#54 Why Transparency Matters on an Impression Level

With scaling any app comes a saturation of targeted consumers, which begs the question of how many paid impressions are overlapping? Today’s guest discusses some of the challenges facing the mobile marketing industry’s sources for driving growth, such as the lack of transparency at the impression level.

Meet Daniel Lopez, Director of Mobile Growth at Electronic Arts (EA), the second-largest gaming company in the Americas and Europe by revenue. Daniel got his start in mobile marketing at Machine Zone and has since worked at DraftKings and GSN Games.

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• During your time at Machine Zone, what do you think made you effective?
• What are mobile marketers overlooking?
• Oversaturation of consumers: Are you more concerned about it from a cost perspective or user experience?
• Is there value in saturating a market to develop the brand and be top-of-mind to consumers?
• Have we overvalued Facebook and Google as sources to drive growth?
• Why do you think MMPs haven’t built a way for marketers to track impressions and clicks across multiple vendors?
• What are you looking forward to or unsure of in regards to the future of mobile marketing?

• 3:10 What made Machine Zone team very effective.
• 4:15 From customer support role to marketing.
• 10:18 What mobile marketers are overlooking.
• 12:09 Why managing towards a unique, incremental device universe matters.
• 16:02 When mass marketing and saturating the market is useful.
• 19:11 Open exchanges.
• 20:00 What is Facebook good for?
• 21:35 Incrementality measurement.
• 24:30 IDFA as an opportunity to develop more robust measurements.
• 27:05 EA Future and open Positions.

(10:18-11:07) “I honestly think there’s not enough attention being paid to drivers of unique traffic and managing towards a unique, incremental device universe as opposed to just managing sources, channels, AT apps, and things of that nature. Because the nature of our business is that we need to identify an audience and then we need to figure out how to get to that audience. And then once we actually figure that out, then we try to scale. And then once we start scaling, we start dealing with this thing called saturation. And we start dealing with losses of incrementality, losses of effectiveness, and whatnot. And I think there’s not enough being done within the industry to challenge the lack of transparency on, let’s just single out, impressions counts.”

(25:32-15:58) “The thing that I am most concerned about is–it also goes back to the death of the idea phase–is that that just pushes power more and more into the hands of the big companies, to where it’s going to be like, “Hey, they have all the data. Let’s allow them to do everything.” And then that just kills the spirit of the problem-solving attitude because then everyone can just blame the algo[rithm]. And that’s something that maddens me to no end.”