What's Working In Marketing™: Winning Strategies for Black Friday & Cyber Monday with Gabe Gottlieb, Chief Strategy Officer at Sensor Tower

What's Working in Marketing™ is a podcast where we uncover what’s working across the digital landscape by tapping into the world’s best data-backed research and through candid conversations with industry experts. Join us if you're ready to learn what's working when it comes to your marketing efforts.

On this episode, we spoke with Gabe Gottlieb who is the Chief Strategy Officer at Sensor Tower, a digital software platform that equips marketers with the data and insights needed to master the mobile app ecosystem. Gabe discusses Black Friday & Cyber Monday digital advertising strategies & trends, the intersection of art and science in digital advertising, new digital storytelling mediums, the importance of competitive intelligence to inform & inspire strategy, and much more.

You can listen to What's Working in Marketing™ – A Podcast by RightMetric wherever you get your podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Tune In, iHeartRadio, and Pocket Casts.

Here's a full transcript of our conversation with Gabe:

Charlie Grinnell: On this episode, I'm joined by Gabe Gottlieb, now Chief Strategy Officer of Sensor Tower, formerly the CEO and co-founder of Pathmatics. Thanks for joining me today, Gabe.

Gabe Gottlieb: Oh, glad to be here, Charlie. Thanks for having me.

Charlie Grinnell: I'm really excited for this conversation. Pathmatics is a tool that our company uses a lot. As you and I were just chatting before we started recording this, I wanted to go back to the beginning and just get an understanding of what were you doing before you started Pathmatics? How did that... your foray into advertising intelligence start? How has that set you up into what you're doing now?

Gabe Gottlieb: Yeah, sure. I'm an outsider who's become an insider I would say. I began my career at Microsoft, just an entry level software developer. I worked on a ton of products, Windows, stuff like that, not in the ad space. Then took some time off, traveled actually for a year around the world with my wife, and then wanted to start something. I had a buddy who was in the space and pointed me and my co-founder to digital advertising ecosystem. This was a little over 10 years ago. So, definitely still nascent. I remember I did some investor presentations and I would show digital ad spending was a small graph, and then TV ad spending was way above it. I'd say one day digital is going to pass TV, and Emarketer says it's four years away or five years away. Now, if you did that graph, digital is double or triple TV.

Charlie Grinnell: Its flipped.

Gabe Gottlieb: Its flipped and digital is going up and to the right, and TV is flat. Definitely early days, but we saw an opportunity here where digital is growing. There wasn't a lot of transparency. Brands didn't know whether their ads were showing up. Publishers didn't know what ads were showing up on their site. As outsiders, we said, "This is totally broken." I get why billboards are hard to measure or radio is hard to measure, but digital is on a computer. All the backbone is there. We had two engineers just dove in and just said, "Hey, let's build something here." It's definitely been ups and downs. It's been over a decade, as I said. I think that we haven't strayed that far from that initial vision and that really resonated. Now we're privileged to work with lovely clients like you guys, and candidly, some of the biggest brands in the world... largest CPG providers and producers and huge tech companies, huge publishers, huge platforms.

Gabe Gottlieb: It's been a really exciting ride, and definitely now... now I speak at conferences. I'm this insider now because I see all this data and because I get to see it. It's been fun.

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah, it's fascinating to hear that you and your co-founder were developers, because as a marketing nerd myself, I think about it sounds like you came at this from almost more of a measurement perspective and transparency as more of a utilitarian service, whereas the marketing strategist in me is licking my chops, because I'm like oh man, this is so useful for marketing strategy. I had no idea that was the case. Have you noticed almost that morph a little bit, or was that something that as you started to dig and build this thing that there were more use cases than you initially thought?

Gabe Gottlieb: No, yeah, totally. I'd say you're absolutely right. We definitely came at it from that idealist, engineer perspective. One saying early on was transparency is not good for everyone, but the good players in the market should want transparency. That's a good thing for folks who are doing the right thing and doing well by their customers. Then actually, background on me, I actually studied... I have a business and computer science degree. I always was interested in-

Charlie Grinnell: Dual threat.

Gabe Gottlieb: Yeah, marketing and messaging and all these things. I always thought the data we were gathering was really cool. I've always loved... we do really cool things with creative, and really cool taxonomy stuff, and all that stuff. I've always just loved looking at that and talking to brands and agencies about the storytelling. I still think that's an area of, especially digital, is underdeveloped. I think digital is profound medium for... you can sequence messages. You know who you're talking to. You can do this really interesting messaging. I think we're all still on the other side of me. The data nerds, geeking out on a data and not really thinking about that storytelling. I think this is a really interesting space in that there's both the art and the science.

