Ep. 003 Adam Hadi: Mobile Influencer Campaigns

In this episode, Adam Hadi with Current, a mobile bank, joins us to talk about acquisition, mobile influencer campaigns from a marketing perspective and more. To connect with Adam directly, catch him on LinkedIn @AdamHadi or on the MAU Vegas website, MAUVegas.com.

Transcript

MAU[Talk]: 0:01

Hey guys, welcome to MAU[Talk], a new podcast from MAU Vegas, the premier mobile acquisition and retention summit. On today's episode, we have Adam Hadi, VP of Marketing at Current. He's going to be talking to us about mobile influencer campaigns from a marketing perspective. Take it away, Adam.

Adam Lovallo: 0:21

All right. Welcome to MAU[Talk]. I am very, very pleased to have a fellow Adam here joining me. Adam is a longtime industry friend, we definitely met through MAU, although I don't perhaps you could recall where you were career wise at the time, currently. Somewhat pun intended, is the VP of Growth, or perhaps this marketing, I don't know, growth, marketing, at Current was this kind of a challenger bank, you could talk up and tell us more about it. So Adam, super appreciate you're doing this in lieu of your, your MAU stage time for 2020. And welcome to our podcast.

Adam Hadi: 1:01

Thank you so much, Adam. You know, I don't even think of you as another Adam anymore. You're just his own person. Most other Adam's, I think of them as a subset of of me, right? They're like, they're, you know, but no, you move beyond that.

Adam Lovallo: 1:12

It's an honor. I've transcended the name.

Adam Hadi: 1:15

And, yeah, I think we met it was the second MAU I'm not sure how you did the first without me. But great job.

Adam Lovallo: 1:23

Where were you at the time, career wise. I mean, obviously, we're in the mobile place. But what was it?

Adam Hadi: 1:28

I was working at Topps, the baseball card company, this was back in kind of the heyday of where I would talk about us as like digital collecting and digital goods. And people would think I was crazy. Because who would pay any money for a digital good? And you know, low and behold, Pokemon Go. Just all of you know gaming right now in general, you know, League of Legends? You know, that Fortnite, right? All these skins? But yeah, you know, that with that, that's where I was,

Adam Lovallo: 2:05

And tell us who for those not users, what is Current? What is this thing?

Adam Hadi: 2:12

So Current is a mobile bank, where a bank for those overlooked by traditional banks. So you know, hey, most people listening to this podcast, right? Most people within our space, were likely professionals earning professional annual salary. And with that annual salary, you can kind of go into any bank, and be like, hey, I want to check an account. And they'll be like, great, we're Bank of America, and you'll be a great customer for us. For about half the country, that's not the case, right? If you're an hourly worker, you know, service industry worker, a gig economy, worker, practic creative who doesn't have like a steady direct deposit, you walk into Chase, or Citibank or whoever, and you're getting charged monthly maintenance fees for not having enough money in your account. You're luckily, paycheck to paycheck, right? Meaning you're near a zero balance, you're probably getting hit with overdraft feeds, and you're paying hundreds of dollars just to maintain a checking account. So it's a very different experience, depending on how much money you have, right? And so we're a bank for the ladder, right? And we can be that, because we have far fewer costs in a traditional bank. It's actually pretty crazy when you think about banking today, right? Because if you were to start a bank today, there's no way you would be like, Oh, you know, we need to do open up thousands upon thousands of brick and mortar locations and and employ, you know, 100,000 people around the country to manage this, right? You would never do that. But yet, like the old traditional banks have chosen, yeah, let's keep this this makes sense. And to be honest, it kind of does for their business model, which is basically to sell what is effectively an expensive product to a wealthy audience. Right? And so that's why, you know, essentially, the way that they get by with that is that they subsidize these checking accounts, in hopes that you'll make money with them by number one depositing a bunch of money there that they can then lend out, number two, by upselling you into like a credit card, or, or even better a mortgage. Right? And so this entire expensive lead gen essentially makes sense on the back of that. But again, that only makes sense with the half of the country that's going to do that. But the other half of the country, you know, the 25 year old who's working at Amazon or working at Best Buy or working at Walmart or driving Uber, they're not going to do any of those things. Right? And so, the banks purposely make their experience terrible, so that they can focus in on the welfare customers.

