# Sub Club Podcast: Level Up Your App Marketing: Measurement, Brand-Building, and Taking Risks

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_NFsGVtejU
Duration: 47 min
Language: English
Words: 8550
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/G_NFsGVtejU

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[0:00] hello I'm your host David Bernard and my guest today is Shireen khi VP of Performance Marketing at derer Shireen has been at dieser for almost a decade working across multiple marketing functions on the podcast I talk with Shireen about why Performance Marketing always hits a ceiling how to think about and measure brand marketing and why ignoring AB test results can sometimes lead to better outcomes hey Sharina thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today hello David thank you so much for receiving me I'm really really glad to be here yeah really looking forward to chatting I feel like I've been saying this more and more recently

[0:36] on the podcast and we actually have a few episodes that will be released soon where I say a lot of people in the subscription app industry haven't heard of dieser and don't realize what a big app it is how long it's been around there's kind of a lot of sleeper hits in the subscription app industry that aren't kind of like top of mind to folks so I actually wanted to kick things off there for our audience who might not be as familiar with derer what is derer kind of give me a brief overview of what it does and maybe even a little bit of history of the app yes these is um it's

[1:11] a music streaming service it was founded in 2007 by Daniel Mar basically a French developer and businessman in Paris in his mother's kitchen so it's really the classic startup story at first it was really a website of course in 207 and then we we built an app for iOS and then for Android so now we really cross device we have very strong website and also very performing apps today it's available in handland in more countries actually but our strongest Market is really France it's our home market so it's this has an interesting history because it started with the downfall of CD sales uh in music industry it was

[1:52] launched uh at a time where everybody downloaded MP3 basically it slowly became an opportunity for the music industry to monetize through monthly subscription as you know so it's really the core of our monetization model of our direct monetization model it's really monthly subscription but we are not owner of our content so it means that a lot of of these subscription money goes to royalties to the labels and the recording companies we also monetize through ads but it's really very marginal compared to what we to the revenue we make from subscription and we also developed a lot indirect monetization through bundles with Partners like Telos Hardware retailers

[2:37] so we present in the US actually through a deal with Sonos we are also present in Latin America through a bundle with mer lib which is used huge absolutely huge there and we are we're partnering a lot with st because that's really how we actually started yeah it's fascinating and Spotify had just started in 2006 so dies are is really one of the early Pion years in moving music to subscriptions and moving music online as you said like maybe a lot of folks listening to this podcast any remember back in 2007 2006 and and even before that of pirating mp3s and buying songs on iTunes and

[3:16] stuff like that so yeah it it dies has been around a long time and been a part of this kind of like wave and while it's not as well known as Spotify it's just an incredible business yeah indeed uh indeed it was at the heart of a big industry shift actually and uh these learned monthly subscription models uh really on the go I remember when I joined the it was in 2015 and I remember that back then there was Major discussions within the product team and of course with with the marketing team as well as to how far we should go into frustrating users free users to get them

[3:54] to pay because really at first the model was a it was a freemium it was really based on the on the idea that ads could also support our business model but the truth is that with ads alone we never be profitable so once we realized that there was a big question was okay what do we do with all these free users who are enjoying our product but not paying not profitable and so we went very far into uh shutting down all the features and trying to frustrate a lot users it was a it was a while ago and settled them to Oh but you know in the end

[4:29] grading the user experience the free user experience actually doesn't uh provide any uh good outcome because all what you do is showing the your free users that's uh well your product is absolutely not satisfying on a free basis and as I would just leave and use another service premium is still somewhat underrated especially now you know a lot of subscription apps my own included like I I I started using a hard pay wall and forcing people to subscribe to my weather app because similar to dieser I have you know expenses with the weather data and so there you there's been a lot of talk the last few years of

[5:04] subscription apps not offering freemium or or like you said degrading the experience but to become a really big business alienating those free users does kind of limit your pool and like you said push people to other apps so it it really depends on what kind of business you're trying to build and how you're trying to build it but it it's interesting to hear that y'all did push harder into subscriptions and then had to dial it back I think that's kind of a lesson for a lot of folks as I do think about more strongly monetizing is making sure that you do still have a valuable enough freemium experience to keep those

