Representative appearances

• The Post-Attribution Playbook for Growth — Eric Seufert, Mobile Dev Memo

  The fundamental problem in marketing uh half my marketing is performing. I just don't know which half. And that will that will be the perpetual problem that needs to be solved in marketing. You you can you can say that because this is your podcast, but I've actually banned that phrase from my podcast. Uh I I just feel like it's it's too reductive and people misinterpret it. I love that phrase. I hate the way it gets used. The way that people use it is to say this measurement's all smok and mirrors. No one really knows. We need to be telling a story. We need to be connecting emotionally. The only rorowass curve I care about is is the curvature of a satisfied customer smile. That's marketing. That's adver. And you this measurement stuff is just a bunch of hocus pocus. That's not what he was saying. I mean, John Wanaker was like a pioneer of advertising. He's one of the first people to take out a full page newspaper ad. He understood measurement. what that statement is saying is not is that's not a bad thing. It's like I understand the outcome given the inputs. I don't know the mechanics of it. I don't need to know necessarily that No, no, you're you're 100% right and I love that you brought that up because it it brings up such a good point is that there will always be some amount of uncertainty in marketing. The good marketers embrace that uncertainty. Not in a way like you said of just like ah throw their hands up and like oh we're just going to do brand stories or whatever. They embrace that uncertainty to say how much can I be certain on and what are the certainties I can build a process around and that's what good marketing is. It's not throwing your hands up. It's figuring out how to be more and more certain but within the the constraints that you understand you can't get to 100% certainty. The people who think they can be at 100% certain are are just as diluted as the people who think they shouldn't be measuring. So there's this concept of Vickenstein's ruler, right? And I've talked about this a bunch, but like I wrote a piece about it years ago called Vickenstein's ruler and adds measurement. And to your point, like so the idea of Vickenstein's ruler is like I take a ruler to measure a table. Uh well, if I don't trust the accuracy of the ruler, the table's also kind of just measuring a ruler. That measurement apparatus isn't telling me anything about the table. And in fact, the thing that I'm measuring might tell me more about the measurement tool. And I say that because that WMaker quote, the one reaction is like, throw your hands up. it's not possible. So, let's go do brand campaigns and go to can and sip rosé, right? And the other reaction is, oh, good point. I should only do marketing on channels that are deterministically attributable. And then what you do is you fool yourself into thinking that anything is deterministically attri. And so, a lot of times on teams, it's like, hey, we we cracked the code. We found a loophole and and we're running all these campaigns and we're getting this deterministic attribution using all these hacks and workarounds. I'm like, no, you're you just convinced yourself of that, but actually you're just getting noise and you're going to be you're going to be wasting a lot of money and that's probably no better than just doing a more like a holistic probabistic model. That question went places I didn't think it would go, but I'm glad it did because that was really fun. Um, last question and we'll wrap up. What's one area you see growth teams pouring too much time and budget into that you believe will matter less in the next two years? Genai, creative tools. I think you could use off the shelf stuff and get most of the almost all the value that you're going to get. Again, I don't think there's that much value there period unless you're doing more of the fundamental stuff that we were talking about at the outset, which is like concepting and that there are not really any like off-the-shelf tools for you. You have to kind of build a system yourself. Maybe there will be at some point. It's probably a good startup idea, but just just cranking out. We went from 50 variants a week to 200 or 2,000, but they're all the same concept. There's no value ad there with the last 1,800 or something. You know what I mean? Like that's that's one thing. It's the testing 50 shades of blue. Like the incremental lift. There's so many other problems you could be solving for than testing that 50th shade of blue. Yeah. Exact. And then the other thing is why are you investing any more time in ad attribution kit that you think that's a genuine source of value or you know sort of a competitive advantage? Don't burn resources on that. It is so baffling to me and I I don't want to dig up this can of worms because we could talk about it for another two hours, but it is so baffling to me that Apple went through all of the things they went through, even the negative press, the tumult in the industry, the loss of app store revenue that AT caused and then didn't actually build something useful for attribution and then just let everybody fingerprint anyway, which is almost more insidious. I mean, I I get it. I think the one thing that came out of AT that was good is that it did at least break a lot of the data broker workflows that you could deterministically find one person and just track them everywhere even when they're on their cell phone and the IP address is different or whatever. Yeah. Anyway, I don't want to dig up this whole can of worms, but like it's just such a mess and it just baffles me to no end that Apple didn't take that opportunity to build an attribution tool that actually mattered and then just let everybody fingerprint. It's so baffling. I have a couple theories here. I think one of them though is they are kind of their hands are kind of tied from a privacy perspective. if you want to honor the sort of like religious zeal that they have towards privacy and I do think they're genuine about that. My interpretation is it was it was a competitive maneuver. That was the motivation there. I don't think it had anything to do with truly had anything to do with privacy. But once you invoke privacy as the stalking horse for that competitive maneuver, then you've got to adhere to the privacy principles of the company which are genuine. And then you when you're trying to build attribution that way, you just can't not functional. like you take their commitment to differential privacy that just breaks the data set and like even if you you know don't implement it in a way that that truly sort of like aderes to it like the principles there even if you do that like okay it's is sort of superficial it still just kind of breaks everything and then and then you you introduced this sort of like crowd and that they they did which is kind of like a reverse form of differential privacy and then you had the scheduling stuff they couldn't implement this to achieve what they were trying to achieve which was competitive disruption without applying ing their sort of culture of this privacy zeal. They just couldn't do it because it was a they they portrayed it as this privacy maneuver and and therefore they couldn't do SK ad network now add attribution kit in a way that is actually functional because when you have to apply all these privacy protections to it, it breaks it. Yeah, I'm I'm uh resisting the urge to dive back in and and talk for another 30 minutes on this topic part two. Um yeah, but man, Eric, this was so much fun. uh really enjoyed the conversation. I think there's, you know, so many things for people to take away if not practical, which I feel like we got to a lot of practical stuff. I think it's really important to think at a higher level, at a almost philosophical level about a lot of these things, which I think then plays out in your decision-making being better because you have a better intuitive sense of like how all of this works together as a market, as a economy. And so, yeah, on so many levels, this was such a fun chat. So, thank you for for joining me today. Cheers, man. Always a pleasure. Hope to see you in Austin soon. Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.