Adam Lovallo: 5:02

Okay, excellent. So you have like a true growth marketing background at Topps and in subsequent companies I know you've done a ton of consulting over the years. So I'd love to hear how those sort of tactics, we'll call them a traditional mobile growth tactics and how they apply in FinTech. Like, I mean, we a lot of people listening will understand what it looks like e-comm will understand what it looks like, certainly in gaming, but like what are some of the learnings that you've had a things that do and don't fit for the category that you're in now?

Adam Hadi: 5:42

Yeah, certainly. Well, I mean, on a technical basis, right, we're a mobile app. And the actions in which we're driving people to do and the which ways in which they engage with us, is measured mostly through our mobile app, although obviously, you have a debit card as well and there's offline things that happened there. So from a technical perspective, there's a lot of similarities. I would say, on a less technical perspective, dealing with people's money is a lot broader than anything I've personally worked on in the past. You know, we talked about Topps, but you know, I've also worked on daily fantasy sports, right? What did I do know about you to acquire you as a daily fantasy sports customer? Basically? Like, do you like sports? Which sports do you like? And are you over 18? And in a blank state. That's all I really didn't even know anything else about your life besides that, to know that you are a qualified user, and could be a good user, right? The same kind of applies towards like, e-commerce, right? Oh, you like these boots? Great. That's the thing, I didn't even know anything beyond your life to acquire you. In our world, it's much more complex, right? I need to like, your entire context, and how I speak to you, it's really, really important. Where you work, what your priorities are, what your pain points are in life, because money is so critical to life, and how you live it. And so I'd say I've taken a lot of like, you know, the performance stuff from my past and had to incorporate a lot of broader marketing, and broader understanding of people's lifestyles. And I think that goes for, you know, not just, you know, FinTech but a lot of non gaming, and even the category of non gaming. That's like a hilarious way to describe an industry. I know, well does this, but kind of speaks to how ingrained we are, and how, you know, I mean, gaming has been so much of a part of, you know, the early days of performance marketing. And, you know, I've learned a lot from my days working in gaming.

Adam Lovallo: 7:50

All right! And so, there are a lot of challenger banks that have different bits of functionality. Have you seen anything tactically from an acquisition standpoint, that that you've observed amongst competitors, that you were either super surprised that like seeing something that only fits in the category that you're in? Or things that you think probably we're not like, we're obviously not very effective you were happy to have avoided? Can you think of anything that comes?

Adam Hadi: 8:25

Man, you know, I'm gonna do my best not to throw too much shade here at the competition. You know, I've seen some interesting things, for sure. You know, millions upon millions of dollars spent on let's say, like, an outdoor campaign, or for maybe a business that had not yet even been established kind of speaks to like, a fundamental, misunderstanding of how, you know, real people respond to advertisements in the real world. It's not to say that, hey, outdoor advertising some stupid channel, no, I don't think that's the case at all. But maybe not the direct response channel, to introduce a brand into somebody's life. You know, you look at something like I'll mention, SoFi. SoFi very bold move, they have bought the naming rights to SoFi Stadium in LA. That's crazy. It's, I think it's like $20 million a year or something. For a startup that's like, pretty, I mean, you know, cheap, you know, Barclays, which is Barclays, you know, insanely old financial brand, doing the same in Brooklyn. You know, very different valuations there to both we spending about $20 million to name a stadium. I'm not saying that, that that, you know, it was a great decision or a bad decision. But if it was a great decision, the logic behind it would work for a company in FinTech that maybe not for a company that's more strictly direct response, right, like, SoFi stadium that instantly solidifies. SoFi as like a legitimate player, right? Because now like, you know, they're right there with Chase Arena. Or again, we mentioned I mean, every bank has a stadium somewhere, right? And when dealing with people's money, that level of trust is incredibly important. And for the most part, we're not when I speak to other people who I work with, in FinTech, our focus really is on conversion, and down funnel metrics, much more than it is top of funnel, you know, if every company says this, but in banking, it's really, really, really true, right? You know, we ask, you know, our core metric that we're driving towards is direct deposits. That's what we truly consider a customer, once you switch your direct deposit to an institution, that's really who your bank is, if I asked you who your bank is. And for us, you know, when we're talking about a customer who's paycheck to paycheck, I'm literally asking them for all their money, right? And that's it's a crazy ask, because, hey, what happens if that doesn't work? You know, really that level of trust is super important. So when I look at a company like that, you know, hey, we're not we're not buying stadium naming rights anytime soon. But at a certain scale, can see how that can make sense, right? Yeah. But how did you feel you refinance with SoFi? And like, I don't know, it's like, there's a lot of risk there--it's a very risky proposition. And there's actually a lot of nuance and regulation. And, you know, hey, how do you qualify for certain federal programs? And it goes on and on and off. But point is that, that may seem crazy, and would probably be crazy if, let's say, the equivalent in, you know, the mobile world of like, you know, we had a Clash of Clans that might be, a little bit more absurd but I don't think it is, in the case of finance.

