How INCRMNTAL is reinventing Marketing Measurement for the privacy era, with CEO Maor Sadra

CEO Maor Sadra, with over two decades of experience in ad tech, is leading this transformation. Having witnessed the industry’s challenges firsthand during his tenure at Applift, he recognized the need for a fundamental shift in how marketing effectiveness is measured and understood. We discuss his vision in this exclusive interview.

My path in adtech started over 10 years before starting AppLift, but my time at Applift was transformative, joining Applift as VP Strategic Development. What made this role unique was that it didn’t have a strict definition – I had to figure it out. When I joined, I brought more ad tech experience than most of the company combined, which helped me identify opportunities others might have missed. We were pioneers in optimization when everyone else was focused on cost per install (CPI). While Applift’s strength was primarily in operations rather than technology, we managed to drive significant growth.

The journey to INCRMNTAL really represents the sum of my career experiences. I was always fascinated, and sometimes frustrated, by marketing measurement. While I have immense respect for Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) and existing measurement solutions, they were all operating in absolute terms with deterministic attribution. The industry’s struggles with attribution fraud in 2016-2018 really highlighted the flaws in this approach.

Initially, I was actually more interested in exploring multi-touch attribution with first-party data about users, including location and proximity data. But Apple’s impending privacy changes made it clear this wasn’t the future. The pivotal moment came at a Luma conference in 2019, where I saw a presentation about Amazon advertising’s closed environment and true incremental measurement. That’s when it became obvious that incrementality was the answer, but my co-founder Moti Tal and I needed a completely different methodology from traditional planned experiments.

When we started pitching to investors, everyone told us we were crazy. They’d say, “MMPs cover attribution.” We kept explaining that Apple might make changes that would disrupt everything in measurement, but investors were skeptical. Then Apple did exactly what we predicted, and we closed our fundraising within two weeks. This timing, while fortunate, validated our vision for a new approach to measurement.

We’ve developed an always-on incrementality platform that provides continuous insights rather than just test results. Our methodology uses causal time series and causal discovery, leveraging AI and reinforcement learning. The platform tells you immediately if a channel is performing well, if a campaign is adding value, or if a bid increase is effective. It’s not a testing platform – it’s an insights platform that gives you actionable information in real time.

Our platform allows for historical validation – you can go back to September and validate any major changes or tests you conducted. While some customers run tests specifically to validate our platform, many find that examining past performance is enough to build confidence in our methodology. Sometimes customers will use a test market, for instance any country which isn’t in their top 5 size wise, and follow our platform’s recommendations exclusively to verify the results.

The trust factor really accelerated once we started gaining traction with sophisticated clients. When you have companies like Supercell, Playtika, Sega, TaxFix, eToro, and Binance trusting your platform, it creates a strong foundation. These companies, particularly in gaming and fintech, are extremely sophisticated in their marketing technology stacks.

Gaming companies operate on thin margins, and performance marketing is in their DNA. They constantly need to optimize for efficiency, and incrementality is fundamentally about efficiency. The privacy changes, particularly ATT, have significantly impacted their margins, making efficiency even more crucial.

Fintech companies, on the other hand, face unique cross-platform challenges. They can’t rely on a single measurement solution because MMPs focus on mobile but miss web activity, and web analytics don’t capture mobile effectively. These companies also invest in TV, billboards, and other channels that aren’t measurable through digital attribution. While Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) can help, it’s not useful for day-to-day operations.

About 3% of our users are highly sophisticated data scientists who want to understand everything about the modeling. We invest roughly 30% of our technical resources in serving these power users – showing them the modeling, helping them validate results, and providing model explainability. This investment is crucial because these sophisticated users help validate our approach for everyone else.

The remaining 97% of users want functional, straightforward insights. They need clear tables showing how much they spent on each channel and what incremental results they achieved. While we’ve shifted our resource allocation to better serve this majority, having those demanding technical users early on helped us build a more robust and trustworthy platform.

We were seeing strong inbound interest even before we had a product. During our first year of building, we had over a thousand deck conversations – just discussing our vision and approach. When SEGA reached out and became an early customer, that was a major validation point. They’ve been with us for almost three years now, and having a brand of that caliber trust us early on was a significant milestone.

Marketing and thought leadership have been far more important to us than sales. We found that getting our opinions out there, publishing predictions, and claiming a position of thought leadership drove significant attention. It’s similar to what the early MMPs did in 2012-2013 – companies like AppsFlyer and Adjust focused heavily on education, white papers, and industry events. While we’ll eventually need to invest more in sales, there’s substantial growth potential through the right marketing approach.

