This special Best of 2025 episode compiles standout insights from top mobile marketing leaders who joined Apptivate this year. Across five segments, the show digs into the realities of AI in ad production, growth lessons from global brands, the rise of community-driven retention, loyalty tactics for the holiday season, and the intersection of brand authenticity with performance marketing. Guests include Andre Kempe (Admiral Media), Luca Stefanutti (Adidas Running), Advi Bishnoi (Social Plus), Sue Azari (AppsFlyer), and Shilpa Reddy (Acorns/Down Under School of Yoga). Listen in for actionable solutions for growth, retention, creative production, and privacy-first engagement, plus practical advice on what really works in mobile right now.

Lisanne Vera, VP of Growth at KashKick, joins Taylor Lobdell to talk about the incentives economy, a marketplace where leisure becomes an asset. From her early affiliate-marketing roots to leading growth at one of the fastest-growing rewards apps, Lisanne unpacks how KashKick designs offers that respect user time, prevent bait-and-switch dynamics, and build long-term trust. She discusses how micro-earnings sustain engagement, why transparency matters more than flashy payouts, and why being relentlessly user-focused, even at the cost of short-term ROAS, can drive the strongest growth stories in mobile today.

It’s often said that for e-commerce brands, the holiday season is the 5th quarter of the year. Sue Azari, e-commerce industry lead at AppsFlyer, joins Taylor Lobdell for a tactical breakdown of how the smartest e-commerce apps move from Q4 user acquisition to Q5 retention and remarketing. From UK and EMEA trends to global shifts in spend, Sue details why remarketing spend surges fivefold at the end of the year, how loyalty and personalization schemes actually drive a second purchase, and what makes non-organic installs disproportionately valuable for real app revenue. Referencing real examples from brands like Zara, H&M, Temu, and Shein, Sue lays out the structural shifts, practical tactics, and emerging risks facing every marketer trying to build durable, app-based revenue in a volatile global market.

James Dickins, Team Lead of Technical Support at Gamelight, joins Taylor Lobdell to discuss how rewarded UA and behavioral targeting shape user acquisition in 2025’s privacy-first landscape. From the company’s laser-eyed cat mascot to the mechanics of lookalike models, James explains how his team balances precision with ethics and how algorithms are trained on aggregated behavior data. He also discusses creative testing and when human intuition should override machine logic. He breaks down the real limits of automation, why model decay demands constant retraining, and how to build campaigns that adapt as fast as user behavior changes.

Shilpa Reddy, CMO of Down Under School of Yoga and former Marketing VP at Acorns, maps her journey from fintech to wellness and explains why the same principles drive both: make time-tested tools accessible, and build a community that keeps people engaged. She breaks down her three-stage marketing flywheel, and shows why marketers must dismantle the false divide between direct response and brand storytelling. The conversation moves from Acorns’ spare-change investing to Down Under’s community-driven yoga. She interrogates the role of podcasts as the new TV, the measurement gaps left by AT&T, and how authenticity risks becoming uniform in an AI-saturated content world.

Alejandro Hernandez, Senior CRM Notifications and Lifecycle Specialist at Babbel, explains how AI and human creativity intersect to drive retention in language learning. He shares how Babbel uses ecosystem segmentation, predictive models, and deep links to re-engage millions of learners worldwide. From predicting churn with behavior signals to ensuring that every push notification feels like a supportive nudge rather than spam, Alejandro shares his thoughts on the CRM strategies that lead to habits -- not hassle.

Advi Bishnoi, Head of Consulting at Social Plus, argues that in 2025, retention has overtaken acquisition as the real growth engine for apps. From Ulta Beauty to Harley Davidson, Advi has helped brands turn community features into measurable revenue streams. In this episode, he explains why micro-communities and in-app social layers transform loyalty programs, how first-party data becomes indispensable in a privacy-first world, and why marketers need to stop fixating on CPMs and CAC. The conversation maps out how fitness apps, travel platforms, sports teams, and retailers all harness community differently and why organic engagement often beats promotions or retargeting in driving long-term retention.

Louis Tanguay, founder and managing director of App Growth Summit, traces his arc from music magazine founder to film marketer to architect of a global mobile industry community now marking its 100th event. Louis explains why mobile marketers keep missing the basics: custom product pages, team silos, overreliance on AI and how AGS forges authentic connection in a field where ‘networking’ usually means sales pitches. Louis argues for true community as a defense against industry fads and reveals practical tactics for getting actual value from events.

Piotr Prędkiewicz, Senior Marketing Analyst at FORMEL SKIN, exposes the myth of ‘perfect data’ and charts the future of privacy-centric analytics in mobile growth. With a career spanning fintech, dating and health tech, Piotr unpacks how to track users legally, ethically, and creatively before they even register. He also discusses why device data is always noisier than you want, and where most marketers go wrong on privacy, attribution, and fraud. The episode blends practical strategies for data-driven marketers with a clear-eyed critique of the industry’s alignment failures, fraud incentives, and the inescapable limitations of tracking in the GDPR era.