Adam Lovallo: 12:12

And in looking at the category, not even banking, but all FinTech. I imagine a challenge is that your optimization events are pretty deep into the experience and pretty delayed. Like sure, in gaming, you know, can you get somebody to complete the first level. In e-commerce, can you get them to take the first purchase? Those are sort of different depths of engagement. Imagine signing up for bank and switching direct deposit. I mean, that's, I met. So that takes time. And there's a relatively low conversion rate. How do you deal with that on platforms where you're optimizing for events? Like do you still, you know, tell Facebook, tell Google UAC's? Yeah, I want people who, you know, do this direct deposit thing? Or do you have to go up or funnel to like, make those systems play nicely?

Adam Hadi: 13:06

The straight up answer is you definitely have to go up or funnel, right? But you know, you can't, I mean, hey, if you know, you want to try to optimize for an event that happens once, most likely offline, you know, four weeks from now, like, you're gonna have a very tough time running effective campaigns. I mean, that's just not actually feasible, or even close to feasible even under, under better circumstances, not even close to feasible in the world of like modern performance marketing, right, certainly, on the mobile side. So yeah, as you can imagine, we have events way further up the funnel, that act as a best predictor of this. And without giving away too much of the secret sauce, these are mostly synthetic events, right? They're not explicit user events. And I think a lot of companies have have moved in this direction, where it's not, you know, it used to be oh, pleading, like level seven, let's say or whatever the equivalent of like this explicit event might be, or, you know, an add to cart, this explicit event,

Adam Lovallo: 14:14

Score or index value or something, right.

Adam Hadi: 14:16

Yeah, and so obviously, being able to predict that and model it out, is hugely, a big part of what we do here.

Adam Lovallo: 14:26

Okay, awesome. Now, I'm going to switch gears a little bit. So I know that you have had a lot of experience personally and in prior companies with influencer stuff writ large. First of all, you've told me some crazy stories over the years I don't know what you can share, but like, could you talk a little bit about what what sort of influencer campaigns paid or organic that you have been involved in or what what what the sort of shape look like? I mean, is it been YouTube stuff or you know, stuff on Instagram or elsewhere, like what what has your your mobile influencer experience been over the last couple years?

Adam Hadi: 15:07

Yeah, certainly. I'm glad you were paying attention that my MAU talks, Adam.

Adam Lovallo: 15:14

Oh, very closely. Always.

Adam Hadi: 15:17

No, it's evolved over time. So influencer marketing even as a term, it's like what does that mean? It can mean a lot of different things, right? It can mean, you know, in my world, it mostly means performance, right? It's a,performance channel, just like Facebook is just like Google is it's a channel that has its own distribution, its own metrics, and ultimately have a CAC, that it drive towards. But it can mean you know, content. It can mean, basically affiliate, it's been used for all these different terms, right? It could be like a brand ambassadorship, you know, whatever influencer marketing became a hot term probably, like, five years ago or something. Yeah, it kind of got adopted by all these different territories. And so, yeah, I mean, I've treated it primarily as a performance channel, although it's very useful for all those other things I just mentioned, as well. And so, you know, we've certainly built a lot of content, using using influencers here. And that's a big part of our story, our brand and, in terms of funny stories, I'll skip that we can.

Adam Lovallo: 16:38

I was hoping that was me. I was I was reaching. What about if you're comfortable sharing, put Current aside for the stuff that you've done, have you done more on YouTube versus Instagram versus Twitter versus whatever? Or has it been everything?

