Performance marketing has consolidated around a handful of platforms. Google, Meta, and TikTok dominate acquisition budgets for most teams, their interfaces woven into internal workflows to the point where many businesses have built their entire growth operations around them. The problem is that as these walled gardens saturate, costs rise and differentiation becomes harder to achieve.
At Business of Apps Berlin 2025, Omri Argaman, Co-Founder and CMO at Zoomd, made the case for looking elsewhere. Zoomd helps brands run user acquisition campaigns outside the dominant platforms — across programmatic exchanges, OEM placements, affiliate networks, and regionally strong social channels, brought together into a single execution layer. The logic is simple: when the largest ecosystems get expensive, you need somewhere else to go.
Beyond the familiar
The appeal of the major platforms is largely psychological. Teams know how to build campaigns there, how to read the signals, how to push toward an objective. That familiarity makes everything feel lower-risk.
Outside those environments, execution is harder and oversight demands are higher. But the audience supply is still there. Device manufacturers, programmatic exchanges, affiliate networks, and regional social platforms all aggregate users at real scale.
The constraint isn’t reach — it’s the integration and management complexity that comes with operating across fragmented channels. For advertisers on performance contracts, where spend has to justify itself against outcomes, that complexity is a solvable operational problem rather than a reason to stay put.
Where you operate determines what works
Acquisition performance varies enormously by region, shaped by payment infrastructure, regulation, and how mature a given category is in a given market. And these aren’t simply surface-level differences that a global playbook can smooth over.
In Latin America, for example, fintech growth is driven by structural gaps in banking. In Mexico, multiple digital wallets compete at scale because large parts of the population have never had meaningful access to traditional financial services. The demand is infrastructural, existing independently of any marketing cycle.
In the US, regulation shapes category economics in ways that are easy to underestimate. Certain social casino formats have lost momentum while sweepstakes-based formats have grown. Short-form drama subscription apps have also gained ground, building recurring revenue around episodic mobile viewing. What works in one market often reflects conditions that simply don’t exist somewhere else.
App growth beyond Meta, Google, TikTok
Source: Business of Apps via YouTube
AI as execution infrastructure
Artificial intelligence is changing performance marketing at the operational level rather than the strategic one. Automation handles media buying across channels at volumes that would otherwise require much larger teams. Predictive systems can model performance ranges before capital is fully committed, changing how scaling decisions are made. Creative generation tools speed up asset production on platforms where fatigue sets in within days.
For teams managing multi-million-dollar monthly budgets, the practical effect is expanded bandwidth. More campaigns running simultaneously, more tests in flight, more granular alignment between creative variants and audience segments. The strategy doesn’t change, but the capacity to execute it does.
New inventory, new contexts
Retail and platform media are starting to move into app install advertising. Amazon and Microsoft are building install-focused products. Twitch has introduced app install formats for iOS. These platforms come with something the open web largely lacks: authenticated users and first-party behavioural data at scale.
Their entry into direct response acquisition reflects a broader convergence between commerce, entertainment, and performance advertising, and for advertisers, it opens up inventory tied to specific behavioural contexts rather than broad audience targeting. Whether it fits a given strategy depends on category and market, but the direction is clear.
Planning around attention
Global events compress and redirect attention in ways that distort normal acquisition economics. The FIFA World Cup — spanning three host countries and an extended competition window — defines the whole year around it, for example, not just the weeks of the tournament itself.
For brands without official sponsorship, the opportunity lies in preparation. Building targetable audiences ahead of peak periods reduces dependence on inventory that gets expensive fast when demand spikes. The brands that benefit most from these windows are usually the ones who started planning before they felt urgent.
The system matters more than the channel
App acquisition is still outcome-driven. What’s changed is the environment around it — dominant platforms concentrating demand, regional conditions fragmenting opportunity, creative cycles compressing, new inventory formats emerging from unexpected directions.
Growth that holds up over time tends to come from teams that have built systems capable of handling that complexity: integrating fragmented supply, adapting to local constraints, deploying automation where it adds capacity, and planning ahead of the moments when everyone else is reacting.
Watch the full video to discover all of Omri’s insights. You can also watch all episodes of App Talks here.