Charlie Grinnell: I think just to echo what you said, we are absolutely in the infancy of digital, even, right? Realistically, I think back about hearing you say, "Yeah, we started this over a decade ago." I was like, whoa. I wouldn't have even been thinking about that a decade ago. I feel like digital advertising has been a thing since the advent of the internet, but it's really accelerated, to your point, in the last 10 years. You've been there right from the beginning, but then zooming out and being like, yeah, that 10 years is nothing when we compare it to television or print or radio or whatever. It really is that interesting juxtaposition, so to speak.

Gabe Gottlieb: Totally. The one reason we've been focused on digital and one of our hypothesis was that you need to be focused because it's changing all the time. It's super fragmented, new platforms are popping up. I've spent a lot of time... we don't cover it yet, but we're working on it. I spent a lot of time on TikTok the last six months, and trying to bend my mind around that. We talk about storytelling and mediums, right? That's a new medium. We don't run out of stuff to do in digital. There's always something new, always. That's exciting. As running a business, I think that's also an opportunity. If things are changing, if things are dynamic, that means our clients need data. That means there's benefits to someone who covers a lot of the space. Yeah, I love it.

Charlie Grinnell: Speaking of the last six months, and maybe we'll expand here, the last 18 months, I want to dig into some of the big changes that we've seen, right? Obviously the world with COVID, that's the elephant in the room, has seen massive, massive changes. The impact on digital has been immense, especially with COVID. I think to your point, digital is always changing, but obviously COVID has accelerated things. What are some... you, having the benefit of being able to sit on top of all of this data and look at things, what are some of the large scale shifts or trends that you've seen emerge with this kind of earthquake, so to speak, that's happened?

Gabe Gottlieb: An easy one, and one I didn't cover in our corporate history, but the shift to mobile is obviously tremendous. I think, a thing I say is every brand now is a mobile brand. It's funny. I think about we were stuck in our homes, and yet we were on our mobile phones, right? Which are supposed to be the things that we take with us, but we're stuck in our homes and we're all tapping away at our phones. I think accompanying that in the data, if I look at the actual data, we see things like the shift to social. This isn't breaking news, but Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, it's platforms like this really just continuing to eat up budget folks switching away from things like your tried and true desktop display publishers. A lot of those trends, mobile being a really exciting one.

Gabe Gottlieb: Then obviously big cataclysmic industry shifts like travel dropping, coming back. We're seeing food delivery, we're seeing a 50% jump in their activity. So really interesting trends that we see because of the pandemic.

Charlie Grinnell: One of the things that really comes to mind there with that is that mobile isn't necessarily a new trend or story line, right? I think we've probably read headlines of hey, this is... mobile is the next big thing. It's one thing to make that prediction. It's another thing to see it actually reflected in the data. To your point, with people sitting at home, I was actually just thinking to myself when the pandemic hit, I wasn't spending a ton of my desktop or my laptop. Here I was marching around the house... whether it's I'm having a bath, or sitting watching TV, your phone is there. I wasn't necessarily on my laptop. That's something where that is pretty ironic that we are supposed to be taking our mobile devices somewhere, but we're still just on them because of that more convenience factor, because I don't want to have lug my laptop from my couch to my bed.

Gabe Gottlieb: 100%. Obviously having done this for over a decade, this is going to be the year of mobile, this is going to be the year of mobile... and then it's funny that 2020 actually probably was the year of mobile. Then we won't call it that. It's the year of plenty of other things that we don't have to talk about. That was actually probably the year of mobile. Now it's a forgone conclusion.

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah, 2020 being the year of mobile where everyone is mostly immobile is incredibly ironic, right?

Gabe Gottlieb: Right.

Charlie Grinnell: Speaking about mobile, I kind of want to tie that into the topic of the episode, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We've heard that narrative, mobile, mobile, mobile. If we're saying 2020 and probably 2021 is going to be the year or years of mobile, how does that... I want to dig into how we think that ties into Black Friday, heading into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, mobile and commerce. Can you just set the stage of Black Friday and why it's such an important moment for retail? You've had the benefit, again, of sitting on top of all that data and seeing the impact that it's had year after year. I'd love to start there.