Adam Hadi: 16:53

It's been a little bit of everything. It really depends on your product or you know, and again, I consulted on this for years. And, you know, I had a lot of people who would come to me and be like, Hey, you know, like, I don't know, I am working on like a, you know, let's say like home improvement. Which, you know, hey, home improvement is clearly has an older audience but could be found on YouTube, that's actually a decent category of like, "Do It Yourself Home Improvement" type show that exists on YouTube. Even though demographically, YouTube itself is a really small channel. So if you were to, you know, separately, come come at me and say, oh, like our average audience is, you know, 45 year old men who really care about sports. You're not really finding that user on YouTube, right? Like, that's, like, you know, maybe like some highlight reels and things like that. But generally speaking, there's not a huge audience for that. And so YouTube is a really young platform. Instagram is certainly older. You know, TikTok started off well, back in the musically days, certainly very, very young, has consistently been skewing older, especially this year but you know, sits maybe somewhere between YouTube and Instagram. Snapchat has kind of grown older as its matured as an audience. It used to be this young platform. Now all of a sudden, those you know, 17 year olds or 22. And so it really depends on where your audience is. But but but for me, YouTube certainly been a bread and butter channel for me. I think the influences on YouTube really carry the most influence and that's a that's a really important, like concept, and all this that often gets lost beyond just the metrics. You know, like, you can get plenty of views. And let's say, comparing it to like a meme account on Instagram, which I'm not trying to diss meme accounts, they have a lot of value within themselves. But a meme account telling you to download an app, it's like, how much is that for the weight does that really carry? Think about the commitment we make when we watch a YouTube video. It's like the biggest commitment we make on the internet. Like, wow, I'm gonna click into this thing, load this up, and like, sit back and watch it. That's crazy. We don't do that with anything else. We like this really big commitment and these influences themselves. It's such a personal connection much more so than you would get maybe just scrolling through a feed. So that's why YouTube's gonna benefit the channel that I've liked. But again, it all depends on where your audience is, and there's plenty that you can do on Instagram. There's plenty you can do on Twitch and live streaming. It's it's all kind of depends on that.

Adam Lovallo: 19:56

Okay, and I want to pause to say, what was the calendar year when you gave a presentation at MAU? And you identified what you thought would be major channels in the future, one of which was I think, musically, now TikTok. I gotta give you credit for that because you didn't nail that. Did you remember what year that was?

Adam Hadi: 20:17

I think that was 2015.

Adam Lovallo: 20:21

That was well ahead of the curve for your credit! So kudos there. To what extent do you think about? So okay, so influencer as a paid channel. That's a different perspective than a lot of the quote unquote influencer marketing ecosystem has, you know, for many, it's a branding channel, but that's okay. To what extent do you use like a campaign on YouTube as a means to generate creative assets for use in paid advertising versus actually treating it as its own standalone channel with a budget and a CAC, you know, targets? Like, have you ever thought of?

Adam Hadi: 21:03

You can stop right there. I am not answering that one. Extensively is the truth. Yeah, I can't no, that given that one. I mean, not that it's not like the major, you know, people do this. But yeah.

Adam Lovallo: 21:17

Facebook's ds Library, bro. It's out the

Adam Hadi: 21:21

You know, make them do the work. I'm not just gonna hand it on a silver platter, not that one.

Adam Lovallo: 21:26

Next question. So in the realm of influencer, one thing that I've at least seen firsthand is that it seems like for performance, um, like the pricing has kind of gotten out of whack, at least with some individuals. Like there's just enough demand from non performance advertisers, maybe who are more interested in reach or engagement and so on, that, it seems like it's gotten more difficult to find people who are willing to engage on a basis that, you know, could be cost effective on a performance basis. Do you think that take right, or, I mean, is it still in 2020? Are there plenty of people that you could find out there? You know, depending on the category where the math could still work?

Adam Hadi: 22:12

It's interesting, because it's somewhat true. It depends where you are in the market. On like, the low level, lower, look, it's called, like micro influencer, nano influencer, or even, or even some lower, mid-tier ones. That's where you'll often see, you know, a brand or an agency that's not so performance oriented, come in, and, you know, pay maybe 10x, the rate 5x the rate of more of like, a performance rate, where, you know, it completely blows it out of budget. And I'm like, oh, that's great that, you know, Procter and Gamble paid you, you know, $50,000 for this, but I can only pay you $10,000. Rather than something like that you'd certainly see. But actually on the top-end when it comes to like, the largest influencers, in many ways, you see the opposite. Which is that, you know, the brands that are not performance oriented, don't feel comfortable shelling out, you know, six figures on a campaign that's not performance oriented, but these audiences do indeed warrant that. And so you actually, again, on the highest tier, it tends to be more performance companies operating there.