[5:38] users around exactly that's a very subtile exercise where you have to show your your value for money but that doesn't mean that your free for the tribs Amic yeah I mean even to this day how do you and and dieser consider that freeming experience as far as are ads working I mean do do you monetize those freemium users enough or is it kind of a these subscriptions are kind of subsidizing those free users with the hope that over time more and more of those free users will upgrade uh no we actually reworked a lot of free experience and the way we work with advertisers to actually be profitable on

[6:18] the free users we keep really focusing on subscription to drive the majority of our revenue and the way we see the premium is more as a conversion tool even though we did not crack it yet to be honest it's tough yeah it is it is we're actually doing the other way around now is that we are opening more and more our product and our user experience to nond deser users we want to encourage our users to share more with and and really open the doors to also users from other streaming service yeah and then how does the Partnerships you mentioned partnering with Telos and partnering with other brands and stuff

[6:55] how does that end up playing into that premium experience are you able to to do those Partnerships actually help kind of subsidize the subscription to make it more affordable or even free via those Telos and others where the user themselves aren't having to pay for that more premium experience or how do you work again I think you know a lot of apps who aren't at dieser scale are maybe starting to think like how do we grow and how do we better monetize for users how do we make it more affordable or more accessible when we know just broadly across the economy I mean not everybody is going to pay for everything

[7:32] how do these Partnerships play into that well it's basically working on on a bundle um principle so if I take we have actually several types of deals what we're doing when we work with a new partner is that we do things ad do we tailor it to their business objectives and we look for the place where it match so it's really about finding a a win-win relationship and it's true that for our partners mainly bringing music to their clients to their customers it's bringing a emotional connection it brings a lot to their brand values it also helps them connect better with uh with the younger Target agents so that's uh that's really

[8:12] uh what we're working on so for instance one of our big partner is Merc lib in in Latin America as I mentioned so Merc Li is a it's a huge retailer in Latin America who built a bundle with Disney Plus for the video streaming and dieser on the audio streaming parts so on the user perspective yes of course the idea of a bundle is indeed to have a better price as a package and for us it's really about retention again another thing a lot of subscription apps I think over time will find things like bundles to be very effective because as you said it's really fascinating looking at the

[8:50] broadly across the subscription app industry and something like Amazon Prime you know Amazon under Prime now has video streaming and music streaming and like they've added more and more and more to these bundles in order to kind of provide that value and while it does kind of lower maybe arpo in some cases you're also kind of expanding the pool of people who are then able to afford the product so it kind of lowers the ceiling but raises the floor I think and what I meant by that with lowering the ceiling and raising the floor is that you know while you're average revenue per user may go down in a bundle you're

[9:26] raising the floor and that you're making it more affordable to more people so even though you have a lower Revenue per user you're going to have more users actually paying so it kind of raises that floor of getting more people into the app and paying even if you're not making quite as much on an individual basis as you would if they subscribe directly that's really about the price elasticity totally and for us partnering means uh an extended reach obviously so the mathematics are are positive for us so the next part of that I wanted to dive into is that you do compete with some very large players in the market

[10:06] you know I already brought up Amazon Prime bundle where people can get music now Amazon music is not not to disparage Amazon but it is kind of not something they seem to focus a lot on you know I don't think a lot of people use that as kind of their primary music streaming but you know for folks who maybe can't afford or don't want to pay for music but it it seems like that's kind of a smaller part of their bundle but then you have apple music music you have YouTube music you have Spotify music dieser is competing globally against some very big players and so what I

[10:38] think would be interesting to kind of dive into next is how you think as a performance marketer about the balance of brand marketing when you're going up against such strong Brands but then also kind of the Performance Marketing which you're more focused on like how do you think about that especially in light of competing with these massive Brands established brands in the space that's a challenge I don't think there are many app developers that are competing against so big competitors when you think that Spotify is actually the smallest of all and the way we see things obviously is that uh just as a pH philosophy to start with we are the