Gabe Gottlieb: Absolutely. Black Friday is really fascinating, because traditionally number one sales day when retailers get into the black, hence the funny term or phrase, right? But really initially built on this physical thing, feet in stores, lining up at 6:00 in the morning. Yeah, it's become this digital and this mobile phenomenon. I think it's evolved like anything, as a physical thing. Then it became this digital... and Cyber Monday when everyone came "back to the office" and then got on their computers and bought a lot of stuff. I would say if you make the analogy, it's like holiday music where it's starting to infect earlier and earlier into the year. I think we're seeing the same thing with Black Friday where it's these holiday themes, these offers and stuff. People are starting to push it earlier.

Gabe Gottlieb: Now we're not necessarily back in the office on Monday, so do I have my deals go out maybe Wednesday before Black Friday? There's all these different evolutions of the phenomenon, but really just this huge retail phenomenon. I think we've been conditioned as buyers to be ready for it. I don't know about you, but I actually... see how much of a data nerd I am. I actually build a spreadsheet of things I've been meaning to buy for the last two months and then wait until that week and buy it. I'm a total Black Friday nerd from that side as well. Yeah, it's become this huge cultural phenomenon and I'd love to dive in. There's some interesting trends on how some brands think about it and build their strategies around Black Friday.

Charlie Grinnell: Speaking about that, you guys released a report last year around holiday advertising, and I have a not here that I want to read and get your take on it. Advertisers in 2020 not only started advertising earlier than November in 2020 than they did in 2019, but they also spent more in the first half of November. Once they hit Thanksgiving ad spends dropped, which is before Cyber Monday. It's this trend of brands are investing earlier and heavier. A. Why do you think that is, and B. Do we think that's going to continue?

Gabe Gottlieb: I think it's super interesting. We were surprised to see the decrease right around Thanksgiving last year. I think it was even in 2019 in a traditional year, and then obviously 2020.

Charlie Grinnell: Different.

Gabe Gottlieb: New rules, yeah. I think yeah... I think it's a competitive world. I think ad prices like... ad prices go through the roof in Q4, and every ad network, every publisher makes whatever, 1/4 of their money in that one month period. It's super competitive. If you think about ROI of advertising, there's good reasons to shift earlier. I think leading into your second question of what are we going to see, I think this year's going to be fascinating, because like we said, we're all home, we're all on our phones, we're all shopping. There's this throughout the year opportunity. Prime Day has been a really interesting driver for essentially Cyber Monday, Black Friday in July. Then of course every other retailer has to match Amazon. There's that shift. They get maybe to test some stuff in July and then refine it and run it in November.

Gabe Gottlieb: Then the other thing, I'm sure you're facing this as well, is as a consumer, is stuff not in stock. What are retailers going to do if half the things they want to sell are back ordered? I think there's an interesting question of do I run my sales early when stuff's in stock and try to get people to stock up on it? My son's birthday is actually tomorrow, but my wife and I bought stuff three weeks ago, because normally we buy it... we're not great.

Charlie Grinnell: The day of? I'm the Christmas Eve guy, where I go do my Christmas shopping.

Gabe Gottlieb: Day of or two days out, right? Now we're like oh, he really wants this robotics kit. We got to buy it three weeks ahead of time to make sure it gets here and make sure it's not delayed. I think that's an interesting dynamic as well. It's how are retailers and D2C brands going to push this different timing?

Charlie Grinnell: It's funny you should mention that. I was just on a call last week with a marketing leader at a brand, and we're talking about insights, and that sort of stuff. One of the things, is they're like, "Yeah, we know we're going to continue to double down on digital and invest in digital and insight capabilities and that type of thing. They're like, for the next little while, we're taking our foot off the gas, because we can't even fulfill things. We could be selling things, and we can't fulfill it, and all we're doing is just creating a group of people that are pissed off at us.

Gabe Gottlieb: Totally.

Charlie Grinnell: That was something where I was like, whoa, okay. Interesting.

Gabe Gottlieb: They don't want to spend money to create a group of people that are then pissed off at us.

Charlie Grinnell: That are angry, and you're like huh, that's actually really smart. I don't think many people would think about that, because they're like, yeah, digital let's go. And market share... I actually do wonder that with different industries, whether it's the supply chain, shipping, whatever the things are, how that's going to impact. When we have you on another episode hopefully in a year from now, we'll look back and be like, oh yeah, that's actually what we saw. I think that would be super interesting. There might be spends that... dark horse prediction. It could be things actually aren't maybe necessarily as big because there could be industries that are hitting those supply chain issues.

