Navigating the Current Mobile Market: Lessons From Nestle-Purina and Mistplay

TL;DR: Key points:

1. Today’s top mobile brands seek to acquire and retain high-value users over just installs.
2. Incrementality testing is critical to evaluating ad channel performance.
3. Ad creative is one of two controllable levers, with leading app marketers running structured tests and partnering with trusted platforms to build and refine creatives that drive measurable outcomes.

Growth at all costs is out. Sustainable growth is in. That was the running theme expressed by mobile leaders from Nestle-Purina and Mistplay at our MAU 2025 session “Exploring Today’s Mobile Moment,” hosted by Moloco’s own Beth Berger, Americas VP and GM for Moloco Ads.

In the session, we covered several topics defining today’s mobile moment, such as strategies to acquire and retain high-value users. We also explored incrementality testing frameworks and approaches to creative testing. For those who couldn’t attend MAU, we summed up all of the key insights shared by the rock star panel of mobile pros.

Prioritize high-value users

Noa Gutterman, Vice President of Acquisition at Mistplay, takes an unapologetically focused approach to measuring success. “When I started at Mistplay, I felt we needed to ruthlessly prioritize acquiring spenders to be our one north star,” Gutterman said. The north star Gutterman landed on: spender ROAS or “sROAS”, because high-value users for Mistplay are mobile game spenders. Mistplay calculates sROAS by taking the average user spend in the first 7 days and dividing by the acquisition cost.

Gutternman even developed a motto for her team, formulated around Mistplay’s sROAS north star metric. “It's not the nicest motto to say out loud,” Gutterman said. “It’s ‘AMSWSM’, which stands for ‘Acquire More Spenders Who Spend More’.” Every campaign, test, and initiative at Mistplay must ladder up to its single goal and motto, Gutterman added.

Run incrementality testing that actually informs strategy

Both speakers emphasized the importance of incrementality testing.

“If you’re not doing incrementality testing, you’re not thinking about measurement holistically,” Gutterman said. Shortly after joining Mistplay, Gutterman partnered with Moloco and other partners to build a holdout incrementality testing framework for Mistplay’s eight main regions. As part of the framework, Gutterman tests every ad channel twice a year, once when seasonality is low and once when seasonality is high.

Gutterman then combines the incrementality testing results with last-touch attribution data and self-reported user data to triangulate measurement. “Users are relatively reliable at telling you where they heard about you if you ask them soon enough after that ad impression,” Gutterman said.”

Mistplay then blends their “triangle” of data to formulate a quarterly reattribution framework. This framework provides a more accurate and realistic view of the impact of their marketing dollars across channels and regions, becoming the source of truth Gutterman’s team uses for allocating spend in the following quarter.

Diana Gilbert, Marketing Manager-Performance and Personalization at Nestle-Purina, ran an incrementality test to understand if Moloco was the channel driving downloads and registered users. The results showed that Nestle-Purina was 99% efficient, meaning nearly all of the actions in their dashboard reported to Moloco would not have happened if they weren’t spending with Moloco. “The incrementality test gave me the confidence that our advertising spend with Moloco wasn't redundant of other channels that we had in market,” Gilbert added. “Moloco wasn't cannibalizing other marketing spend. Moloco was growing our user base while steering clear of vanity metrics.”

Make creative testing a performance lever

Ad creative is one of the two controllable levers in mobile marketing that marketers have at their disposal, and Mistplay prioritizes it accordingly. As part of Mistplay’s creative strategy, Gutterman’s team organizes creative assets into themes like spicy/raunchy, educational, and family-friendly, runs monthly creative performance postmortems, and invites ad partners, especially Moloco, to develop solutions to Mistplay’s problems. “I only bring a select few partners in at that problem stage because only some know how to help me create a solution,” Gutterman said.

Nestle-Purina leverages Moloco’s creative expertise and tools to combat creative fatigue. Gilbert highlighted how Moloco seamlessly plugged into their creative workflows and developed a portfolio of fresh creatives across formats and specs based on Purina’s working design files.

Moloco’s creative support also doubles as a creative testing vehicle. “By utilizing their creative suite, Moloco can take the learnings from their platform and apply them directly to our assets,” Gilbert said. “We’re then able to understand what's working through our performance and apply those learnings directly back to our paid and owned channels.”

(Editor’s note: Quotes have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)