[11:15] Challenger we can do what others count we don't have everyone focused at at us and we're small and agile so uh in some uh to some extents it's very challenging indeed because we are maintaining the same product as a sptify an apple or on Amazon with maybe 20 times less developers than them but we still keep up the pace so of that we are super super proud and we really think that being uh small is actually it can be a totally an asset an advantage and when it comes with Partners actually about Partners that's a big Advantage for us because we can really allocate a lot of

[11:54] resources to our partners because partner is are like the weight a lot in our Revenue so there would be a drop in the ocean of spotify and actually usually partners are looking to compete also against the the big gaffa the giant of the web so we know that that it's it's an advantage on a day-to-day basis it is indeed very challenging and not always on the very positive side especially uh when we we know that Amazon Apple to name them they don't really um like profitability is not an objective for them so when we have Amazon buying ourand Ed keywords on Google they like they set the building

[12:32] so high it's really hard for us to keep it to Pace but we still uh we still do and I I do believe that having to be profitable and having strong constraint actually make us more efficient and more well smarter basically we are looking to get profitable in uh in 2025 that's really something that we are working on as a company effort for quite some time now our ambition is really to be to become one of the first to be profitable in the music industry I can imagine that's pretty frustrating when you have a massive company like Amazon buying against your keywords which then makes user acquisition even more challenging

[13:12] but on a day-to-day basis can how do you think about allocating resources to kind of build the dieser brand but then also do Performance Marketing in a way and as you said as the competitor as a more Nimble company you have to be more efficient and effective so how do you think about that balancing the performance marketing side versus the brand and and how do you kind of build both for me Performance Marketing doesn't go without the brand yes our competitors are so big that we can see it straight away but I think that's at some point something that all apps encounter when you focus purely and only

[13:47] on Performance Marketing you hit very quickly a ceiling a ceiling Beyond which you cannot scale again so yes you will catch some low H geek fruits you activate two to three acquisition Channel and you will see indeed user coming in and they will be instantly profitable and that's the beauty of Performance Marketing but you won't go very far with that and I really believe that the days where this was working are really over for the app industry because it only worked in the app industry maybe for the past 10 to 15 years and period on any other industry you have to work on your brand awareness because that's

[14:23] the the beginning of the funnel and bu the conversion campaigns all the performance marketing that you do is at the bottom of the funnel so for me you cannot really perform in marketing if you lose track of the funel so brand marketing goes with Performance Marketing it's just that so you Rew workk your brand on the upper funnel and yes it would be more challenging to measure that's for sure and it will be more challenging for you to convince your top management that you need to do it so this of course I get and that's I mean uh it's it's a daily uh issues that we all have to fix in Performance

[15:01] Marketing but if you don't do that your scaling up possibilities will be very quickly very limited and I'm not even talking about retention here because obviously also to retain your users you do need to have a strong uh a strong brand awareness and a strong brand uh preference because you know that at any point your competitors will come to to catch your users so for me it's indeed very important to have a very good balance between the two and that's to something that I think that I'm Wonder in at da I'm one of the best advocate for brand marketing because I can like we are on the first line on the on the

[15:38] Forefront to see when our action lose impact we cannot go further than what we did because we focus too much on on the very lower part of the F how do you define the difference between Performance Marketing and brand marketing what would be some examples of brand marketing that you do that you consider brand versus performance so the the main difference is really the the objective and the kpi behind it so an example of brand marketing activations that we have is currently we have um this massive TV and out of home campaign live in France Al the campaign and other the messaging is really about enforcing

[16:17] the positioning of our brand it's not talking about the price about uh trial period it's not even encouraging you to download the app it's more really about what what it means to be a user of dieser basically the vibe dieser is cool yeah yeah no so beyond theel being cool which is obviously one of our brand value as you can imagine it's really about making very clear to our user and nonusers that for derer everything is about music and everything is about leaving the music we are not positioned on all the audio we are very centered around the music and all our branding um marketing is really uh around this core