Adam Lovallo: 23:31

Interesting.

Adam Hadi: 23:33

There's kind of this double thing happening in the market. Really, more than anything, you know, this is not like an efficient market place with like, auction dynamics that you would find, you know, that we're used to, on Facebook or Google, right. It's a lot of this is informal, a lot of this is based on relationships and that's not like a problem. Like, often people will think like, Oh, well, there'll be a platform that solves for that. That may be the case to a certain extent, but it's actually, you know, the trust that's built, that a lot of what I focus on when I work with creators, and that my team focuses on is enabling influencers to, you know, really do what they want to do, and create the content that they want to create, incorporate it in a way that's relevant to their audience. This was actually really easy, six, seven years ago, you know, because that's all they did was create content for the audience. They never worked with brands. And so when I approached them, they would, they would come up with all this cool stuff, right? But over the last several years, you've had them essentially be like, you know, what's the term I'm looking for? Basically punished by all these brands who they make something really cool and then brands like no, this is not correct, this is not the spec, this is a little bit off. You know, so they've kind of learned from from that to be like, no, I'm just gonna stick to the script and then once I say this, I won't get in trouble and it will be approved in the

Adam Lovallo: 25:13

In middle of the video I cut away, I say the thing, I show the thing for a minute, and then I'm back in the actual content, right?

Adam Hadi: 25:20

Yeah. And so a lot of the work that we do is building the trust with the creator that, hey, you can do something cool, you can go outside the box, you can be genuine and we're going to be okay with that. And so that's a level of trust that I get, you can't communicate that via some automated platform, right? It's just not something that's possible.

Adam Lovallo: 25:41

Okay, so one more tactical question. And this is less I think Current specific more does advice to people. So there's a, an ecosystem of influencer agencies and managers, and as you said, at least 20 plus quote unquote marketplaces of influencers, that you can either find people or even contract through them. Do you find? Or would you recommend going through one of those avenues like an influencer agency? Or have you found it to be more successful to kind of DIY reach out to people? Or maybe it makes it the two?

Adam Hadi: 26:20

Yeah, it's, you know, people, often companies often asked me this. And, you know, the answer I am used to giving is like, Oh, yeah, do it yourself, you definitely got to do it yourself. And it's the most obnoxious answer in the world. Because, you know, again, this is like, how are we every company strapped for resources? And how are you supposed to dedicate resources to a channel that you don't even know how to work? Especially if you don't even know how it works? So that's not really a fair answer to give the, I think more reasonable answer is that early on, it really makes sense to outsource this to somebody who knows what they're doing. Now, how you find who that person is, or who that agency is, it takes a little bit more work. But you know, right out the gate, you're not going to be able to execute an influencer campaign yourself successfully, right? So I wouldn't try to do that. But ultimately, to build it as a viable channel over time, you do need to do that internally. That's something that's very, very difficult to externalize. A lot of virtues, it's for those reasons I just gave you, right? Like, like, you know, me being able to go back and forth with an influencer, or, you know, more accurately somebody on my team that's like that back and forth and that that level of trust, it just creates a much better output that if you have an intermediary in-between, who doesn't necessarily have that level of trust, maybe with you, or doesn't have that nuanced understanding of the product, or if, you know, you want to create custom stuff for that influencer, you just can't do that through via third party agency. I mean, some of you I, I worked as VP of Marketing at Quidd, which is a digital marketplace, also for digital goods, with quite experienced in that category. You know, we made custom stickers in our app for the influencers that we worked with, right? So it wasn't an influencer, going out saying, Hey, you know, go download Quidd, it's a great app. It's an influencer saying, hey, go get my stickers on Quidd. You, it can be very hard to do that via a third party, that's something that you ultimately, you know, requires buy in from a lot of people internally. And, you know for it to really work at scale, you need that. So that's kind of my advice to companies who are who are thinking about it as a channel.

