There’s a popular way of showing the growth of mobile by charting the growth of app stores. The only problem is the growth of mobile, from a marketer’s perspective, might be inhibited by the growth of app stores.
There are a few ad networks such as Millennial Media, Fiksu, Tapad and others that have created a software-development kit that gets implemented into your clients app to measure downloads. This information in isolation is OK because it only measures the individual partner’s performance. For a larger plan, which has more than one mobile ad network on it, it isn’t great.
At The Media Kitchen, we work a lot with our strategy and analytics team (also part of KBS+P), and they have created correlation models that measure the impact of each media vehicle on each other when at different weight levels. These models have been our secret sauce but as a digital native. These should not need to exist in the digital world when everything should be directly measurable.
It’s frustrating because the Internet has been down this path. Closed ecosystems don’t allow for innovation to cross into their walls without much kicking or screaming. We shouldn’t have to be reliant on correlation models, which is what I’d expect to use for an offline plan. In the best case, I’d like to see app stores open up their ecosystem, specifically Apple.
In a world of transparency, API’s, platforms and ecosystems, closed app store models aren’t the future but a return to the past.
Darren Herman is chief digital media officer at The Media Kitchen, the media-buying arm of Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners. Follow him @dherman76.
More in Media
Digiday+ Research: How Dow Jones, Forbes, The Guardian and other publisher revenue streams are shifting in 2026
Digiday+ Research’s third annual report on publishers’ revenues examines the current and future state of the group’s revenue streams, from traditional ad revenue to events and subscriptions.
Publishers see double-digit growth from The Trade Desk’s OpenPath, but volatility remains
Several publishers said that TTD is temporarily allowing duplicate bids on those integrating with OpenAds, as a sweetener to ease onboarding. One publisher said it plans to accelerate integration with OpenAds, to capitalize on this “likely temporary window.”
Time pitches GEO insights into a new brand offering
Time is turning its AI insights into a new product, selling branded content to shape how brands are talked about inside AI-generated answers.