Ep.123 Mergers & Acquisitions in App Marketing

If you work in the mobile app industry, you may have noticed a mass consolidation of companies taking place across multiple verticals. Today’s guest discusses what factors have accelerated these mergers and acquisitions, how this affects the app ecosystem, and what we can expect next.

Satya Vinnakota is the Director of Ads at Vinted, an app for second-hand fashion. He’s kept a pulse on the app economy since he started his career in Delhi at Startup Tunnel and moved onto business development for the performance advertiser, Applift. He is based in Berlin.

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• Why wasn't it difficult to acquire customers when you started at Applift?
• Tell us about Vinted.
• Is it fair to say that community is a big part of the ethos that drives loyalty to Vinted?
• What are you focused on at Vinted?
• What’s surprised you the most about what’s happened these past two years?
• Would you agree that the Apple privacy changes are a big impetus for the consolidations happening in the industry now?
• What do you expect to happen following the massive consolidation we’re seeing now across the app industry?
• What mergers and acquisitions were a smart move in the last couple of years, in your opinion?
  

• 2:37 Satya’s background
• 11:24 About Vinted
• 16:17 Satya’s role as Director of Ads
• 19:00 Post-pandemic consolidation in AdTech industry
• 21:16 How privacy changes accelerated M&A
• 23:00 What will happen next?
• 30:20 Do advertisers truly want transparency?
• 32:00 Smart acquisitions
• 35:10 It’s all about context
  

(4:03-4:23) “India is really a mobile-first country. I don’t think my grandfather has ever touched a Mac, but he has definitely used an iPhone, for example. I think that really changed everything for us in the sense that we had our own Flipkart, which is like Amazon but in India; we have our own travel apps; everything is app-first basically.”

(19:35-19:45) “What has surprised me in the last couple of years when it comes to mergers and acquisitions in our industry is the scale of it. I’m not just talking about the number of deals, but the sizes of the deals.”