#1 Shetland pony's story: How we turned a crisis into an opportunity?

Introduction

Adikteev is the leading app-retargeting platform for mobile apps and is serving several verticals including the biggest gaming publishers.

The Tech world is dominated by unicorns: companies who create buzz and attract large investments based on an idea. In our world, a company’s value is often not determined by its value creation, but by its potential for raising money. My six-year-old daughter told me recently that she doubts unicorns are real. However, she did say that she knows Shetland ponies are real. I like to think of our profitable, reliable 10-year-old company as a Shetland pony among unicorns. In the wake of the industry turmoil created by Apple’s ATT Framework, this couldn’t be more true.

Context

In 2021 our mobile tech industry had to face a major crisis following the deprecation of advertising IDs by Apple on iOS for iPhone users. To roughly explain, IDFA was considered as “the hydrocarbon of the mobile advertising ecosystem.” This was a MAJOR crisis.

After over a year of tech development, Adikteev has recently released its brand new product to face IDFA depreciation: The smartest Cross-Promotion Platform ever.

But how did we decide to develop a new product that required a lot of investment in the middle of an industry crisis?

Apple pulls the trigger

I have to say that 2021 was the most challenging year in my professional career so far.

Our company was facing a huge challenge as the multi-billion dollar advertising industry (which Adikteev is part of) was hit hard when Apple decided to roll out the ATT feature on iOS 14. Under the Privacy banner, Apple decided to change the rules of the entire mobile advertising industry. Third-party vendors would no longer have access to user data, although Apple still would, creating an advantage for its own network. For an app remarketing actor like us, this change could have destroyed our entire business (at least on iOS).

We freaked out big time. How could we not when after succeeding in profitably growing your company for 10 years, you may lose 30 to 50% of your turnover in a few months just because a giant tech company suddenly decides to change the rules?

Yes, it was brutal and yes I spent a couple of nights awake. Our investors were calling us every week over the course of months and financial operations were made harder at this time because of a deeply uncertain context. Note that we finished 2021 with positive growth vs. 2020 which looked like a miracle for business analysts, but this is another story.

The only good surprise for me at this time was the reaction and resilience of our management team. First, we all had to digest it for a few days. Then, after we realized there was nothing we could do to stop it, we regrouped and we simply started thinking about the best solution possible to help our clients facing this new reality.

Being gaming-oriented influenced us a lot

We quickly had to make some assumptions on what changes the ATT framework would trigger. Focusing on our mobile gaming vertical, we guessed that fewer advertising IDs on iOS will lead to a CPI increase on this platform, but also on Android because advertisers will spend more in places they could still fully target users. We also guessed that the gaming studios consolidation will accelerate to create stronger entry barriers. Our last guess was that gaming publishers will realize that they need to protect their best users from new "coopetitors"* (ex adtech players becoming gaming publishers or vice versa).

And we started talking to our clients extensively to confirm our market assumptions.

Guess what? They were all confirming the trends. But none of them was thinking about Cross-Promotion as a good way to face those new iOS challenges. Yet.

And that’s how Adikteev launched the development of a brand new product: The first Smart Cross-Promotion Platform, early 2021.

2022 is confirming

In early 2022, some gaming clients began asking us to stop running ads on ad tech platforms that moved from being partners to (big) competitors.

The continuous flow of M&A (illustrated by Microsoft acquiring Blizzard recently) across the gaming industry led to the birth of insanely big Gaming groups inside which hundreds of titles are cohabitating.

CPI has increased, mainly on Android, and ROAS is becoming more and more complex to measure on iOS.

Lastly, mobile marketing expert Eric Seufert underlined the importance of Cross-Promotion for gaming publishers in his 2022 predictions for mobile gaming published on Mobile Dev Memo.

While I thought that systematic cross promotion was a?good idea?as far back as 10 years ago, it is now an?imperative?for mobile game developers: user acquisition is less efficient in the wake of ATT, so developers must monetize users better, and cross-promotion provides for that by allowing for multi-title LTV to be calculated and utilized for new user acquisition.

And now what?

Even though we’ve already started deploying the platform on a bunch of apps, we just officially released our Smart-Cross Promotion Platform a few days ago. It’s still too early to predict how the market will adopt it.

The fact is that I am so convinced this platform is providing exactly what gaming advertisers truly need right now that I am glad Apple gave us the occasion to innovate the world of user retention.

So while big M&A activities and new unicorns will continue to create buzz in the coming months, Adikteev in its unique Shetland pony stable will still provide clients with a reliable, stable, and trustworthy partner to work with. Today with an amazing new product, and in the years to come with whatever comes next. ??

*A partner who could also be a competitor