Gabe Gottlieb: 100%. Yeah. No, totally.

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah, what a time we live in. Just another comment about what you said about Amazon was so true, that kind of, the Black Friday in July or that sort of thing and other companies having to match step with that. The example that comes to my mind is this concept of transferring, which with shipping and supply chain, I don't know what the exact stat is. Someone here is probably going to roast me on this for getting this stat wrong, but I think I read somewhere, this was a couple of years ago, where it was like Amazon spends $4 Billion or something on shipping a year. Maybe they lose four... it's such a loss for them, but they're willing to take the loss to have that convenience and create that consumer expectation so that when maybe when I don't buy something on Amazon and I buy something somewhere else, I still expect that same day, or next day, or free shipping. That's something where it's like they're sucking the oxygen out of the air, so to speak for other brands.

Gabe Gottlieb: It's a huge competitive mode, right? It's like how do you compete with that? You have to have literally hundreds of billions of dollars to be able to compete with that. You're totally right. We've been 100% conditioned to that. This COVID, the out of stock has been interesting because it's forced us to reckon with hey, maybe this reality here is actually we can't have everything at our fingertips. We can't just conjure these items out of thin air.

Charlie Grinnell: The nerd in me is like yes, more now, but then the human in me is like maybe we should pump the brakes.

Gabe Gottlieb: Maybe it's actually better for us as people. Not everything has to be instant gratification, right?

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah, exactly. I want to talk a little bit more just around general strategies or tactics that you've seen work. You, again, sitting on all the data, when it comes to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, are there any high level trends, more tactical around channels, creatives, that sort of thing, and do you see that stuff typically differ by industry?

Gabe Gottlieb: Yeah, I'll answer both questions in one. We see a divide. We see the D to C folks going heavy on social, really very clear call to action, very clear value prop. Like whatever its price, hey, buy this Peloton or whatever. It's a very clear value prop. Then we see the retailers doing that old school, like trying to get the feet in the door. It's much more an awareness play, much more a broader channel play, trying to say, incredible sales. An interesting thing is I think the retailers have figured out this D to C playbook and then they'll go to social and run more targeted ads. They'll run more D to C ads. Best Buy might have a general, hey, we got a bunch of door busters... video. Come in early to get the best deal, whatever it is. But then they'll have a pin point like buy this LG TV for 699 tomorrow. That'll be the social ad. It'll be much more tactical.

Gabe Gottlieb: It's super interesting. It makes sense, use the mediums for what they're meant for. I continue to put out videos. Video is super powerful if done right for brands. It'd be interesting to see if the D to C folks start... they've generally definitely been doing more videos if they dive in even deeper.

Charlie Grinnell: Interesting. Just hearing that D to C, the old dogs are being taught by the new B to C dogs new tricks, or they're trying to maybe have to steal that because they're forced in terms of having to continue to compete with those brands, right?

Gabe Gottlieb: Totally. Totally.

Charlie Grinnell: Then the comment about video, just to reiterate, you're seeing more and more video coming up and this idea of video ads translating into commerce?

Gabe Gottlieb: Absolutely, yeah. I think video was thought of as... if you're an auto maker and you want to get everyone thinking about Ford, or please your dealer network. Make sure you run the ad during the football game. Yeah, I'd say channels, or I think we publicly said we're going to cover OTT, but OTT is really interesting. There's a lot of... that's a place where I think you see the melding of that traditional branding and then more D to C players diving in, running traditional video ads, but with a clear call to action with a target. Yeah, and I think... I mean the audience is captive on video channels. I think it makes perfect sense. And social, I think social is now priced very high. It's definitely the easy wins are gone. The cheap eyeballs are gone.

Charlie Grinnell: For sure.

Gabe Gottlieb: Video is interesting, interesting broader play there.

Charlie Grinnell: I guess it's one of those things, right? There's a couple things that pop into my mind. Number one, before I got into marketing I was a videographer. It was always the battle between the photo and the video guys. A photo is worth a thousand words. It's like if a photo is worth a thousand words, then video is 24,000 words a second or whatever the nerdy thing was. I think about that with how that translate online with things being more and more competitive, right? More people spending more time online. There have been a ton of research done on that, compounded with what we're seeing with COVID and with people staying inside being on their phones, being more mobile. Then I think the last thing that I would tie into there is all the different ingredients is people spending more time on video platforms, spending more time on YouTube, spending more time on TikTok, spending... Instagram being... we are video platform now. We are no longer just a photo platform.

