Mobile Heroes Uncensored – Details, episodes & analysis

It’s the last dance. For the last time on Mobile Heroes Uncensored, John & Peggy are chatting about mobile growth, mobile success, and mobile challenges.

In this episode, we chat about our favorite episodes, a few of our favorite guests — there’s no way we could talk about all of them — and the places they come from, and the topics they shared.

It’s been 76 shows.

Thank you all for the ride, and see you around social media and on many other podcasts that both Peggy and I still on.

Apologies, but we liked Brazil so much we stayed (virtually, of course). In this Mobile Heroes Uncensored, we chat with Guilherme Braz, Acquisition Senior Director at Mercado Libre, an e-commerce and fintech leader in Latin America.

While he’s got great experience in mobile -- having worked at Wildlife Studios previously -- in another life he was a Bain consultant. And Gui, as he likes to be called, brings the kind of intellectual rigor you might expect from Bain to his marketing.

We discuss Brazil, mobile marketing today, incrementality and media mix modeling, App Tracking Transparency, and so … much … more!

Timestamps

0:00 Guilherme Braz, acquisition at Mercado Libre

7:15 Start with the problem

9:50 Brazil and super apps

13:15 Re-engagement in mobile apps

14:45 Incrementality

19:45 Attribution and incrementality

26:00 Least censored opinion about mobile marketing

If segmentation sparks joy in your life you might need to get fitted for a straitjacket. Or maybe you’re just super passionate about mobile marketing, engagement, monetization, and retention.

We think the latter applies to Geoff Hladik, who leads revenue and growth at FlipaClip. At least we hope so, because this is the second time we’ve chatted with him and we’re almost related now.

In this episode, hosts Peggy Anne Salz and John Koetsier chat with Geoff about:

• Becoming a Mobile Hero
• Audience segmentation (shocking, I know, given the title)
• New paths for revenue and user growth
• Engaging and activating creators
• Flaws in measurement models
• And more …

Timestamps

0:00 Who is Geoff Hladik

2:01 An eternity in mobile marketing

6:07 Audience segmentation

9:27 Understanding your users

14:05 Tweaking user journeys

16:40 Putting revenue and growth together

19:35 Improving user experience

22:45 Least censored opinion

Every mobile marketer needs good ASO. The last thing you want is to acquire users, have them hit your App Store or Google Play listing, and say … nah, maybe not. So getting your app store optimization right is critical.

In this Mobile Heroes Uncensored, we chat with AppTweak’s head of ASO Simon Thillay. He chats with hosts John Koetsier and Peggy Anne Salz about custom product pages, in-app events — the kind that people participate in, not the kind you track for KPIs — and how he sees ASO evolving.

Check this episode out to make sure no marketing dollar gets wasted at the very last step in the funnel. And why endurance skating and mobile marketing are similar!

Timestamps

0:00 App Store Optimization

3:30 Custom product pages

7:35 In-app events and live ops

9:30 AppTweak head of ASO Simon Thillay

13:05 ASO trends

19:30 Galaxies of apps

22:10 The most frustrating thing about ASO

25:01 Least censored opinion about mobile marketing

It’s never been tougher to make it in user acquisition and growth, but Huuuge Games director of marketing creatives Misha Syrotiuk makes it work in two diverging ways: more automation, and more human connection.

In this Mobile Heroes Uncensored, we chat with Misha about the amount of automation needed to remove some of the drudgery and grunt work from creative creation and campaign optimization. But we also chat about the advice he’d give his younger self: investing in the human relationships that make business run and enable needed growth.

In addition, hosts Peggy Anne Salz and John Koetsier discuss how Misha feels about Android vs iOS, creative testing, AI-enabled art workflows, and the best career advice he can offer.

Timestamps

0:00 Huuuge Games

1:45 Misha Syrotiuk

5:55 Innovation in mobile games

8:15 Structuring mobile growth teams

11:10 Challenge: manual operational work

14:00 Android is my favorite playground

18:05 Top tip for personal growth

20:05 AI art creation tools

23:15 Advice to my younger self

25:20 Least censored mobile marketing opinion

Blockchain and gaming? Check

IDFA, ATT, and Privacy Sandbox on Android? Check

Influencer advertising on TikTok? Check

Today is agency day on Mobile Heroes Uncensored, and we’re chatting with three all-stars. Jonathan Yantz at M&C Saatchi Performance, Dave Riggs from Apex Growth (used to be Customer Acquisition), and Eddie Yoon at NP Digital (yeah, that’s Neil Patel’s company) join Peggy Anne Salz and John Koetsier to talk about all the hot stuff.