Seema Shah, VP of Research and Insights at Sensor Tower, dispenses with the industry’s fixation on superficial growth metrics. Her analysis exposes the fundamental asymmetry in e-commerce: scale without retention leads nowhere, and price wars favor only those insulated by infrastructure and sunk-cost bias. Shah parses the machinery of loyalty and why brands that depend on incentives or viral hacks collapse as soon as ad spend falters. She dissects the nature of ‘engagement’ and how most apps can mistake installs for allegiance and explores why friction points like returns, shipping, and checkout, aren't a minor feature set, but the primary front in the battle for behavioral lock-in. This challenges the fantasy that small brands can out-spend or out-feature incumbents, insisting instead on granular tactics: how to interrogate user data, how to manufacture urgency without eroding trust, and how event-driven design transforms disposable installs into measurable lifetime value.

Moshe Even-Israel, Head of Business Development at Scrambly, unpacks the real stakes and shifting standards in the rewarded user acquisition ecosystem. From onboarding and fraud, to retention and data transparency, Moshe interrogates both the promise and pitfalls of incentivized platforms. This episode covers vendor selection, long-term retention strategies, KYC (know your customer) challenges, and the real metrics for measuring UA quality. Whether you see rewarded UA as a growth hack or a strategic pillar, this conversation drills into the mechanism that deliver high-intent, loyal users in a market crowded with lookalike vendors.

Udhara de Silva, who leads loyalty marketing for Singapore Airlines in Australia, walks through the launch and rapid growth of Kris+, the digital rewards app that enables members to earn and spend miles in restaurants and retail stores – a first for any airline rewards app outside of Singapore. The discussion tracks why Australia was chosen as the testbed, the challenges of localizing a QR-based payment app in a card-centric market, and the dual work of building merchant trust and user habits from zero. Udhara details what drives engagement, how to “double dip” on points, and why genuine merchant partnerships matter more than technical bells and whistles. Listeners get insight into evolving loyalty marketing tactics, campaign strategies, and the real mechanics of building an airline’s everyday brand.

Andre Kempe is the CEO of Admiral Media, a performance marketing agency based in Europe. He returns to Apptivate to discuss the role of AI in creative development for mobile app marketing campaigns. Find out what types of apps can leverage AI in their ads, where the human touch still outperforms the machine, and where AI makes the biggest impact from a mobile marketing standpoint.

Daniel Lupu is the Senior Marketing Manager at Skyscanner, a search engine for deals on flights, hotels, and car rentals serving 110 million users monthly. In this episode, Daniel shares lessons and results from the tests he’s run. He discusses his team's approach to navigating SKAN, the creative strategies they’ve implemented, and his observations of the relationship between paid and organic search ads on Apple.

In this episode, we chat with Luca Stefanutti, the Director of Growth at adidas Running, the fitness app formerly known as Runtastic. They touch on the app’s role within the larger brand, key performance metrics, implementing new insights within large teams, and Luca’s point of view on some of today’s hottest app marketing topics, like AI, creatives, and the relationship between incremental and organic traffic.

In this episode of our Apptivate podcast, we chat with Liam Branaghan, the Performance Marketing and Strategy Lead for Uber. Liam’s teams focus on driving growth for Uber Eats across EMEA, while supporting overall brand and business goals. In this episode, you’ll learn about the evolution of Uber’s regional marketing teams and how they merged into a single global team. You’ll also hear about their work to refine their localization strategies and the balancing act between brand and performance marketing goals.

There are a lot of data sensitivities when it comes to marketing in the healthcare and wellness space. This week on Apptivate, we speak with Kevin Bell, the Performance Marketing Lead at Mochi Health, about navigating Facebook’s recent changes to events for advertisers in these industries. Kevin gives you the background on the platform’s changes, and how his team adapted their marketing strategy to meet Facebook’s new criteria under HIPAA compliance. You’ll also learn about the limitations of marketing creatives and how they’re leveraging AI to optimize their campaign performance and grow.

In this episode of Remerge’s Apptivate podcast, we chat with Yoni Nijboer, the Director of Partnerships at exmox, a platform that helps mobile gaming companies scale their user base through engagement-driven, rewarded user acquisition. You’ll learn why rewarded UA used to have a bad reputation, how it’s evolved, the benefits of working with a rewarded UA network for certain mobile games, how to pick your rewarded UA partner, and much more.

Joshua Javaheri is the CEO and founder of Lucky Day, the mobile entertainment company behind games like Bingo Stars, Solitaire Royale, and Blackjack Royale. In this episode, Joshua shares his story and the strategies behind Lucky Day’s success – from concept, creation, and the development of their flagship titles, to the hard lessons he’s learned along the way.

Aaron Diaz is the Manager of Mobile User Acquisition at 2K, the American video game publisher behind NBA 2K, Borderlands 2, and other popular role-playing, sports, and strategy games. In this episode, Taylor quizzes Aaron on his keys to UA success across the big titles he’s worked on over his career, including how he reached 10,000 users in less than 24 hours for the soft launch of a new game.