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah, I feel like we're probably going to see that to continue. I don't think that's any, to your point, groundbreaking news, but probably the way that people are creating video... when I say people, I mean brands. How they're creating video to map towards different objectives, whether it's an awareness play, or a middle funnel thing, or a conversion play. Do you guys think about that the same way?

Gabe Gottlieb: Absolutely. I mean depends on your definition of video, right? Sometimes it's a bunch of emojis dancing around. It looks nothing like a 30 second spot, right?

Charlie Grinnell: True.

Gabe Gottlieb: But it's sound and motion, right? And it's driving to an action. Yeah, that's the fun stuff about digital, to see how these mediums change, and then horizontal is vertical and all these things, right? We're past the day where they take the 30 second spot from national television and throw it as a pre roll, right? I think we've got a lot more creativity, a lot more people using the medium. It leads to better results, certainly.

Charlie Grinnell: Yeah, and making things more native for consumption. To your point, just slap it on there and you're like no, we can chop this up. This can be done in a different aspect ratio so that when it's going on someone's phone they're not actually having to turn their phone horizontally.

Gabe Gottlieb: Totally.

Charlie Grinnell: Just thinking more about Black Friday, to your point about earlier on where you were talking about how Amazon has... Black Friday in July and the same day shipping and that sort of thing, what do you think about that in terms of discounting? We've seen Black Friday hasn't necessarily been a battle of discounting, but more of a battle of attention. How can brands stand apart heading into this Black Friday? Again, coming off the heels of COVID where things are super competitive.

Gabe Gottlieb: This is one of those where it's like there's no golden bullet. It really depends on the brand. It depends on what they're going for. I think, like we said, like you have tons of supply and you want to get the message out or do you want to drive... maybe you don't have as much in stock, but you want to drive high price rates so you're not discounting. Also, it's super expensive. Like we said, super expensive. I'd say go back to basics. Know what you're trying to achieve. Know your audience. Know the message. I would suggest looking at some competitive intelligence, maybe, and seeing what other folks are doing out there. We found out that folks tend to learn a lot and it helps them think about what they're doing, but really going back to that what am I trying to achieve. It's not just hey, we spent this much last year so we got to spend the same amount this year.

Gabe Gottlieb: The beauty... we talked about the fragmentation of digital and how it makes it difficult, but it also makes it... it's like a Swiss army knife. There's a tool for driving just clicks, and check outs. There's tools for driving awareness and whatever. You use the right tool for the right... don't just use TikTok because it's the hot thing. Use it because it achieves a certain objective that you're going for and it connects with that audience. It connects with that consumer. I think there's a lot of opportunity there if you really think through the basics.

Charlie Grinnell: I want to dive in deeper. You and I are biased because we both work in that competitive insight space, but I'd love to just hear your hypothesis. I'll go first. I think about the power for a brand to be able to look outside its own four walls and get an understanding of what competitors and/or leaders, or inspirational brands are doing, as a strategist, knowing what you're doing and what works for your business, and what a competitor or a leader is doing. This is the thesis of our entire business, is just by having those two bits of information, I feel better armed to make the right decision for our business whether that's allocating budget, ideating a campaign, that sort of thing. How do you guys think about that?

Gabe Gottlieb: We're incredibly aligned. We make those same arguments. I would say occasionally we'll come up... I'll be in front of a super tactical D to C marketer and they'll say, "Hey, I'm the best in my space. I've got my CPA down to the penny, and I know exactly what I'm doing." I say, "Great. The odds of that being true are low." I say it much more politely. If you walk around thinking you're the best... there's only one person in the world who can say that. We don't know who he or she is. Maybe you're the leader in this space, but there's tons of other mature spaces that are going after the same consumer. You can learn from them.

Gabe Gottlieb: An industry we like to point folks at is car insurance. They've been selling car insurance, a very commoditized product. It's a thing you barely... you use it, but hopefully you don't. Hopefully you don't use it very often. They've been selling car insurance for whatever, 80 years or something, or 100. I don't know. I don't know the history of car insurance, but the point is the very mature thinking about the consumer, very mature targeting. They've got their funnels down. There's a lot of, to your point, there's a lot you can learn from adjacent industries or an industry totally across the field. I think you know you're sleeping better. You know that you're understanding the trends. You can understand all these new mediums, right? You can see who's dipping their toe in, what they're doing. And you end up saving money, right? You end up not making the mistakes.

