AppLovin's Dead Ads Fiasco
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A story about how AppLovin's personalized ad feature backfired when it showed deceased people in advertisements.
"The company AppLovin had this feature where if you're playing a game, they would show your face from someone's address book saying 'Sean's playing Candy Crush right now, tap here to play Candy Crush too.' It was a super effective ad unit - they were printing money.
But something really bad happened where the CEO of Expedia got an ad that showed his deceased wife was playing this game. Someone from his address book who had this app was shown to him, and he's like 'What the hell is this?'
When it got back to them, they had to turn it off. They did a similar experiment around location tracking, like a Life360 thing, but you have to be really careful with these data experiments where you're giving information about either yourself or others."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.