Liftoff CEO on the IPO rebound, AppLovin comparisons, and why mobile apps remain an AI growth story

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On the morning Liftoff Mobile finally hit the public markets and raised $437 million, CEO Jeremy Bondy sat down with Digiday to explain why the company, backed by a private equity firm Blackstone, decided to make its initial public offering now and how he intends to thrive as a Nasdaq-listed entity.

Earlier this year, Liftoff walked away from a hotly received roadshow after markets suffered their “SaaS-apocalypse” wobble, sending investors scrambling to triage their portfolios rather than back new listings.

Since then, Liftoff has notched a “tenth consecutive quarter of growth,” markets have stabilized, and investors have started to regain confidence, with Bondy arguing that now is the window the company has been waiting for — even if the June raise was short of its initial ambitions.

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Future of Marketing Briefing: How agencies are betting on entertainment to survive

Chris Hassell launched Ralph in 2010 wanting to make cool things and get paid for it. Fifteen years of running an independent shop in advertising made that harder than it sounds. Now he thinks he’s found a way through.

The way Hassell sees it, entertainment is the one part of the creative business that can’t be procured, optimized or automated. You can’t put a kids’ TV show through a procurement process the way you can a display campaign. You can’t performance-market your way to a hit. And whatever AI does to production costs, it can’t generate the rights, the talent relationships or the distribution that a genuine entertainment property requires.

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