In this exclusive interview for Gamesforum, we sit down with Marc Bearman, VP Commerical at oolo.

Hi Marc, Tell us about yourself, your background and your role at oolo.

I’m a monetization and growth expert who has spent the last decade of my life working in the mobile app space for leading ad networks, mediation platforms and intelligence tools.

I’ve been lucky enough to find a career doing what I love most, which is breaking down complicated concepts and translating them into intuitive value propositions. I’ve been building and leading commercial teams at top ad tech platforms for the last 5 years. 

At oolo, I am responsible for commercial operations and our go-to-market strategy, which in startup terms means I am the person who brings new customers onboard and ensures they stay happy on the platform. 

What is oolo and how does it help app companies?

oolo is a new type of offering and we are the leaders in what we do. Some call it ‘Smart Monitoring’ while others say ‘Deep Monitoring’ or ‘Automated Detection’. Personally, I think the simplest way to present oolo is as a tool designed for app developers and publishers. A tool that actually understands your data and proactively finds the most impactful problems and opportunities that a Growth or Monetization Manager needs to action each day. 

We’re constantly scanning your data sources so that you don’t have to create manual processes; we really want to reduce the need for manual monitoring down to zero. Whether it’s a large revenue discrepancy coming from one of your waterfalls or a decrease in D0 ROAS for a given campaign due to a new ‘low quality’ install source — oolo will find what is happening and surface it in a simple and easy-to-action way.

How does it work?

It all starts with training the model — which is not a trivial process. oolo has proprietary machine learning technology that we use to model healthy data patterns, predict performance, and detect anomalies. The anomaly detection is then filtered through layers of additional analysis — what we call the 'Business Brain’ — to validate issues (not just statistically, but operationally), quantify the impact, confirm the actionability, bundle all related anomalies, and trace the issue to its point of origin. 

Our models learn to meet the needs of each individual partner and, as a result, no two clients have an identical experience. 

Compared to traditional monitoring tools that use rules-based architecture (i.e. for metric X, alerts are triggered when a drop is over Y%), oolo truly understands the ebbs and flows of your data and surfaces only genuine, contextually-relevant anomalies. 

The result is noiseless detection and a curated list of the most impactful tasks for the team to focus on every day.

The technology is very sophisticated, but the process couldn’t be any more simple. Automated data monitoring, anomaly detection, focused alerting.

Obviously, monetization is just one side of the coin and doesn’t exist in a vacuum. For many companies, UA is the major strategic focus. Wouldn’t a smart monitoring solution offer just as much - maybe even more - value for UA teams? 

Monetization is what makes UA viable, and UA is what makes monetization possible; nothing is happening in a silo. So we’re definitely keen to expand oolo into the UA space. And I’m proud to say we’ve just released our flagship UA product.

Our monetization product has become an essential part of operations for many of the top game developers and publishers globally. Our mindset entering the UA space has been to bring impactful tools already enjoyed on the other side of the fence. Quickly though we began to realize that what we’re working on is really much bigger than that. 

If you look at the average day of the UA and Growth managers, an awful lot of time is spent looking at BI charts and trawling through Network UIs — systematically digging deeper and deeper into the data. In this respect, the industry’s still crawling. Our aim is to get growth teams running. 

When advertisers experience oolo’s power to streamline tasks and push for greater scale and profitability, there will be no going back.

The launch of a new UA product is obviously a big deal for oolo. Why do you think it also represents a significant development  for the industry? 

I think there has been a certain amount of backlash to the term ‘automation’, especially in a challenging market where many people are worried about job security. But the fact of the matter is that solutions like oolo are power tools in the hands of experts; we magnify and amplify existing capabilities and create breathing room for UA managers to focus on some of the more exciting, strategic and interesting areas of their growth. 

Automation tools are here to better empower people and processes, not displace them. People get that. The reception we’ve received to our monetization product — as well as to the beta we ran for our UA product — speaks volumes. I think it’s proof positive of the fact that there is real frustration out there that’s too often overlooked. We think it’s awesome to be one of the driving forces of this next wave of business transformation.

Can you walk me through a use case of how your anomaly detection and smart alerting would be used by UA?

To start the day, you will receive a notification that tells you how many issues oolo’s found. Normally, this will happen around the time you're preparing your morning coffee. 

