Brands in Apps: The Future of Advertising Is in Your Hands
Most media plans were built for a world that no longer exists. 68% of Google searches now end without a click. Publishers are reporting web traffic declines of 20–30%, and in some cases far worse. TV viewership has fallen more than 40% in a decade, and CTV supply cannot absorb what’s left.
So where did audiences go, and where should brand budgets follow?
Increasingly, the answer is apps: on the phone in your hand and on the screen in your living room. But the infrastructure needed to make brand demand work inside apps has lagged behind the audience shift and CTV is still too often bought as a black box.
At Advertising Week New York, LoopMe Chief Revenue Officer Michael Scott was joined by Ashley Wheeler, SVP of DV+ Platform Revenue at Magnite, to explore this gap from both sides — the brands trying to buy this reach and the publishers trying to sell it — and what has to change for app inventory to become a core brand channel rather than a test line.
How publishers are navigating the shift
Ashley described a continuum rather than a single response to the decline in web traffic: at one end, established publishers who already have an app footprint are starting to think about monetization and how to enhance their tech stack; at the other end, premium brands whose audiences once found them through search are now building apps to reduce friction and own the relationship with their users.
Non-traditional app publishers such as commerce platforms are entering the space using Chartboost Direct, LoopMe’s brand SDK for in-app environments.
Why in-app is so effective
The difference starts with mindset. When someone visits an app, they are actively going to a destination, as opposed to ending up there as part of a search, and this inherently means that users are more engaged.
Publishers also have more freedom with apps. On the open web, sites are often optimized as much for search engines as for users, but this constraint does not exist for apps, so user experience is the focus. For brands, that means more immersive formats, full-screen high-impact units and strong viewability, in a less cluttered environment.
Targeting is richer too. Publishers get far more device-level data and control over the experience, so brands can layer new signals on top of the audience and contextual approaches they already use. As Ashley put it, targeting can use the same playbook as the open web — or a better, more granular one.
It’s important to remember that ‘in-app’ includes CTV as well as mobile. Michael framed mobile and CTV as one app audience rather than two separate channels, and Ashley agreed: it’s the same person with the same purchasing power, and their attention is divided, so brands need to reach them across both screens, with the right message at the right time.
The gaming opportunity
Mobile gaming is often written off due to stereotypes about what a ‘gamer’ looks like. To dispel this myth, Michael asked the room who had played a game on their phone in the past week. A lot of hands went up, demonstrating that mobile gaming is for everyone.
Another reason gaming has a bad reputation, Ashley argued, is that it has historically been judged as a performance channel optimized for clicks.
Brand demand can help change that. Ashley’s view is that brands moving into apps have the chance to revitalize the ecosystem, because brands do not want a high click-through rate at the expense of upsetting their users. Even gaming publishers that have historically leaned on performance demand are starting to see that a high performance CPM might not be as valuable as a brand CPM, which looks lower but has a better lifetime value.
Both Ashley and Michael later went on to name gaming as the most underrated app environment for brands.
So what needs to change?
In Ashley’s view, brands’ hesitations around in-app advertising can be bucketed into three categories:
Brand safety: ‘Safe’ means something broader than the usual definition. It includes avoiding apps that serve a new ad every few seconds, or that trap users in hard-to-escape ad experiences. This is where curation plays a role, as it means knowing what the ad experience actually is, not only that the environment is reputable.
Targetability: Apps offer targeting that goes beyond what many brands expect, from publisher first-party data to audience segments that can be activated across environments. The opportunity is to show buyers what’s available and let them choose what fits their goals. This applies to CTV too. Michael raised the idea that CTV is often bought as a black box, but Ashley pushed back: genre-level content signals, audiences and supply chain transparency all exist today.
Measurement: The industry has to move beyond click-through rate, and beyond treating CPM as the only measure of value. Ashley believes that focus on brand outcomes, especially mid-funnel metrics, would be better for consumers, developers, and brands alike.
Ashley offered practical advice for marketers ready to act:
- Review where your app spend currently goes
- Demand full app transparency
- Look beyond CTR, CPM, and VCR
- Work with your partners on curation, targetability, and measurement
Conclusion
Michael shared three key takeaways on why app inventory should become a core brand channel:
- The open web’s decline is structural: the audience has moved and it isn’t coming back.
- That audience has moved into mobile and CTV apps. It’s where the attention is higher, where the experience is way more immersive and where reach is incremental.
- Advertisers can now measure and optimize brand impact in-app while the campaign runs.