Adam Lovallo: 28:46

Awesome. Okay. And then one more influence around if you can answer this. So Twitch and streaming in general, even as a consumer, you know, someone who watches these videos myself, I certainly see lots of cross promotion of stuff pertaining to gaming, other games, you know, energy drinks, keyboards, all kinds of stuff like that, have you experimented, or either yourself, you know, managing campaigns for your clients for Current or even as a consumer scene, influencer sort of engagements that are probably more of a performance, you know, oriented campaign on streaming platforms from people that are not just pushing games, or is that a place that makes sense to you know, people watching games to promote games, do you think?

Adam Hadi: 29:40

I've seen both, I think it can totally, totally depend. You know, one of my first clients when I started consulting, was SeatGeek. Right? And, you know, we had a lot of success early on with gaming around sports gaming, right? Because now barely, you know, SeatGeek is not a game, it's a ticketing app. But obviously that's where, you know, an audience exists, a sports fan exists is in a sports, you know, is in a sports game. So that's where I think about and that's why you see, you know, the same idea behind like an energy drink, right? And hey, if you're trying to reach a certain consumer, whether you know if the you know, male or female or however old they are, and you can determine a lot by you know what game they're watching. If I know that you are, you know, streaming Call of Duty, or Counter-Strike that tells me something very different than if you're streaming Minecraft or Fortnite. And so, it's, again, we tend to throw all these things in one bucket, but it's the equivalent of like running a TV ad on Comedy Central or on you know, Oxygen or I don't really know the TV channels as well as I used to.

Adam Lovallo: 30:58

HGTV. Yeah, no, that's a fair I think there is a temptation even myself. Yeah, you think you think that is these influencer platforms as monoliths right at all we're gonna do Twitch. You know, there's people streaming chess and woodworking and all kinds of stuff at this point. So it's, I think it's kind of an anachronism to think about.

Adam Hadi: 31:17

I know I can find Adam Lovallo on Twitch but I get the feeling I can't find you on TikTok.

Adam Lovallo: 31:24

Exactly. Right? Exactly. Right. You might not be finding anybody on TikTok depending on how the news plays out next week. We'll see. Okay, and then my last topic, I'm not sure when we're gonna release this episode but this we're speaking not long after the WWDC IDFA, apocalypse business. Without going super into the weeds of the IDFA stuff, just fundamentally, how big of a bearing do you think it has on you know, what you guys are doing as a team? Like, do you think, oh, this is cataclysmic, and we're gonna see more concentration on Facebook and Google or like, you know, things will figure themselves out and it'll be more of the same like. Well, how are you guys thinking about it so far? And then it's early, so.

Adam Hadi: 32:07

it definitely is early. So it's interesting, because I think, while like, a lot of people are marketed as like, some huge, cataclysmic change and event iOS 14, really kind of like the second Apple started talking about limit ad tracking, this became a thing, right? Absolutely. And in many ways, I think we'll look back. Number one, not maybe, like, you know, 2012, to like, 2017, or something as like, the golden years of mobile ad tracking. But maybe more importantly, it's now pulling people, you know, it's maybe eliminating a little bit of false confidence that's existed in our existing attribution techniques. And, and, and again, this affects way more than just attribution. You know, particularly on the monetization side, for ad networks, games, etc. But just just from the attribution side, I like being told, hey, this user came from this ad, even though we know it's imperfect, eventually, you kind of get used to this idea that that's some determined thing that that's infallible. We all know, like, in reality, that's not how the world works. Yeah. Again, particularly in non-gaming, although even in gaming, you know, where it's acceptable, a bunch of different different cases there. But we talked about, personally, here at Current, you know, we're operating on quite a few different channels, quite a few non digital channels, where, you know, we need to look at incrementality anyways, right? And that's, I think it's going to force a lot of companies to do that, in a way that's ultimately going to be in their best interest. And so I think, while this is certainly catastrophic for a lot of companies, a lot of ad tech companies, a lot of, you know, again, depends on what vertical you are, there's going to be a lot of changes that happening. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. As bad as a lot of companies are looking for it. Because if you're thinking, Oh, my God, how am I going to do my job without this? As a marketer, you've probably been overly dependent on it anyways. And so the will change that.

Adam Lovallo: 34:34

It is true that specifically in the mobile app ecosystem, the MMPs, largely were effectively last click attribution, right. I mean, and that, yeah, they had some first clip, but yeah, they were last click attribution. So you had a whole ecosystem, massive advertising ecosystem. That's basically just been running like hardcore, last click, and now maybe has to pick their head up a little bit and be like, huh, you know, maybe an Apple search ad user isn't really just Apple search stores? Like, well, you know, actually, maybe they came up, or whatever.