When you click through to the dashboard, you will be greeted by a display of the day’s monitoring funnel: the number of data sets scanned > anomalies detected > incidents grouped > and alerts issued. The display will direct you to your ‘inbox’, which is the section of oolo that holds all of the things requiring your attention. I like to call this ‘The To-Do List 2.0’. 

Before you even start your day, oolo has already scanned all your data and compared it to the system’s predictions. This surfaces all data anomalies. But because not all data anomalies represent real problems or opportunities, the system takes its analysis a step further. 

oolo understands normal seasonality and won’t trigger false alerts, and if an anomaly is of low significance, or is inactionable, it is filtered out. Similarly, different anomalies that extend from the same underlying issues are bundled together to produce a single coherent story. The idea is to distill all insights down to a handful of crucial alerts. 

Whether it be a sudden spike in D7 ROAS, or a dramatic decline in install volumes coming from an ad network partner, oolo will drill into the data and find the exact source, creative, and geo that is causing the anomaly in your business — surfacing detailed charts that allow you to see and explore every metric. Alongside each alert, you’ll also find follow up recommendations. Then all that’s left to do is to act.

As interesting as the use case you just described is, you’re not the only vendor promising that type of functionality. How is oolo different from its competitors?

We fill a unique position in the market in that we live at the intersection of AI and Growth ops. Let me explain. 

There are vendors who build solutions for growth teams — UA and Monetization — and really understand the work, what it requires, and where there are gaps. And they go about building tools to fit those needs like a glove. Then there are vendors who build smart solutions — solutions that are able to learn and able to process insane amounts of information at incredible speed. 

Outside of oolo, there aren’t really any vendors doing both. And that’s a distinction that makes a very big difference. 

Without the deep context-awareness and operational know-how, the technology can be awkward to use. You’ll try to bend it to your needs, but more often than not, it’ll work the other way around. You’ll have to work with two separate vocabularies that don’t quite translate one-to-one. The system will exist as something outside of your normal workflows and, even worse, it will produce insights more suitable for a data scientist than for Growth professional. 

On the flip side though, without that smart technology, even if the solution is designed with a perfect understanding of your business, it just won’t be able to cut deep enough when it comes to helping you quickly and intelligently move through data at scale. It can help you be more organized, and more surgical, but it still leaves you on your own when it comes to catching issues and making sense of things.

oolo is not a mass-market solution. Nor is it a simple workflow management suite or data visualization dashboard. It is the context-awareness, operational backup, and process automation that app businesses need to maximize the impact of their time and talent.  

The purview of the monetization manager is expanding and it’s becoming a much more collaborative role. With many companies pushing for a closer working relationship between monetization and UA, how do you see this playing out in practice?

I think it is a challenge, it is a different language, culture and overall mindset between these 2 teams, but it is a worthwhile endeavour. Companies that can find the codes to connect the information of these 2 teams will be the ones that survive and thrive in this fast-paced and dynamic market. 

At oolo, we try not to get carried away thinking about all the possibilities. Instead we’re focused on building our technology and business in a way that is smart and adaptive — so that we can be responsive to the changing needs of our customers. I think it’ll probably be obvious to anyone reading this that when our customers connect monetization and UA data, they receive a newfound clarity. It’s suddenly much easier for each side to see and really appreciate how they are impacting the other side of the business. 

With that setup, it doesn’t take long for these teams to start asking the right questions and begin operating in a more synergistic and complementary manner. In this sense, we hope that we can serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone for our users — helping them understand each other and unlock the business’ full potential.

What’s next for oolo?

World domination, of course. But seriously, I think as time passes and daily data reviews become less and less viable through manual means, more and more businesses will turn to oolo. We’re offering something that you can’t really get anywhere else. Which is why I think we’ll become an industry standard sooner or later. Hopefully sooner. 

With Monetization and UA under our belt, we’re now starting to think more in terms of the ‘Product’. I think eventually we’ll grow the solution to the point that it touches all the non-dev teams in an app company.  And, of course, as we grow we’ll continue to deepen and perfect all our existing products — releasing and refining features — to give app teams a new level of control for a fraction of the effort

By John Speakman for Gamesforum