TapCommerce & The Evolution of Mobile Advertising
As I mentioned in my last post, I'm moving on from the incredible ride that was Pandora to my next adventure. I've enjoyed mobile advertising so much that I've decided to dive deeper by joining TapCommerce as Director of Sales leading up their San Francisco team.
Here's the why and backstory:
About May or June last year, I got a note from a client asking if we did any "mobile re-engagement campaigns" on Pandora. Instead of paying us to drive an app install, they wanted to retarget their users (who already have the app installed) via a deep link and pay us to bring them back to their app. At the time, we didn't have the capability and we moved on.
But after talking to more clients, it made me realize: engagement is a huge problem.
The average person has over 30 apps on their phone. Most of the people I know have way more.
The problem if you're a marketer is the more apps a user has the harder it is to re-engage that user.
Marketers can (and should) use push notifications to re-engage users. But unfortunately due to a lot of developers abusing the privilege early on and spamming, more and more users are opting out of push.
Email is another good tool for re-engagement but much ink has been spilt on the problems of email overload.
So engagement has continued to drop.
Flurry now says that after installing an app less than 25% of users still use the app 3 months later. And that number is dropping.
Meanwhile Apple said on Tuesday that App Store customers spent more than $10B in 2013. There are now more than 1 million apps on both the App Store and Google Play. With the app market growing more competitive, the cost to acquire those users keeps going up.
Still, many app developers are starting to get massive reach, with 900+ of them having over 1 million monthly active users. And 30+ of them with a whopping 20mm MAUs.
Because of this combination, we're starting to see a big shift in mobile advertising spend: from new user acquisition to re-engagement.
As the market continues to mature and evolve, the largest advertising categories of the desktop Web (e-commerce, travel, financial, telecom, etc.) will follow suit and focus primarily on mobile re-engagement. In fact, the smart ones already are.
The evolution hasn't gone unnoticed. Facebook announced they were getting into re-engagement ads (related by me: Facebook Jumps Into The Mobile App Deep Linking Game). And I'm sure Twitter will take their Cards deep linking feature to mobile soon. Both of which further validate and bring more scale to the re-engagement market.
With much more demand from advertisers and more supply coming on board every day from programmatic, RTB, Facebook, Twitter, etc., there will be lots of opportunities for startups to capitalize.
After getting to know the founders and hearing the vision for the company laid out by CEO Brian Long, it became clear that this would be a perfect fit.
TapCommerce sits in a truly unique space within the industry. They saw the writing on the wall before everyone else and made big investments building out the product. They achieved product-market fit early on with some of the top grossing mobile companies and now have a significant first mover advantage because of it.
The team has lots of experience building products and scaling. More importantly, they have hired the right engineers with the talent and knowledge to keep executing.
The company also had the foresight to put teams in place to help with basically everything a client could ever need. Customer service isn't just a punchline in the pitch deck, it truly guides every decision in the company.
When I was at their headquarters in New York last week getting ramped up I looked over the team and felt humbled to be a part of it. It's going to be an exciting ride.
As for my writing… I wouldn’t expect much to change. I’ll still be writing here and elsewhere as time permits. Hopefully a bit more, maybe even occasionally on the TapCommerce blog.
Now after 6 weeks of travel I'm glad to get back to San Francisco (and normal people weather) and really get started.
Update: We're hiring. If you know anyone good (mainly sales, account managers, and engineers) looking in SF or NYC, please ping me.