[16:59] ID we also want to put back as user at the really at the core of our of our brand positioning so it's also all about the user it's all about you these activations we don't expect to have immediate return on investment besides the fact that we are not able to measure that's not even the point really what we are we are using brown trackers we are using post tests so we really more on the quantitative studies qualitative studies to make sure that we do have a positive impact on our brand image but we know that we won't get immediate Revenue out of it what we do though is

[17:36] on Performance Marketing we are very focused on amplifying everything that the brand marketing team is doing to make sure that we do Z know the final little push the little pinch for users to make sure that users who are ready to convert will actually download our app and convert into paying sub yeah and I think that's what a lot of people maybe underestimate about brand marketing is that when people do have some level of affinity or understanding of the brand then when you do hit them with that Performance Marketing that Performance Marketing can be way more efficient and effective because you've kind of like warm them up as a lead and to kind of

[18:17] backtrack a little bit I do think it's interesting dieser scale you know you're talking about Performance Marketing not working anymore I think a lot of people listening to podcast would be like wait a minute you know our Performance Marketing is working great but what they'll find and kind of you alluded to is that as they scale they're going to find that Performance Marketing to become less and less and less effective and then as that happens that's where the brand marketing does start to come into play and you do have to be at a certain size and have the the finances to be able to spend in a way that isn't

[18:50] going to affect the bottom line immediately immeasurably but will then make your Performance Marketing more effective and so this discussion is Maybe you know for the smaller apps to be thinking in the future this is how we should be thinking about it and then for the bigger apps that are already kind of hitting these boundaries is that they they really do need to figure out both sides of the equation exactly at first it will work at small scale it would be uh well it would be super profitable and you will be super happy but then it's very short term so as soon as you have a

[19:22] bigger competitor like we do have head deser when you start fighting against an Amazon for inst and Amazon is a very good example what do you have left if you don't have a brand what do you have left to actually retain your user and to keep acquiring new ones all you have is emotional connection that you manage to build with your brand and this is not something that uh it's an actual expertise to know how to position your brand well Target your audience well understand very well your users it's really about Art and Science it's about how you do a business while being uh more understanding your users let's

[19:58] start about the science part of that a little bit though how do you measure you kind of mentioned a little bit like qualitative measurement and doing user panels and things like that tell me a little bit more about that like you mentioned you do have kpis around brand marketing so then why do we kind of talk through both the measurement of the performance marketing side of things and the measurement of the brand marketing side and kind of how you maintain both at the same time to even on the brand side making sure that you're not overspending or being wasteful in that spending and then how do you measure the

[20:32] Performance Marketing piece and then account for the brand Marketing in that uh that's um one of my most favorite topic because there's there's no black and white uh answer to this question for me we so everything became even more complicated without the Privacy uh rules so we we cannot track everything we want anymore on the upside you cannot even get anything before the last touch point so when you think about that it leaves you uh with pretty much no direct tools to measure the impact of your branding campaigns for me now measurement is really about multiplying the source of Truth you have to use different methodologies different techniques to

[21:14] measure different kpis and make sure that they all align and they all point to the same conclusions which you want to be you're going in the in the right direction basically so the way we do it at DES that we do use many different ways to measure on the brand marketing side we are very much measuring the trend of our consideration towards our users uh through quantitative studies so it means that every quarter every semester we ask panel of of our audience how they feel about does does theer Nose music does theer understand me do I feel close to theer and we especially focus on the paid consideration part which is

[21:57] basically am I considering paying for theer so that's the what's actually reliable on that is that we follow the trend so maybe it does not measure super precisely the actual level of pace consideration but what we want to see is an upward Trend that's also what we're doing in terms of um of Performance Marketing we follow the same pattern so we do have last click attribution we are working on a multi-touch attribution model but it we we know that it will somehow be biased because of the different ways you track on web versus app and as you know we are with cross device so we do have lot more data on a

[22:39] web Journey than on an app Journey we also use incrementality testing so we do as many increment incrementality tests as possible to validate our assumptions and as part of the incrementality test we also try to figure out what is the right level of investment on the digital upper funel campaign so campaigns that will drive instyles or campaigns that will be much more about really reach and frequency how do these impact our performance campaign so these are Stu that you can actually do very easily with a conversion LIF study to um through meta among other partners and we have the mmm which is more of a statistic model so it's not fully fully