Adam Hadi: 35:13

I mean, if you look at, like, the public relation, like on how, again, and super sophisticated advertisers haven't been, you know, like spending tons of money on fraud, but, you know, how, I mean, these fraudulent installs exist for a reason, because, like, for a certain segment of advertiser, they are, they are susceptible to that. And like, the fact that you see, I mean, you know, Uber is a great example of this, right, they spent they spent millions of dollars on were effectively fraudulent installs, and then, you know, pulled out and saw, you know, all of a sudden our organics increased. The fact that that could happen at that scale is indicative, again, in this world in which, you know, idea phase are effectively dead, you would have never fallen to that frog hole to begin with. And so it's going to be an interesting world. But, you know, I there, there's people who are far, far, far better versed in this then than I am. So I'm just listening to them like you.

Adam Lovallo: 36:17

Yeah, and there are a lot of self interested parties, not in a bad way. But you know, who are building their products and changing their plans, I'm sure in response to this stuff. So it's, um, I at least personally have found it somewhat difficult to like. Alright, so I read the branch thing. Okay, so now I've got that worldview, then I just read this Allison thing and adexchanger that's way worse than it read Eric Schubert on mobile dev memo, whoa! Like, that sounds like a bomb went off. And then I jumped over to, you know, the singular or just guys and it sounds fine. So it's been as someone who's not nearly as well versed in it, as you know, somebody like an Eric, it's been kind of difficult over the last two weeks for me personally to like, know, what is going on. But I think, I think your point on incrementality, especially just like, you know, media mouth modeling stuff, and all that kind of stuff.

Adam Hadi: 37:09

Now look, it's fitting and I can sit here and not be freaking out, because I'm in a somewhat privileged position. But this really, really, really hurts, and changes the ecosystem for obviously, a lot of ad tech players and things like that. But also on actually like the UAE and advertiser size. I mean, if you're gonna talk about a world in which we're completely dependent on incrementality, and media mix, modeling, these are things that are really hard to do it, medium scale, we have super tiny scale. incrementality is easy, because, you know, hey, baseline zero, right. But I like kind of like the small, medium size, it becomes really, really difficult--it really favors big businesses with big budgets. And, you know, so it's certainly, you know, the world of like, okay, well, now I'm just gonna stay inside of this walled garden. Although even you know, it's still unknown, that we know, what does Facebook advertising attribution looks like, particularly, you know, optimizing for down funnel events, all the stuff that we just talked about, where does that go? It's, yeah, it forces us to be a little bit more nimble minded, and maybe understand our customers more and behaviors have become, you know, it's funny, because we've spent really the last several years giving up lots of control to all these algorithms, right? When you look at things like UAC, and app event optimization, look alikes, etc, that existed for a while. And there's two ways to have gone with that. One is, hey, we give up all this control to algorithms. Now, I just become a data scientist. And that's where I live. The other approach is actually like, hey, all these algorithms are doing like the heavy lifting on the data side. This allows me to actually just better understand my customer, and focus on like, the creative and the messaging side. And so I think, for maybe the folks who went one route, they might, you know, have have a tougher time, than people who kind of looked at both, or maybe focus more on you know, traditional marketing. I put that in quotes.

Adam Lovallo: 39:17

Yeah. Now, Adam, if people want to find you, because we can put this in the notes. Are you a Twitter person? Can they follow you on LinkedIn? You do a newsletter? What do you got anything like that or not really?

Adam Hadi: 39:28

Certainly. You know, I'm on Twitter. Adam. It's Adam Hadi, on LinkedIn. Most importantly, and my biggest plug is you can find me at current.com/careers or hiring here at Current that's my big plug across the company as a whole but certainly on the marketing team.

Adam Lovallo: 39:49

Those are New York based roles or are you considering remote people?

Adam Hadi: 39:53

We are considering New York people because those are the best people.

Adam Lovallo: 39:57

Okay. Bias there. Okay, awesome. Well, I super appreciate you doing this and it was really great and until next time, thank you.

Adam Hadi: 40:09

Thank you.

MAU[Talk]: 40:11

Thanks for joining us. Adam's information can be found in this episode's description. Be sure to subscribe and visit our website mauvegas.com for updates. Catch you on the next episode of MAU[Talk].