Our Chief Revenue Officer Timo Richardson went to MAU 2018 in Las Vegas. He was impressed. Here are his key takeaways.
I’m really used to going to big industry shows, trade events and conferences. But my recent trip to Las Vegas actually did leave me quite impressed. In short: I had never before attended an event with such a great selection of participant and such a low number of pushy sales people or business cards being exchanged. For some, this may evoke the impression of a business trip gone wrong. For me, it was an eye-opener. The mere set-up of the event, the list of participants, was so much designed around quality and actually thought leadership that no-one had to hand around any old school credentials.
MAU, an event in a fantastic setting – the event took place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas – and is focused on user acquisition and retention in mobile. It’s dubbed the world’s largest and best gathering of participants in the industry, and rightfully so. Therefore, it is especially interesting to see what these players perceive as the main challenges and what we can deduct from this to add value to our mobile marketing partners and help brands capitalize the most on mobile.
My three big take home messages from MAU:
- Fraud has been the major limitation as companies try to drive their mobile marketing. The industry’s big players are afraid of fraudulent activities on the mobile web, such as fake users in click fraud.
- To keep fraudsters in check and to control the game, the big names are turning almost exclusively to the two household names Google and Facebook. This is especially true for US companies.
- This trend leads to a market where the two big companies dominate – and where even companies with incredible marketing budgets complain about the rates charged for their exposure. User acquisition cost on Facebook and Google is skyrocketing. As most of the companies attending MAU are US centric, one of the topics addressed was how to further help grow your company and improve your overall ROI on marketing spend by increasing your global reach and diversifying to new markets beyond the US. Internationalization was discussed as a way to more cost-effectively expanding your user base.
If this trend continues and the aching of brands grows further, I’m very optimistic that Spyke Media can provide actual solutions of value. How so?
- We have got fraud under control. This topic has been a really important factor for us over many years. We have established our technical shields, we are partnering with third party software providers to have all possible safeguards in place, and we are building and developing a human level of fraud control in our Manila base. Spyke will prioritize transparency to show its partners that they can trust our mobile marketing traffic and procedures.
- We can offer very attractive and highly competitive marketing returns on investment. Our marketing through direct acquisition and trusted sources opens many additional routes and liberates our customers from the pricing monopolies on Facebook and Google. The value they receive and the scale they can achieve with Spyke Media should be worth a discussion. As Spyke Media is a truly global company with strong local media partnerships we are confident about our capabilities to source fully optimized audiences and loyal mobile users
- We can help identify the right creatives, metrics, campaigns, channels and more – we can actually offer a comprehensive level of consulting on mobile performance marketing to acquire and keep users on board. Just look at the many options in place: Spyke will help optimize creatives, recommend new types of campaigns to enhance marketing spend, and even introduce you to avantgarde marketing tech such as playable ads – all to increase the engagement that users have with mobile marketing.
With these three advantages of working with Spyke Media pinned down, I’m very optimistic that more and more brands will understand we actually have an offer to make – and will be able to help them overcome problems that lead to more problems.
And one more thing: I’ll be really happy to return for MAU 2019 in Las Vegas. Looking forward already!