Our initial product could measure individual changes with bulletproof accuracy, but it wasn’t very functional for day-to-day use. Imagine having hundreds of campaign-level changes across multiple channels and countries – while you could measure each change precisely, it wasn’t practical for users. We had to evolve the product into something that speaks the user’s language: simple tables showing spend, incremental results, and marginal results.

This evolution required significant investment in engineering and data science. Unlike building a DSP where you might have a standard recipe to follow, we had to create everything from scratch. Our focus was on making the platform autonomous and scalable – we didn’t want to end up with a seven-week modeling calibration process for each new customer. Instead, we developed a system that self-calibrates based on 12 months of historical data.

We’re definitely an enabler. Apple was the disruptor – they created the massive change in privacy that disrupted the entire measurement landscape. We’re enabling the transformation that needed to happen in response to that disruption. If we do nothing different, we’ll still grow because the market is growing and education is being driven by Apple’s privacy changes. Our role is to enable companies to adapt and thrive in this new reality.

One significant trend I’m predicting for 2025 is the rise of modeled conversions. Previously, advertising platforms relied on attribution providers like AppsFlyer to tell them how many conversions they generated. With Apple’s ATT and SKAdNetwork providing only aggregate campaign-level data, platforms started modeling conversions using their first-party data. Meta, Google, TikTok, and especially Applovin have seen tremendous success with this approach – Applovin’s growth from a $10 billion to over $100 billion company demonstrates the power of this shift through their algorithm Axon 2.0.

We expect more platforms like Digital Turbine, Smadex, and other demand-side platforms to follow suit, effectively reducing the role of MMPs. However, there’s a critical issue: when you sum up how many conversions each platform claims they’ve generated, it often exceeds 100% of actual results. This creates a clear need for overarching technology that optimizes toward true value.

I predict MMPs won’t face an existential crisis – they’re evolving from mobile measurement to becoming comprehensive mobile platforms. AppsFlyer, maintaining its 75% market share, and Singular as the challenger brand, are both well-positioned. While Adjust’s recent layoffs were inevitable following their acquisition by an ad platform seeking efficiency, I don’t foresee any MMPs closing or going bankrupt.

These companies are expanding beyond their core measurement offering into areas like publishing and creative optimization. It’s similar to how Deloitte and McKinsey, primarily consulting companies, now offer MMM services to their Fortune 100 clients. When you have a strong customer base and trusted relationships, there are natural opportunities to expand your services.

I don’t see Google’s Privacy Sandbox happening in 2025. Google has other pressing issues to address, and I believe they’ll either maintain the status quo or follow Apple’s opt-in approach. Additionally, while this is more speculative, I anticipate a major App Store redesign in 2025, given that we haven’t seen significant changes since 2018.

Platforms will increasingly accept aggregated signals for directional optimization. If our platform indicates a 30% incrementality rate, they can recalibrate their targeting logic to improve that performance. It’s about alignment of interests – platforms want to generate actual incremental value for advertisers, but they currently lack visibility into whether they’re generating incremental results or cannibalizing existing conversions.

In the retail media space, we’re seeing significant growth with platforms emerging from companies like Walmart, Deliveroo, Uber, and various incentivized platforms like Fluent and ironSource’s aura network. The rise of retail media networks, incentivized platforms, micro-influencers, and AI influencers demonstrates how privacy changes have created new opportunities. While it’s hard to pick a single winner, we expect to see multiple successful players emerge in this space.

Scott Galloway’s work, particularly “The Algebra of Happiness,” has been hugely influential. In fact, INCRMNTAL was partly born out of listening to his lecture in New York. Even my personal investment strategy follows his recommendations, which has worked well for me. It shows how powerful the right insights can be at the right time.

If you’re ambitious, prepare to work intensively. As Scott Galloway says, I’m “an overnight success fourty years in the making.” But I’ve learned something important – there actually is enough time. While we often say life is short, you do have time to improve your situation and make changes, even if you’re currently in a difficult place.

The key is finding what makes you happy and being grateful for it while continuing to push forward. When you get advice from successful people, remember it’s like them sharing their winning lottery numbers – it might not work the same way for you. Everyone needs to figure out their own path. What matters is staying grateful while pursuing growth – that’s been fundamental to building sustainable success.