[23:25] functional at deser not fully satisfying but this is still something that we we are working on to keep the pace of um what's really being done in the measurement part at the moment so my main goal actually my main focus is to make sure that we always one step ahead in terms of measurement for me measurement is everything if you cannot measure what you do all your efforts are a waste you have no idea what you're doing so yeah my next steps really on the measurement side is to uh use the results of incrementality tests to apply some um scores into our mmm you know once you you validated your assumptions

[24:04] it's not super scientific but uh you can work with these assumptions and end up with a sort of a golden book where you know exactly precisely what worked what what doesn't work I think some of our audience and when you said mm I was expecting you to then say MMP mobile measurement partner which I know a lot of folks I think fewer folks will be familiar with the idea of media mix modeling can you explain that and then is that all done inhouse or is there a tool that you use for media mix modeling yeah so media mix modeling is it goes beyond tracking and attribution so mmps

[24:39] for us like they are vital we could not work without without MMP but as I mentioned with privacy it's become very limited so you can you can understand your last touch point but you cannot understand anything else media mix modeling their objective is really to help you understand the impact of um any parameters to your business business so it can also be um competitors activations competitors offers but it's mainly used indeed as make it obvious it's really about your media mix so it helps you measure the impact of offline media such as TV out of home print and it can also help you understand the impact of your digital brand campaign

[25:20] you know those that you do on YouTube that nobody can really measure but we all know that it works so to go beyond attribution Medan mix modeling is really about building a statistic model comparing your spend versus your daily or weekly uh incoming traffic yeah to outline actually the the variations and also to define a baseline but it's not perfect uh because ideally for me in my dream world an mmm would be able to tell me what will happen if I stop investing on anything we know we all know that yes we do have a baseline but if we stop uh investing on it a baseline with decrease

[26:00] and yet really on mmm your your Baseline is always flat it's not perfect you cannot base all your decisions on an mmm unfortunately that's why for me having multiple source of Truth is key you validate your assumptions again and again the most informed decisions that you can and is your mediax model all done internally do you have a whole team dedicated to that or is it a few people in the kind of I imagine you kind have a marketing engineering or a growth engineering team is that mostly done internally or are there any specific tools that you use to help with that yes the answer is um we we do everything

[26:39] internally we have an amazing data science team that spend times on building those mmm and improving them we work definitely super well with the data team to improve it to me the I wouldn't say that doing it in house is the best setup for two reasons the first one is that okay maybe those data scientist is that you have internally maybe they would be better working on your product algorithm for instance on some some maybe more product related missions and the second uh second aspect is that what I find maybe Laing a little bit is that when you when you work with an external company they theying so many different

[27:21] company problematics and challenges and uh they they are 100% open to what's happening outside so they would be able to feed you with the best solutions for your for your own challenge so that's still an open question we do it in house that it's something that are work on for 2025 maybe about that the best setup would be to have a hybrid of internal and external because indeed internally you will have all the essence all the knowledge of what's happening in the company and in your industry if you Outsource a little bit of that you take an external consultant to audit what you're doing make some recommendation

[27:59] coming from outside that might be a good win you mentioned that part of the challenge of mediax modeling is that you don't necessarily get Precision in understanding what changes will directly impact the overall profitability of spend but then you had mentioned before that you layer on incrementality testing so how do you use incrementality testing in combination with medium mix modeling to better kind of be able to understand and predict which parts of your marketing spend are working and which parts are maybe less efficient so the idea behind it and that's really something that's done by companies like L'Oreal it's my top of Mind company but when I heard that they did that I was

[28:41] like okay I absolutely need to do that too so the the concept behind it is that through in incrementality testing you are able to calculate sort of a score between what you actually see as direct tracked data and what was more hidden you know it's usually uh well it can be on both ways maybe you do attribute more directly to certain channels than what they actually contribute like for instance search to say it that's a very basic example and maybe you do under attribute to other channels that come earlier in the funnel like social ads so you can with incremented testing estimate a score and use that score to