Gabe Gottlieb: It's the same thing... maybe an analogy is building a company. I made tons of painful mistakes. Thankfully we took venture capital investment and sometimes the venture capitalists will say, "Hey, we've seen that mistake before. You're about to make it. Don't make it." I think it's the same thing with competitive intelligence. Why spend the $50,000, $100,000, millions of dollars? Why not just take a look at what you can learn from the market?

Charlie Grinnell: Look before you leap.

Gabe Gottlieb: Totally.

Charlie Grinnell: It's funny you bring that up. There's a quote that we've rallied around as a business that really rung true to us and kind of I think you'll probably appreciate. It's from a woman named Marissa Thalberg. I believe she's the chief brand officer, the CMO now at Lowe's. She talks about when it comes to marketing strategy... I'm going to butcher the quote here, but when it comes to marketing strategy, you need to look within your industry for information, benchmarking, and you need to look outside of your industry for inspiration. You need to have both, information and inspiration, to be armed to make the right decision for the business. That's just exactly what you were just talking about.

Gabe Gottlieb: I like that a lot.

Charlie Grinnell: That's a quote where when I saw that, I was like save... sending it to Evan, my co-founder. We were freaking out about it. Again, as someone who, before I started a company, I was sitting on the brand side. I was tasked with building strategies. I'd be like, "Yeah, I think this is pretty good." We're trying to grow 20% month over month, or whatever it was. But I was like, is that good? I don't know. What if the category... if we grew 10% last month and the category grew 110%, we actually suck.

Gabe Gottlieb: Right, we actually move backwards, right?

Charlie Grinnell: We actually suck. I think that context is something that I was always looking for. Then I think about by understanding, yeah, what can we learn from adjacent things? Can we steal tactics from, to your point, car insurance, and more mature competitive industry, and maybe there's a tactic that we could steal out of there or take inspiration from, deploy it in our industry, and all the sudden, boom, we're shooting past people. You would never be able to know that otherwise.

Gabe Gottlieb: Got to love it. I mean, cross-pollination, too. Just think of it that way.

Charlie Grinnell: Absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about resources. As I imagine a lot of people who are listening to this episode are... it's the end of August and they're hopefully well underway with their Black Friday planning and strategies and stuff, but where would you recommend are resources for listeners to go check out and learn more about either building and/or optimizing Black Friday, Cyber Monday strategies?

Gabe Gottlieb: First off, I love the Pathmatics reports data. One thing I haven't mentioned is that actually we recently combined with a company called Sensor Tower who provides... they're essentially the Pathmatics for mobile. They're really deep app intelligence. At Sensor Tower we've got a huge team that turns through a ton of data and puts out amazing content. There's a lot of really interesting content from Sensor Tower. Then I think, yeah, and I think look at the platforms. The platforms are also really interesting resources, because they see a lot. They have a lot of best practices, kind of tactical folks I think are pretty interested and understand how can I utilize this platform well?

Charlie Grinnell: Makes sense. What would be one thing that you would mention to marketers that they should keep top of mind as they head into this crazy holiday season? I guess it's COVID holiday 2.0 here, but still things have changed a little bit obviously. What would be one thing you would encourage them to keep top of mind?

Gabe Gottlieb: This may be old school, and with cookies decreasing, I think we're thinking about more about it... I think context this year is really something to think about. What head space is my client in? What's happening in the world? What's happening on the mediums if I'm buying... I'm doing a site buy of an old school desktop display or video site buy, or I'm on mobile or I'm on social. I'd say, I think people's minds are in different places these days. Thinking about that might be an interesting thought exercise to think about where a consumer's at these days.

Charlie Grinnell: Makes a ton of sense. Last question. Where's the best place for people to get a hold of you online if they want to ask questions? I feel like you're in such a unique position. Again, you get to sit on top of a bunch of data and you're working on something super interesting. Your guys' merger with Sensor Tower... so many different, exciting pieces. I'm sure people will have questions. Where is the best place for them to get a hold of you?

Gabe Gottlieb: I'm big on Twitter. I would say @GabeGottlieb, G-A-B-E-G-O-T-T-L-I-E-B. That's a great place. Or I'm Gabe@SensorTower.com as well if email is better. Happy to chat. I love to chat with folks.

Charlie Grinnell: Gabe, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciated chatting with you and keep up the great work. We'll talk to you soon.

Gabe Gottlieb: Thanks, Charlie. This was good. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on.