exactly the plan. But like that’s the exception, and you’re always trying to build towards that. But to me, everybody will learn from that process, and it’s just… Yes. You know, sometimes it’s not fun to learn. 

Shamanth: Exactly, yeah. And, you know, for your performance marketing, you clearly have a creative process, a creative iteration process, and I know you touched upon this briefly that there are brand elements that impact how you make creatives. I’m curious how specifically your creative process looks as a result of you guys being mindful of your brand, and everything that the brand needs to communicate. 

Adam: So it’s, it’s kind of like I alluded to before, it’s super integrated, right, we, you know, we have, you know, our brand designers and our brand marketers here, we’re in the same meetings, you know, we ideate on the creative process, and again, I’m talking about like, for our performance ads, and they have total input into that process. 

Shamanth: Yeah. 

Adam: It’s not one that’s happening in isolation, which is like, you know, again, me, as somebody who’s predisposed to performance, right, like in many ways, I need somebody to police me on brands. Right?

Shamanth: Yeah. 

Adam: And I think that’s, that’s important. 

Shamanth: Yeah. And, you know, for a performance marketer that’s looking to be more brand conscious perhaps because they started working in a company that requires more trust, building of trust – how would you recommend they inculcate that and how did you do that yourself? 

Adam: I think a lot of it is, I guess, it’s being cognizant, kind of, you know, maybe your own deficiencies, which is certainly the case with my, with myself. But just having, having respect for both processes, right? 

And I get, what I get asked a lot is, A, like at the top of a marketing organization, right, is it more important to have a brand person or more important to have a performance person; and what you’ll see is with a lot of startups and this is, this is a trend that I see, I have seen repeated several, several times, especially here in New York actually where a lot of traditional companies are based, where you have a startup that’s been, you know, performance led on the marketing side, and then they scale up, then they raise their Series C, then their series D, and the numbers get bigger and then they hire some big flashy CMO from traditional consumer brand to lead their marketing organization. It’s like, well, I’d say, I’ve never really seen that succeed. But to me, it’s vertical specific, it’s product specific, there is a good argument to have that person in place if you’re in the right vertical, right. You know, I’ll bring up, I’ll bring up dating again, because I think brand is so important to that, that vertical, like it’s a, it’s a really obvious choice where, you know, the number one reason why people may choose a dating app is because it’s the cool app, not because the call-to-action was right and put in the right position. Right? I mean, that’s, that’s the reality of it. But I find that for a company to which like, you know, performance and direct response is just going to be more important, it’s a lot easier to find somebody who maybe, you know, is stronger on the performance side, but also both has respect and, and an understanding of the importance of brand. 

Shamanth: Indeed, yeah. And oftentimes, it makes sense to look at marketing holistically, you know, even though a lot of gaming companies don’t necessarily need to look at it, doesn’t mean it’s not important or necessary, especially in high involvement spaces like yours Adam. 

Adam: Yeah, and I’ll tell you, this conversation is hilarious to a marketer 20 years ago. 

Shamanth: Yeah, exactly. 

Adam: Because we are not saying anything that they don’t necessarily know. 

Shamanth: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. 

Adam: But again, coming from the space that’s strictly performance driven, which mobile has been, and I think this is, this is part of the just evolution of mobile, right? Early mobile was so gaming focused, those were just the biggest companies on mobile. And as, you know, smartphones have just become a bigger part of our lives, mobile is not, you know, mobile is everything, right, every single company has a mobile strategy, every single business has a mobile strategy, because mobile is such an important part of our lives, that this natural shift from like, okay, super performance driven to, you know, moving more towards, you know, the pendulum swinging more towards a combination of a hybrid approach makes sense. 

Shamanth: Indeed, And I guess, we’ve come up toward the end of our time together, Adam. So this has been incredibly instructive for me there’s certainly something we can all take away from this. Thank you so much for being on the Mobile User Acquisition show. As we wrap, can you tell us where our listeners can find out more about you? 

Adam: Yes, certainly. You could find me on Twitter @itsadamhadi or on LinkedIn. Certainly, if you are interested in any of this, please check out our jobs listings at Current. We’re hiring pretty aggressively. We’re, again, based in New York City in Soho. We’re doing some pretty exciting and cool things here.

Shamanth: Excellent, excellent. We’ll link to that when we put out the podcast – in the podcast show notes, and certainly excited to have you on the show again, Adam. And yeah, thank you so much. 

Adam: Thank you Shamanth. 

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

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