Ep. 100 The State of Retargeting in the Privacy-First Era

Your host Tommy Yannopoulos celebrates Apptivate’s 100th episode milestone with a special interview of Remerge’s CEO and co-founder, Pan Katsukis. They tackle the big elephant in the room, what Apple’s ATT and iOS privacy changes mean for retargeting -- and why Pan is excited for the future. They’re also sharing a macro view on several trends in the mobile app economy as a result of these changes and Pan’s predictions for what this all means for mobile marketers.

Pan Katsukis is a Berlin-based serial entrepreneur serving as CEO and Co-Founder of Remerge, a leading programmatic app marketing platform. Before starting Remerge in 2014, Pan co-founded a European mobile ad network, madvertise in 2008.

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• Why did you launch Remerge? When did you become aware of the retention problem and the opportunity to provide a solution?
• Typically, CEOs have to have a lot of conversations that they’re not willing to share with their employees. Are you saying that everything that you know about you’re willing to share with your team?
• What change do you think marketers will have the hardest time adapting to as it’s related to the privacy era?
• Why is iOS an opportunity for marketers today?
• When do you expect the market to stabilize as it’s related to no-id marketing? When do you expect marketers to feel more comfortable buying that 60% cheaper traffic to the point where it starts shifting to more expensive rates?
• Is retargeting still a strategy that marketers are leveraging?
• Is there a future in which the available inventory of IDs on iOS decreases, or do you think we’re at a point where it’s become saturated?
• The market is changing as a result of privacy changes. Why do you think we’re seeing a lot of businesses consolidate? What’s your take on what’s going on?
• What does consolidation do to open bidding? Is there an advantage to staying independent?
• What are you excited about for the future?

• 3:16 Pan’s background
• 5:25 Culture: The impetus for Remerge
• 9:20 Modeling openness and transparency
• 12:40 Adapting to SKAdNetwork
• 15:42 The opportunity of iOS15 for marketers
• 21:03 Why retargeting will stick around
• 24:53 The drivers of the app market consolidation
• 29:20 Strengths in staying independent
• 34:08 Why Pan’s excited about the future of Remerge

(13:57-14:12) “I think the opportunity is big. Even if you have this inventory, this audience which is very valuable of iOS users who are using the newest version, you can’t simply stop spending on iOS. You want to tap into the audiences and address them.”

(29:28-29:54) “Whether you’re independent or not independent, I think it doesn’t matter so much. It all comes to the mission and why you’re in the market. What’s the purpose? What do you want to solve? What do you want to achieve? What kind of mission are you on? Being independent and having a very clear mission and focused perspective on how to address market needs helps you obviously to execute towards that goal.”