On the afternoon of Wednesday 19th October, the Sydney office of M&C Saatchi Performance opened its doors to our esteemed clients, partners and friends for an afternoon of Mobile thought leadership. We invited two of our mobile-tech partners – Adjust and AppAnnie – to present alongside our own James Hilton, CEO and Bobbie Gersbach, Regional Account Director.
James Hilton opened the session with the hot topic of Ad Blocking and shared his insights into the future of mobile advertising. According to James, ‘we all have a responsibility to work together to serve fewer and more relevant ads to users’.
We then welcomed John Sardelic, MD of Adjust SEA, who according to his mum ‘works with computers’ to inform us of the attribution changes that have come with the latest iOS 10. The key take out from John’s presentation was to highlight the changes to Apple’s IDFA with more users switching on their Limit Ad Tracking Setting on their phone.
Our good friends at AppAnnie joined us with Kevin Huang, Head of Customer Success (APAC) enlightening us on the App Econony. It seems apps are here to stay!
And lastly, but most definitely not least, our very own Bobbie shed some light on the various acquisition tactics that we employ as a mobile first digital agency.
We ended the evening drinking wine, eating cheese and entertaining our guests. The feedback was extremely positive with many guests thanking us for an educational evening. Overall a successful night.
Here are some content takeaways we would love to share with you:
- Ad Blocking: there is work to be done by advertisers and marketers to improve the mobile ad experience, and M&C Saatchi Performance are championing both relevant creative and targeting. However, there is also a need for consumer education.
- Attribution: With iOS 10, iPhone users are now able to block their device IDs from being used by advertisers for attribution. We will start to see an evolution in attribution, involving methods such as fingerprinting which will hold industry-wide accuracy challenges.
- Australian app usage: In Australia, time spent in app grew 125% YoY between 2015 and 2016, and Australians spend more per capita, in-app than most other western countries, including the US and UK.
- M&C Saatchi Performance trends:
- Marketers are spending a huge amount of their advertising budgets on ATL channels (e.g. TV, OOH..) to drive users to install their apps, however are often losing out on ROI due to sub optimal app store visibility against key search terms. We as a peformance marketing agency are working with our clients to ensure the organic path to install is optimized, and that the greater marketing budget is not being wasted.
- There are many partners who are able to provide quality installs outside of the likes of Google and Facebook, however the industry barrier with this long tail is transparency. There are several ways we as an agency are addressing this:
- Experimenting with emerging, mobile-first programmatic platforms
- Leveraging new technology (i.e. Cluep) which allows advertisers to use rich social data, across the open web.
- Using our vast proprietary learnings to build databases of top publishers by category and country