From multi-million dollar monthly budgets to startups just beginning to scale, there’s something for everyone. And … we get each mobile hero's hot take on their most uncensored opinion in mobile marketing.

Timestamps

0:00 Super special MHU day

3:15 Ad performance in the age of privacy

12:55 Blockchain in gaming

16:15 Privacy Sandbox on Android

19:01 Why you need a higher converting app

20:50 Influencer marketing on TikTok

23:50 Video ad micro KPIs

33:01 Least censored opinions on mobile marketing

Is data-driven marketing actually impossible today? Do we have too much data … so much we have to shift to AI-driven marketing?

In this Mobile Heroes Uncensored we chat with Agustin Ochoa, a former Googler and now Performance Senior Manager at Winclap, a growth marketing consulting partner. Ochoa chats with hosts John Koetsier and Peggy Anne Salz about events to pay attention too — hint: far more than most do now — and how AI is better than humans at certain things like that.

We also chat about when sacrificing marketing efficiency for growth makes sense, the “event stack” he evangelizes, and the kinds of data you need to be collecting for optimal effectiveness.

Timestamps

0:00 Meet Agustin Ochoa

5:50 From data driven marketing to AI driven marketing

11:00 What app events to pay attention to

17:30 Omnichannel and focusing on your user

21:30 3 trends challenging mobile performance advertisers

24:30 Best advice for mobile marketers

3 billion app downloads is no small feat. Wildlife Studios, however, has achieved that and has very quietly become a top 10 games studio on the planet, beginning from Brazil and expanding across the globe.

In this Mobile Heroes Uncensored, we chat with Carolina Guimarães, Senior Director of Performance Marketing, and Anel Ceman, VP of Ad Monetization, about the twin challenges of UA and monetization.

1. Get more quality users as cheaply as possible
2. Monetize them without destroying the game experience

And … we get both Carolina’s and Anel’s uncensored opinions about ATT and privacy, as well as their biggest hacks for automating the more annoying and mundane aspects of user acquisition and monetization. We also get Anel’s take on what to measure in a mobile game – pretty much everything – and Carolina’s identification of the single most important KPI.

Timestamps

0:00 Success has a thousand fathers

3:30 Wildlife Studios

6:50 Performance marketing vs product

9:40 UA vs ad monetization

13:30 The biggest challenge

14:30 Automation save times

15:35 KPIs to measure in mobile games

17:30 One metric to rule them all

19:10 Ad partners

22:40 Superheroes of mobile

26:40 Carolina’s nightmare

Apple’s app tracking transparency was great … if you were primarily monetizing via ads on Android. In this episode of Mobile Heroes Uncensored hosts John Koetsier and Peggy Anne Salz chat with long-time SmartNews marketing leader Fabien-Pierre Nicolas, now an advisor.

We chat about ad monetization, using old-fashioned linear TV for mobile user acquisition ads, and automating hyperlocal organic and paid reach on Facebook. And, of course, as always, much, much more!

Timestamps

0:00 Unicorn apps

2:30 19 different jobs on LinkedIn

5:35 The TikTok of learning

9:00 SmartNews user acquisition strategy

13:30 Consumer-driven growth

15:30 Borrowing from big tech

18:40 No good ad campaign survives contact with the enemy

20:20 Top 3 tips for mobile marketers

What can 250M users and 30 billion games played reveal about mobile games, winning IP, and monetization?

In this episode of Mobile Heroes Uncensored we chat with Amy Huang, the CEO of Mattel163. She’s led the company to take iconic games like UNO and Skip-Bo mobile, leading to a quarter of a billion users and 30 billion games played. If that’s not enough, she’s also an accomplished rock climber.

Hosts Peggy Anne Salz and John Koetsier chat with Amy about focus, growth, hybrid monetization models, and going global via localization.

Timestamps

0:00 250 million users

2:46 Mattel163

5:35 CEO Amy Huang

7:00 Big IP for mobile games

9:30 Mobile app launches

12:00 Mobile monetization: IAP, IAA

15:43 UNO and eSports?

19:54 Globalization is localization