[29:25] modify your uh statistic model your media mix modeling so in your incrementality testing are you completely shutting off specific channels or or like how do you actually do the incrementality testing I think really incrementality testing there at level where you you need to be well either you have an excellent agency to Get You On Track you do lots and lots of trainings but basically on an incrementality testing there are different methods depending on what you want to check and with which partner so one of them is a geolift and geolift is really about shutting down some regions and comparing them to not shut down regions but the regions have to be

[30:07] similar and there are tools on Google that help you do that uh actually uh on Google ads yeah and when you shut down you can see you can calculate the increment but there are many others ways of uh doing incrementality testing like as I mentioned conversion Le study brand Le study where you have a controlled group and an Expos group and you can measure the Z uplift between the two we're getting super in the weeds which is a ton of fun because we don't always get to do this on the podcast but I think this going to be really helpful for folks to be thinking about this and

[30:40] again there aren't that many companies at dieser scale doing this but the companies that are on their way toward dieser scale should be thinking about these things and so I think it's super fascinating and so just a couple more questions on that front would you also potentially switch off spefic specific types so like maybe you don't actually cut all YouTube ads but you withhold a certain type of brand marketing and keep the other brand marketing like what other kind of ways do you use incrementality testing to understand those the performance so on brand marketing you have to keep one thing in mind brand marketing is not a short-term

[31:19] impact so switching it on switching it off if you expect to see a difference between the two I don't believe in it because you compared to um yeah for instance you work with an ad Network and you're not really sure that the ad Network actually provides on the conversion side then switching it off and on you will see the impact you will see it straight away because it's a short-term Channel but whenever it's longterm you have to be bit smarter than just switching off and see what happens Because the actual impact can happen maybe next year or in two years you don't know that it can be a very slow uh

[31:56] decrease that's still also very consistent and hard to reverse yeah my last question there then is have there been any especially interesting results from the incrementality testing so you know have you done a test where you you know removed a channel and wow like things just drop like a rock or and the opposite have there been channels where you drop them off and like you just don't see a difference at all any kind of surprising results to the positive or negative in some of your incrementality testing actually it more it validated more assumptions that we already had and the surprise was to which extent it was

[32:35] so um I would say that all the campaigns that we do that are more a personel like campaign that will um optimize based on installs and not necessarily paying Subs we knew that it had an impact that was not so easy to measure on our performance campaign but we did not imagine how much so it's uh it really confirmed the absolute necessity to keep investing on upper funel campaigns even though they won't have a short-term impact what's really interesting with incrementality testing is that it actually validates the fact that all the more conversion campaigns that you have they only amplify what exists already they don't create anything as such so so

[33:19] that's again the the brand marketing that's is Performance Marketing debate but yeah Performance Marketing does only amplify what has already started way earlier in the funel yeah again just so fascinating and fun to have somebody like you on the podcast who works day in day out having to make this work and like you said you know these are pushing toward profitability in 2025 these are the steps that you take to make that happen and so it's really great to get this level of insight from you on how that all works at the scale of dieser I did want to shift gears and talk a little bit about deer's approach to

[33:57] experimentation and testing I think you have a lot of interesting ideas there one thing that I'm absolutely fundamentally convinced of is that nothing can be done in Performance Marketing if you don't innovate if you don't test everything that you can test it's really and that's also why I really love this job you have to be curious you have to be daring and you have to not be afraid of failing you only invest only in the most secure campaigns with the most secure audience and the most secure your channels the whole relevance of what you do will fall either in terms of volume in terms of cost or in terms of

[34:33] quality you will once again hit very quickly a ceiling if you don't get out of your comfort zone and go test some stuff so that's why I also insist a lot towards my team you know in France we have culturally we are not raised to test and fail we have this belief that we need to succeed Straight Ahead like at the first try and if we we not sure that we succeed well better not try so it's a lot of uh it's a lot of Education to do I would say of company values to infuse uh of same speech to repeat to say no actually I will never

