Spotlight
Prediction articles make great reading…even if they eventually turn out to be wrong. The new year always brings a host of these, and here are a couple of my favorites.
2023 predictions for mobile gaming
Yes, this one will be relevant mostly for a subset of readers.
But where gaming goes first, the rest of mobile often follows, and prediction #4 ("Brand spend will reach a 10%+ proportion of in-game ads monetization") in particular is a great example of that — someone has to be on the other end, buying those ads!
2023 Mobile marketing trends & predictions
This is a much wider-ranging collection of predictions, with inputs from many voices across the industry.
Honestly, you'll be hard-pressed to find a topic not touched on here: COVID, economic softness, privacy, generative AI, connected TV, the importance of good UX for retention and channel diversification for acquisition...the list goes on, and wraps up with a nice summary of 2022 data trends at the end.
Interesting Reads
What does it look like for the web to lose?
Since literally the beginning of mobile, web vs. native app has been an ongoing debate. This author is clearly on team web, and there aren't any especially novel arguments here — in fact, he seems a little bit blind to exactly how far the momentum has already shifted to toward apps.
But my real reason for including the article is that it inspired this thread in response, which contains some true gems of historical context about how the web vs. app dichotomy developed in mobile in the first place.
React Native is not the future
If we take the web vs. app argument above and drill down one layer, the derivative version within apps is 'true' native vs. cross-platform framework (such as React Native on mobile, or Electron on desktop).
This is also not a new discussion, and companies often go back and forth between various options (Airbnb, rather famously flip-flopped on React Native a few years back).
In this case, the author's team felt that even maintaining React Native was too much work, and decided to make their apps nothing more than their mobile website behind a simple webview wrapper.
Simpler development, perhaps…but of course, it's always a tradeoff: all one needs to do is read the Hacker News comment thread for this article to see that yes, users definitely notice when things in apps work 'worse' than they expect.
How Apple and Google Are Taking Over the In-Car User Experience
Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are arguably just mobile-adjacent, but this was a great read about how the app/car experience is maturing over time.
Direct-to-Consumer Is Dying. It's Time for a New Paradigm
Mobile apps aren't just self-contained destinations anymore…they're critical (and typically very cost-effective!) components of much broader customer relationships.
With that in mind, notice the parallels here?
[…] in 2023, DTC retail will evolve into a new, more resilient iteration which I call connect-to-consumer (CTC). This new approach is about taking many pathways to reach customers simultaneously: From social media to Web3, from online shopping to the high-street stores.
Walled Gardens
The Year Ahead In Antitrust For Big Tech In The US And Abroad
It's shaping up to be a big year for antitrust, with almost every tech giant facing action on both sides of the Atlantic.
If you were looking for a refresher about who's under scrutiny for what, and where, this is a pretty solid recap of how things stand.
UX
The State of Mobile User Experience
It's been almost sixteen years since the original iPhone, and this report argues that the lines between mobile web and native apps are becoming blurrier.
I suppose in the extreme macro view, that's true…it's been a while since I saw an m. domain in my browser, or needed to click a view full website link, but 'blurrier' is not the same as 'gone'.
Data
How did organic and paid acquisition channels perform in 2022
This study reflects truth: the importance of non-paid mobile marketing is growing.
But with all due respect to the team at Adjust, this analysis of the trends reads like something straight out of 2011. Shoehorning the world into a simplistic paid vs. organic paradigm is a relic from an earlier age — organic is not a synonym for unattributed, and marketers today need a much more nuanced understanding of the different channels they work with.
Podcast
Strategic Paid Social, Massive Growth & The Culture That Empowers It
Head of User Acquisition @ Hopper: Makoto Rheault-Kihara
Makoto Rheault-Kihara leads user acquisition at Hopper, one of the fastest-growing travel apps with over 60 million in sales to date. Hopper differentiates its paid social strategy by focusing on user acquisition AND long-term trust through investing in paid social and other mobile ad channels. They use Facebook as the primary focus of their paid social ads with TikTok as a growing secondary channel.
Paid social is becoming a lot more abstract and therefore more creative. Makoto believes paid TikTok ads must be kept fresh, platform-focused, and generated at a higher frequency. Because Hopper diversified across three generic categories (hotels, flights, car rentals), their ad targeting still focuses on great creatives and has not changed much since IDFA deprecation in iOS 14.5.
Who’s Hiring?
- CVS Health | Executive Director, Retail Marketing – CRM Strategy — Woonsocket, RI
Do you have a mobile growth role you’d like to share with the community?
Just fill out this form — it’s free!
Welcome to 2023! We're barely even a full week in, but there is already a buzzy news story to start off the year: EU regulators have just ruled that Meta's use of its own first-party user data for personalized advertising is a violation of GDPR.
If the decision stands (Meta plans to appeal, obviously), this will be a remarkable shift, and potentially quite disruptive.
Why? Apple's AppTrackingTransparency policy is based around the distinction between first-party and third-party data, and requires advertisers to get user consent (via the ATT prompt) when using the latter for ad targeting and attribution. But first-party data has been seen by many as a relatively safe haven, and this ruling could change that by forcing companies to ask for user consent before using data collected on their own websites (or apps) for ads personalization.
Buckle up — 2023 is going to be interesting!
Alex Bauer