Tapjoy is a leading mobile advertising and app monetization firm whose SDK is on approximately 70,000 mobile apps that reach over 1.6 billion monthly active users. In October of 2021, the company was acquired by ironSource, a leading business platform for the app economy, for about $400 million.
Candor has worked with Tapjoy since the former’s founding in 2010. During that time, Tapjoy has had three exceptional CEOs and just as many heads of marketing — each of whom was unique but no less exceptional in their own right: Peter Dille brought a wealth of leadership, strategy and brand building; Emily Robinson was gifted with strategic vision and incredible team building skills; Lauren Baca made you feel you could accomplish the impossible.
Throughout it all, Candor has adapted to Tapjoy’s various growth stages, partnering with the company to design strategies to help it accomplish the next phase of its growth, no matter what it looked like. Here’s a rundown of some of our biggest accomplishments…
Publishing Dozens of Hard-Hitting, Data-Driven Reports
As a critical player in the fast-moving mobile advertising space, Tapjoy had a lot of data and insight to offer that helped explain how the market was evolving — and even what it might do next. Candor helped Tapjoy develop and share these insights in dozens of reports that we’ve produced over the years, some published as blog posts and others as long-form, downloadable research papers.
One of Tapjoy’s best-known reports is its Modern Mobile Gamer series, which uses a combination of 1st and 3rd-party data to describe the attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of the people playing mobile games. Ten different editions of the report have been released, each focused on a specific niche such as game developers, Gen Z, parents, and more. The reports are jam-packed with useful insights and information, while telling the story of who these audiences really are.
The reports have been downloaded thousands of times, including by important decision makers at many of the businesses that Tapjoy targets. These MQLs were then re-marketed to through email drip campaigns, helping build a solid pipeline of SQLs for the company’s business development team.
Not only that, but the reports have led to more than 125 media mentions, with Candor using its PR muscle to secure press coverage in relevant media outlets including Forbes, VentureBeat, Business Insider, AdWeek, eMarketer, ClickZ, MediaPost and many more. Headlines like “App users who engage with rewarded ads are 4.5X more likely to spend” and “Study: 82% of mobile gamers plan to make holiday purchases online, via apps” offer invaluable support to the key messages Tapjoy wants to seed in the marketplace.
Driving Thought Leadership With Thought-Provoking Commentary & Perspectives
With the mobile advertising landscape evolving at breakneck speed over the last decade, Tapjoy stepped up and became a leading voice on the most important issues affecting the industry. From privacy and consumer rights to the platform wars between Apple and Google, Tapjoy never shied away from sharing its opinions or turning the spotlight on underrepresented voices.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the “Mobile Champions” series that Candor produced for Tapjoy, in which we interviewed leading experts and influencers within the industry to get their take on the issues of the day. Whether it was Netflix’s Laura Teclemariam talking about the importance of having diverse people involved in product development or Looma Home’s Denver Rayburn describing the best DTC marketing strategies at a time when the D2C business model was first emerging, the series gave readers lots to think about, while providing Tapjoy with lots of organic traffic, social shares, and reader engagement.
We also ghostwrote a plethora of bylined articles on behalf of Tapjoy’s executives, placing articles on topics such as “The app industry’s reckoning with privacy, control, and consumer empowerment” and “How Mobile Apps Are Driving A Resurgence In Advertising Creative “ in outlets ranging from VentureBeat and AdExchanger to Forbes.
Generating Organic Traffic Through Educational, Informational SEO Posts
No inbound marketing funnel would be complete without a steady stream of high quality, organic traffic coming into the top. That’s why we published hundreds of blog posts that were educational and informational in nature, helping Tapjoy’s prospects and customers alike gain practical and actionable insights that they could immediately apply to their jobs.
What’s more, many of these articles were search optimized, helping bring in a flood of traffic from Google and other search engines. Examples include:
- What is In-App Header Bidding?
- Mobile Attribution – 4 Best Practices Every Mobile Marketer Should Know
- Diversify Your Customer Acquisition Plan With These 4 Tips
- Brand Research: A Primer for Marketers
- Cost Per Acquisition: CPA Marketing Explained
A True Partnership
From Tapjoy’s early years as a startup to its later years as a global organization, recognized leader in its space, and now part of a public company, Candor has been there every step of the way.
As Lauren Baca, the former head of marketing at Tapjoy and now the senior director, U.S. marketing at ironSource, explains, “Candor has been a crucial partner of ours for more than a decade now, and I can honestly say that they’re a big reason for our success. The content they produce is always top-notch and their work is largely responsible for all of the organic traffic, visibility, and inbound leads that have fueled our growth over the years.”