[35:08] reproach anyone in my team to have fail at something or what would be a problem for me is people on try so what I'm what I really expect from my team is that they they do test a lot they have to be very honest of the result of course and not be afraid to say okay I tested that and it failed and that's fine I mean uh the main question is what are the learnings learnings are so valuable that yes it requires sometimes to sacrifice a little bit of budget take a little bit of risk because in the end what happens when we do the math at the end of the

[35:39] year and we look at everything we tried all the biggest fail that we had versus all the biggest wins what we see is that wins always compensate for fails I think that's also why we've been so successful in the past years in Performance Marketing I don't like to brag but we did improve our LTV sack we doubled we we more than doubled it in two years time while scaling up on volumes at the same time so pretty incredible and for me there are of course many reasons and it's also a company for it was also because we collaborate very well with other teams and we're all looking in the

[36:16] same direction but the main factor that helped us really scale while improving our profitability is all the test that we run and I'm really really very proud of my team like the test stuff that I would have never dared to test when I was younger that's such a fascinating topic from like a a leadership perspective that as a team you're spending a lot of money and a failed test while not completely failed like if you you know spent $50,000 in a new ad campaign and and it performed half as well as another ad campaign you're not necessarily losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because you're still getting

[36:53] some level of performance but you are losing money in that you could have potentially put that budget behind another ad that was performing or another channel that was performing so how do you instill that in a practical level inside a team that you may inefficiently spend a considerable amount of money which I mean just as a human you know it's hard to kind of reconcile that and like go to work the next day and be like oh man I just wasted money and then how do you put kind of guardrails against that as well to where you know you aren't going to lose hundreds and hundreds of thousands

[37:30] of dollars in these experiments first of all we do frame our test very well the risk taking is actually quite limited if you look at the big picture if you look at the overall and that's really what I encourage team to do is to look at the overall sack as long as overall we are profitable it's okay to test stuff and indeed lose money so if you look at it in an isolated way yes it's money we would have loved to um spend it better but rather than looking be and it's more about looking uh ahead and get the valuable learnings that would make the next test actually overperform and

[38:06] compensate for the loss and then how do you incorporate gut feeling versus Raw data into making some of these decisions where maybe sometimes something appears to be underperforming but you just feel like it actually is the right thing to do it's a being data driven as you can have understand now is really key for me so data is at the heart of everything measurement is at the heart of everything but at some points there are stuff as a marketer that you did that you know and when the data is not showing is not showing it you should definitely to me still listen to your G feeling and do it anyway and see what

[38:45] happens and I do have an ex excellent example on that we had this homepage last year our unlocked homepage that's in terms of design in terms of clarity uh nobody was really satisfied with we developed two alternative versions in which I think all of us really believed that one of these two will uh will overperform so we would say more of a branding unlog homepage with key messages around our brand and our product and there was more of a player looking like unlocked hom page so a player but unlocked and obviously with features that are very limited and I encourage you to to subscribe whenever you wanted to to

[39:26] stream a song b basically so we we ABC tested this Pages against each other and none of the alternative versions one against the control version and so yes that's the moment I think that we all agreed to listen to our ging which was okay in all case the control version was not satisfying to us it was not conveying the messages that we wanted to convey and it was not user friendly at all so uh based on that we made the decision to go live with um with a branded version also we implemented it we are we rolled it out now that we did a few weeks after we see positive

[40:04] results compared to to the old version so uh that was one of the example where we are actually right to listen to our get feeling I think the key there is User centricity it's like that you're doing what is best for the user and I think a lot of marketers and and we see this broadly throughout the industry a really kind of annoying example is the gaming ads where the gaming ad is completely fake the game itself doesn't actually do anything that was you know shown in the ad but those ads perform but then people get into the game and they're confused and and and that that's

[40:39] just like a really blatant example of not being user Centric where you can do things in marketing that quote unquote work or that you know the data shows works but you're not to kind of the point of this whole conversation you're not building a a brand you know you're not doing something that like makes the users feel good about playing that game even if it did actually convert better than an ad that did show the actual game so how do you think about that user centricity and and how that kind of permeates marketing and product and throughout the entire user journey and that was a perfect example of it is a

