Episode 183: Ask Olivia Kory Whether AppLovin Ads Work & She Explains Attribution vs Incrementality

**Eric Franchi** (0:00)
So good, so good, so good.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
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**Ari Paparo** (0:37)
Welcome to the Marketecture Podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I'm joined by Eric Franchi and our guest today, Olivia Kory, a second time guest. She is the Chief Marketing Strategy Officer at Haus. Haus is a company that does incrementality testing. She has just a ton of insights and knowledge about effectively the most important question we have, which is, do the ads work?
Eric, what sort of questions do you want to hear from Olivia about?

**Eric Franchi** (1:02)
I mean, I want to know if ads work.

**Ari Paparo** (1:05)
Do they work? They must work.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:07)
They must work, right?

**Eric Franchi** (1:08)
Has our lives worked, but Elijah, just kidding.
Olivia, I mean, she is so prolific and she has so many interesting nuggets she puts out there, so A, just being able to talk to her and not just see a kind of view of the tweets. But then also, she's done a lot of work on AppLovin, and I'd love to dig into that one. AppLovin, does it work? If so, theories on why it works and why has this thing just exploded over the course of the past year or so, and then let's get into AI and all that other good stuff.

**Ari Paparo** (1:38)
You probably didn't see it. Vibe was in the news again this morning. The deal hasn't closed yet. I think it's moving along well from all I know. They were in the Wall Street Journal's daily morning email.
I forget what it's called, like CMO Daily or something, because they have a new kind of controversial, somewhat hysterical commercial for themselves. They have this commercial where they have the CMO and the CFO falling in love, like kind of a sexy commercial where CMOs and CFOs start getting the connection with each other. It was featured as the main article in the Wall Street Journal today. So kind of another quiver in the belt of good marketing matters for ad tech B2B companies.

**Eric Franchi** (2:22)
So cool.

**Ari Paparo** (2:23)
So one follow-up is that last week we launched the RMCP server from MadDB and people reacted. We have a whole bunch of sign-ups. MadDB is like kind of our little stealth project, but a whole bunch of people signed up, people are using it. If you have any feedback, hit me by email. I'd love to hear how you're using it, how you're getting out of it, because it's definitely in the realm of experimental products we're building. And the more people use it, the better it will get. So please let me know. And if you're new to this, you can access our MCB server. Just go to maddb.ai and then register. And then it should be pretty straightforward from there. With that, let's do the thing. Let's have Olivia Kory, the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer of Haus, to talk about whether the ads actually work.
All right, welcome, Olivia, the Queen of Attribution. The...

**Eric Franchi** (3:19)
And caffeine.

**Ari Paparo** (3:20)
Incrementality.

**Olivia Kory** (3:21)
No, no, not attribution. Incrementality.

**Ari Paparo** (3:23)
My bad. The former Queen, it's like one of those British titles, like the Duchess of Attribution and the Queen of Incrementality or something along those lines. Show the audience your caffeine situation here.

**Olivia Kory** (3:35)
Yeah, well, real quick. Meta's new ad product for optimization is called incremental attribution. And somebody wrote, that's like an oxymoron. Like that doesn't...
So, yes, I was just telling you before we hit record that there was some research that published this week saying up to five or six cups of coffee is actually good for you. And so I used to start my morning with a venti, four shots of espresso. And now I feel like that article gave me permission to add another coffee on. So I was saying, I'm testing the limits of my caffeine intake. So we'll see how this goes. It might be messy.

**Ari Paparo** (4:11)
How do you feel about microwave and coffee? If it gets a little cool?

**Olivia Kory** (4:14)
I'm fine with it.

**Ari Paparo** (4:15)
Yeah, I'm kind of fine with it too.

**Olivia Kory** (4:18)
I'm not in terms of taste buds. Like I don't really, you know, I don't drink fine wine, so I don't care.