Season 7, Episode 21: The AppsFlyer investment and the new dynamics of mobile attribution (with Olivia Kory)

The $1 billion investment in AppsFlyer by a consortium including Meta, Google, Unity, and Moloco aims to preserve an independent, neutral arbiter of truth in mobile measurement. This strategic move creates a firewall against potential consolidation, ensuring stability for app advertisers who rely on attribution as essential infrastructure. While attribution provides necessary daily signals for ad-level granularity, the industry is shifting toward incrementality testing to correct biases in click-based models. Despite the hype surrounding Connected TV as a performance channel, advertisers struggle to scale budgets due to long payback windows and measurement complexities. Furthermore, Apple’s abandonment of SKAdNetwork updates has left the ecosystem with a dysfunctional framework, accelerating the need for sophisticated, experiment-based measurement strategies to navigate modern mobile growth and effectively allocate marketing spend across diverse, non-linear channels.