[41:16] homepage that as a marketing team you felt put the user at the core even if it didn't immediately AB test better over the L haul putting the user at the Center did make a difference and it showed over time which again that's that's the hard part about being data focused as well is that sometimes you're fooled by your ab test because in whatever specific timing or external factors or other things that you can't even account for in an AB test Led You One Direction but it was actually the wrong direction in the long term so how do you think about that user centricity and how to apply that and those gut

[41:53] perspective to making those decisions user censing is really Game Changer when you shift your mindset as a company towards listening to your users and uh stop think that you you are part of the users and that your personal opinion does matter a lot because you use your product and B that everything we come from product features you know the product Leed growth which does not take into account really the needs of the user for me the shift really means that you equi yourself to listen to your user ask them the right question and listen to them all the time and actually kind of delegates some of the decision making

[42:31] good example is when we changed our logo so before 2023 we had equalizer as a logo it was our logo ever since our creation so from 2007 until 2023 we had the equalizer as a logo we knew that we needed to change from different kind of of reasons but we knew that we had this big problem of brand attribution somehow logo didn't seem to be recognized very well which is surprising when you know that it was so it it was there for like since forever and so we decided to change it but we we did not decide to change it just because we we were convinced that it was needed

[43:11] we decided to change it because we asked our users we asked them to uh draw our our current logo to see if they were able to draw it we also tested our existing logo against two alternate versions and we were like this is not a person opinion so we had this now our logo is a purple heart so a big big change really really really internally it was a big change to go from a very Tech equalizer to a purple heart which is much more into the emotion connecting emotions with our users so nobody really believed that the Purple Heart would be uh the winning version because it was so

[43:49] disruptive and maybe looking more like a dating app stuff like that but it actually what came out of the studies was that it was winning version and it was a winning version by far and it was a winning version on all Target audence and to through all T and for me that's the example of user centricity like we listen to the users and uh and we implemented we made decision based on it and what we see really all our signals is that uh it was the right decision to make ever since I also believe strongly that it really helped my performance campaign to be again more profitable

[44:23] while cleaning up so yeah user Simplicity should be at the heart of any marketing actually well I think that's a fantastic place to wrap up this conversation is that and and again I think in a world of ab test this and that and use every dark pattern you possibly can to encourage people to subscribe in the first couple of minutes A lot of that works and sometimes you you use some of those tactics to get to the profitability level you need to get to but in the long run what wins is providing a really good experience had a good feeling to the users so I think

[44:59] it's a fantastic place to wrap up and then even especially you know throughout this entire conversation about brand and performance and the and the combination of the two the fact that listening to users and being user Centric even so far as changing your logo then actually increased performance on Performance Marketing is just fascinating so thank you so much for all these insights anything you wanted to share as we're wrapping up we're going to include links to your LinkedIn and uh I know dieser is hiring so we're going to link to the job page as well but anything else you wanted to share as we're wrapping up

[45:31] yeah we Rec covered everything thank you very much for inviting me to your podcast I mean um these are questions that I'm always happy to uh to have a followup on so I would be super happy to connect with anyone interested in measurement especially so we can share experiences don't sleep on those uh the job links Paris is an incredible City and dieser is not remote right so so pretty much everybody all the job listings I saw were Paris specific so if you if you work in uh mobile marketing and want a cool job in a cool City go check out the derer jobs page you're

[46:04] just talking to for the last hour it sounds like it's a fantastic place to work and really doing some Cutting Edge things and marketing and you know being the underdog and kind of getting into fight against the bigger players in the space so I think it's a a really cool company and uh a really cool opportunity for folks yes definitely so if you want to move in Paris these should definitely be on the list of of companies you uh you apply to we do have uh several jobs opening at the moment and obviously there will be many opportunities in the future in the future at the moment we're

[46:38] looking for a senior SEO manager by the way so uh if you're interested you can apply on on our desert jobs board and also reach out directly to me voila voila and is so wonderful so all right thank you so much Shena for joining me this is a fascinating conversation thank you David 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. sub club.com to join our private community [Music]

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