Customers spent close to $75 billion globally on Mobile App Marketing campaigns just to drive user installs on their devices. However, the pandemic crisis and high cost of advertising continued to plague marketers from scaling their mobile app marketing efforts. To know how to scale further in 2021, we spoke to industry leaders from the mobile martech world. Today’s Martech Predictions Series is special. We have managed to get together 3 top-level executives from a leading Mobile Marketing technology company, Adjust.

Today’s predictions series features Adjust’s C-level executives who delve into the unique world of mobile advertising and how it evolved in the last 11 months or so– only to prepare for the future ahead. A New Year, a grand year, where every marketer needs to pull up their sock and tighten the Mobile App Marketing budgets with a renewed vision.

Here is the complete version of our interaction with Adjust’s C-level executives.

Mobile Is the Future of TV; OTT Is a Channel Marketers Can No Longer Afford to Ignore

Katie Madding, CPO of Adjust

“With revenue in the video streaming segment expected to grow to $30.4 billion by 2024, the opportunity that Over The Top (OTT) media affords mobile marketers is enormous, yet largely untapped.

Whether in the living room or on the move, mobile is an increasingly important component in the OTT mix. Recent research conducted by Adjust showed that younger consumers lead the pack in mobile streaming, with Gen Z and Millennials most likely to pay for streaming and on-demand entertainment services than any other generation.

And as mobile marketers tap into OTT and ratchet up their spending on advertising for user acquisition, the question for 2021 is really how they’re spending and how they attribute users. Many companies are investing heavily in OTT, but often have no way of understanding what drives value — measurement is the answer.”

Subscriptions Become the Ultimate Monetization Model for Apps Across Verticals

“The growth of subscription-based apps has intensified this year as users look to their mobile devices for a broader array of activities, from entertainment and e-commerce to fitness and finance. This is also being driven by changing user habits that point to the ‘stickiness’ of subscriptions. As subscriptions become a regular expenditure, we’ve seen that Gen Z and millennial consumers, especially, are more willing to pay for a premium app product or supporting brands they love.

Recent research conducted by Adjust found that 25 – to – 34-year-olds spent the most on subscription apps — $25.85 a month — compared to $13.97 for respondents aged 55+.

More than a quarter of Millennials and Gen Z consumers also said they have stopped paying for other services in order to buy subscriptions on mobile app services (for example, subscribing to fitness apps over going to the gym).

With ad targeting set to get harder on iOS 14, we expect an increasing number of apps will be looking to diversify their monetization models beyond ad revenue in 2021 — and subscriptions will become the ultimate income stream for many publishers and advertisers.”

With iOS 14 Changes Looming, Measuring Data Accurately, While Protecting Users’ Privacy, Is the Critical Challenge Going Into 2021

Paul H. Muller, Co-founder and CTO at Adjust

“Adjust’s primary focus heading into 2021 is supporting a seamless transition to Apple’s new privacy guidelines, set to take effect early in the year. We’ve started our own research program with the help of our leading UX and UA experts to enable our clients to implement the best consent flow and UX design that fits their app — and maximizes opt-ins. So far, we’ve seen opt-ins of between 30-60% for certain clients we’ve been working with.

Additionally, Adjust launched a new iOS SDK to support all iOS 14 privacy features — from AppTrackingTransparency to SKAdNetwork — allowing app developers to test out different options to determine the best way to handle the transition.

Regardless of what plays out with the coming changes, we’re confident that the industry can use this opportunity to create a sustainable future for app developers, advertisers, and end-users alike.”

Ad fraud will continue to be a global problem, as fraudsters are active across all markets and app verticals. Looking at Adjust data through Aug. 2020, fake users/bots are the most widely used fraudulent method in the mobile ad ecosystem, with the US seeing the method make up for 68.7% of its fraudulent activity, China 65.6%, Japan 60.7% and EMEA 47%. In LATAM, SDK Spoofing still dominates (51.16%).

When looking at the gaming vertical specifically, our data also shows that globally, fraud rates spiked 172.95% between Aug. 2019 and 2020. They rose 181.20% in EMEA, 310.29% in the US and 214.86% in APAC.

“It is absolutely vital that marketers can trust their data. Without having a clear view, it is simply impossible to make strategic, data-driven decisions. Ultimately, fraud is and will remain to be a challenge we see in the industry; however, by implementing the right tools, we will be able to stay one step ahead of the fraudsters and ensure transparency remains a top priority.”

Marketers Will Lean Into Campaign Automation to Get Creative and Personalized 

“With the potential to revolutionize the industry by increasing the speed and scale of mobile marketing activities like reporting, automation will continue to be a focus for app marketers in 2021. As marketing has become more advanced, it has also become more complex. Marketers now have to handle dozens of different channels, campaigns, and advertising networks — all of which are very manual, time-consuming tasks. Automation tools help streamline the heavily manual and time-consuming tasks marketers spend hours on every day — leaving them with more time to focus on a hyper-personalized creative.

While the workflows are automated, the creative should be unmistakably human. Marketing and product development should continue to work closely to ensure they are retaining the organic users gained during the last year with relevant, helpful and most importantly, personal advertising.”

2020 as the “Great Acceleration” Towards an App-Focused World 

Andy Chandler, VP Customer Success at Adjust

“The pandemic has really highlighted the utility that apps offer both brands and consumers — not to mention the many governments who have built COVID-tracing apps — in 2020. This has led to a ‘great acceleration’ toward a more app-focused world. In 2021, it’s likely we’ll see more and more businesses investing in their apps and using them as a primary channel to interact with their users. Traditional brands will also need to invest in their apps if they are to compete with companies with mobile at the heart of their strategy.

For marketers, the priority going into the new year will be how they can retain the users they gained throughout the course of 2020 — particularly when we get back to relative normality — as well as how to build more utility into their app. The pandemic has proven the value in going one step further and really thinking about what it is your users need, especially in very difficult times. As with any successful brand, it’s about putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and seeing what small things your company can do to make their lives easier and safer.”