Josh: Hi Tanner, thanks for joining me! Can you introduce yourself, who are you and what do you do?

Tanner: Hi, I'm Tanner Hanson. I’m the President of RevU, where I’ve really been focused on our core offerwall offering. I’m focused on the product itself and developing the backend to make sure that we have the tools to support advertisers and publishers in all verticals.

I’ve also focused on growth, leading our sales team and working really closely with the marketing department to make sure we’re executing, and make sure that we’re attending the right events, like Gamesforum.

I also oversee our account management, which we’re starting to expand as we grow. I’m very excited to build that team from the ground up. Coming from the customer success and growth side of the business, I’m excited to sit at this intersection of customer and product, being able to assess performance and gather customer feedback and bring that right into our product development cycle.

Josh: Can you tell us a bit more about RevU. What is your MO?

Tanner: RevU is a unique offerwall platform; unlike others in the space we focus exclusively on delivering an exceptional offerwall experience. The company actually started eighteen years ago,so we’ve been around quite a while. We got our start in the desktop space originally, providing a lot of the demand sourcing for some of the original offerwalls that were in the Facebook gaming space.

From there RevU maintained their growth with desktop and web offers and over time mobile publishers actually started finding RevU as they were losing the ability to run app campaigns on iOS. This created an opportunity for RevU to adjust our product to drive very high CPMs for publishers who had lost a lot of revenue on the iOS side of the business.

While we had been web-first, changes on mobile ended up working out really well for us to get into the app monetization space because of the changes on iOS and long-standing advertiser relationships that were natural fits for mobile publishers as well. 

Josh: What led you to join RevU?

Tanner: The product, and the need for new and effective mobile solutions. I was there when Apple made us shut down all of our iOS campaigns, and, you know, crying a single tear as I’m pausing all of my best iOS CPE campaigns.

We definitely felt that at my former employer, we felt that for both our publishers and advertisers, where we lost this great performance channel. And so I actually started to hear more about RevU from my clients as they discovered RevU and integrated the product. 

What appealed to me about the opportunity was the small, nimble team and the ability to drive product decisions - which wasn’t something I could do in a large organization.

Moving to RevU was a logical and fun choice for me to expand what I do and be able to dive into the business side of the product itself rather than solely focus on account management. It was a really good opportunity to bring over the knowledge that I had in the app-based offerwall space to a company who is incredibly knowledgeable in the desktop and web space. And I love combining those two knowledge sets with a small team where I’m able to influence product in a way that benefits publishers that I’ve known for years.

Josh: How are the team of RevU leveraging desktop users and redirecting to mobile campaigns?

Tanner: This is one of the features I’m most proud of from the past year. It’s fairly simple, if the users are on desktop, we’re able to show mobile offers and we show that user a QR code instead of  linking them directly to the store. When they scan that QR code it knows what device they’re on, it sends them to the right OS and the right app store for that OS, and with a track link to that exact campaign. So we’re able to both track it and use the incentivization to get a user to move across devices. And it’s been the most interesting data to me because the players and the users that we acquire when we’re going from desktop to mobile, the retention is really unlike anything else that we see in the CPE space.

Everyone knows with offerwall and incentivized media, a lot of the users are just there for the reward, and they’re not going to be retained. But it’s all about capturing those high value users. If you can still retain 5 or 10% of those users, it’s incredibly efficient.

So seeing the numbers that are generated, as far as return on ad spend and retention when we’re pulling people from a desktop game or a shopping site on desktop into a mobile game has been incredible.

Josh: What is the most common challenge you’re seeing from your advertising partners at the moment?

Tanner: So there’s a few challenges I think that most advertisers face. The one that I always see, the cost model is really critical when you’re thinking about your analyses. You're not able to evaluate a CPE campaign in the same way that you evaluate your CPI video traffic. The metrics look completely different. And you also need to use a new set of metrics with the way that you install cohorts are looked at and many BI systems that advertisers have spent countless hours building out their proprietary in house kind of BI systems.

A lot of those systems are really made for CPI buying, because that’s the bulk of it. But CPE is a great channel, and can be a solid chunk of your portfolio and it's not able to be perfectly put into the exact same lens that you’re looking at CPI campaigns with. Just mainly because the way the cost is incurred right with CPE. You might get an install on day 0, and incur the cost of that on day 30. And so unlike a CPI campaign, where the cost and install are completely aligned.

So I think even outside of CPE if you’re buying on CPC the cost comes in on the click, and then the install might come in 3 days later. So it’s really critical that I think teams understand the cost model and are able to be flexible with their BI systems. Then you’re able to make correct decisions and accurate decisions and that’s something’s really important to me. We know we always want a long term evergreen campaign that’s profitable for everyone. And sometimes looking at the data wrong can trick you into overbidding or under bidding. We want to retain partners, and build out long term advertising relationships with people that we’re working with.

 Josh: What can our audience expect to hear from you at Gamesforum Barcelona in February?

Tanner: Well…naturally I’ll be talking about offerwalls. I’ll be talking about some data examples of the way that the cost model affects how you need to analyze a campaign. So I have some fun slides to show how you can kind of fall into data that looks great and over bid or data that looks very bad and under bid and so make sure that we cover that, and then other things that I really like to touch on are both the history of incentivized media. It definitely had an interesting past. And it’s in a completely different space than you know right now than it was, you know, 5 or 10 years ago. I always like to touch on how that’s evolved. And then for me, I think one of the huge benefits that I like to show is how you can use offer wall, to really expand your audience, especially for legacy, titles, or where you know you spend so much that everyone in the world has seen the ad on Facebook or the add on every other game.

 Josh: Speaking of Barcelona, what are you most excited to do (other than Gamesforum!) in the city?

Tanner: I’m super into architecture, so I’ll probably wander around. But I’m also not that into tourist traps, as I live in San Francisco and you know, I tend to guide tourists that I know away from most of the mainstream tourist things. So for me, whenever I travel I just really love to attempt to see what the nightlife is like, and what’s kind of a day to day of somebody who lives in the destination. I always like to find whatever hole in the wall spot somebody recommends.

Josh: Hypothetically, every time you walk into a room a song plays. What song plays for you and why?

Tanner: Oh, God! That’s a terribly hard question, Josh. I can’t pick one. I think it would be a song called Bipp by Sophie. It sounds like a robot is malfunctioning, really and like sometimes I just embody that spirit and so, you know not that pleasing of a song to hear, but definitely sounds like work is being done. And it keeps me motivated to keep working. So I think if I need to keep myself motivated, and I walk in a room, and I hear that I will be ready to open up an excel spreadsheet and solve some problems.

The other side of it kind of going completely differently if you want to keep making your playlist weird would be. This must be the place by Talking Heads, because one, it’s my favorite song in the world and 2, I’m pretty certain it’s like physically impossible for somebody to not be both happy and peaceful when they hear that song. And so when I walk into a room, if that’s the energy. I’m finding I would be very okay with that every time.