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12 tactics from Shireen Khi
Level Up Your App Marketing: Measurement, Brand-Building, and Taking Risks
Watch the full episode“For me Performance Marketing doesn't go without the brand. You will catch some low-hanging fruit, you'll activate two to three acquisition channels and you will see indeed users coming in and they will be instantly profitable — but you won't go very far with that.”
Performance Marketing Always Hits a Ceiling — Brand Is the Only Way Through
Performance marketing yields fast, measurable wins early on, but every channel eventually saturates and CPAs climb. Shireen Khi at Deezer argues the only way to keep scaling is to invest in brand: brand awareness fills the top of funnel so performance campaigns have warm audiences to convert. Without brand investment, you're fighting over the same shrinking pool of high-intent users who already knew you.
“Performance marketing does only amplify what has already started way earlier in the funnel. Conversion campaigns only amplify what exists already — they don't create anything as such.”
Performance Marketing Only Amplifies Existing Demand — It Creates Nothing
Incrementality testing at Deezer confirmed a counterintuitive truth: turning off upper-funnel campaigns made performance campaigns collapse, not just slow down. The implication is that every conversion ad, retargeting pixel, and search campaign depends on prior brand exposure to do its job. Invest in brand first, then let performance harvest what brand planted.
“All the campaigns that we do that are more a performance-like campaign optimizing on installs — we knew that it had an impact that was not so easy to measure on our performance campaign but we did not imagine how much. It really confirmed the absolute necessity to keep investing on upper funnel campaigns even though they won't have short-term impact.”
Incrementality Tests Revealed Upper Funnel Had Far More Impact Than Assumed
Deezer ran geolift tests — shutting down specific regions — to measure the true contribution of upper-funnel campaigns to paid subscriptions. The results validated assumptions but at a much larger magnitude than expected. Upper-funnel spend was generating significantly more downstream conversions than last-click attribution credited it with, a common blind spot for apps relying solely on MMP data.
“Every quarter every semester we ask a panel of our audience: does Deezer know music, does Deezer understand me, do I feel close to Deezer — and we especially focus on the paid consideration part. What's actually reliable is that we follow the trend. Maybe it does not measure super precisely the actual level but what we want to see is an upward trend.”
Measure Brand with Paid Consideration Trends, Not Point-in-Time Surveys
Brand measurement at Deezer relies on recurring quantitative panels that track paid consideration — not downloads or impressions. The key metric is directional trend, not absolute score, because the methodology is inherently imprecise. Combine these quarterly panels with incrementality tests and media mix modeling to triangulate whether brand investment is moving the needle on subscription intent.
“For me now measurement is really about multiplying the sources of truth. You have to use different methodologies, different techniques to measure different KPIs and make sure that they all align and they all point to the same conclusions — that you're going in the right direction.”
Multiple Sources of Truth Beat Single-Channel Attribution Every Time
Post-privacy, no single attribution model is reliable. Deezer layers last-click MMP data, multi-touch attribution, incrementality geo-tests, brand lift studies, and media mix modeling — then looks for convergence across all signals. If only one tool shows a lift, it's noise. When three or four tools independently point the same direction, it's a real insight worth acting on.
“When we do the math at the end of the year and we look at everything we tried — all the biggest fails versus all the biggest wins — what we see is that wins always compensate for fails. I don't like to brag but we did improve our LTV/CAC — we more than doubled it in two years while scaling up on volumes at the same time.”
Test Culture: Wins Always Compensate for Fails — Deezer Doubled LTV/CAC While Scaling
Deezer's performance marketing team doubled their LTV/CAC ratio while simultaneously growing volume — primarily by running more tests. The key mental model: evaluate tests in aggregate across the full year, not in isolation. An individual failed test that spent $30K is not a $30K loss; it's a learning that informs a future test that may return $300K in efficiency gains. Fear of failure at the test level kills the portfolio.
“We ABC tested these pages against each other and none of the alternative versions won against the control version. And so yes, that's the moment that we all agreed to listen to our gut feeling — the control version was not conveying the messages that we wanted to convey and was not user-friendly at all. We implemented the branded version, and a few weeks after we saw positive results.”
When Every A/B Variant Loses, Ship the One That Serves the User Best
Deezer redesigned their logged-out homepage and ran a three-way A/B test — none of the new variants beat the control statistically. Rather than staying put, the team listened to a qualitative signal: the existing page didn't represent the brand or serve users well. They shipped the branded variant anyway. Within weeks, it outperformed the old control. Data tests can fail to detect real improvements, especially for brand-driven UX changes that take time to compound.
“Nobody really believed that the purple heart would be the winning version because it was so disruptive — maybe looking more like a dating app. But it came out of the studies as the winning version by far, on all target audiences. And I believe strongly that it really helped my performance campaigns to be again more profitable.”
User-Tested Logo Change Improved Performance Ad Efficiency
Deezer changed its logo from a technical equalizer graphic to a purple heart after user research: they asked panels to draw the old logo from memory, then tested new versions. The study pointed to the emotional heart — not the tech-signals equalizer. Post-launch, ad creative using the new brand identity became measurably more efficient. User-centric brand decisions don't just improve perception; they compound through every downstream marketing touchpoint.
“We went very far into shutting down all the features and trying to frustrate a lot of users — and you know, in the end, degrading the user experience actually doesn't provide any good outcome. Because all what you do is showing your free users that your product is absolutely not satisfying on a free basis — and they just leave and use another service.”
Degrading the Free Experience Just Shows Users the Product Is Unsatisfying
Deezer tried converting freemium users by making the free tier worse — removing features, adding friction. The result: users left for Spotify rather than upgrading. The lesson: free-tier degradation signals that the product has no inherent value without payment, which destroys trust. The better path is to make the paid tier so compelling that users want to upgrade, while keeping the free tier useful enough to retain and evangelize.
“I do believe that having to be profitable and having strong constraints actually makes us more efficient and more — well, smarter basically. Our ambition is really to become one of the first to be profitable in the music industry.”
Being Small Forces Efficiency — Profitable Constraints Beat Unlimited Budget
Deezer competes against Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and YouTube Music — all backed by companies where music streaming profitability is irrelevant. Rather than treating budget constraints as a handicap, Shireen Khi frames them as a forcing function for sharper decisions: every test must justify itself, every channel must be earned. Smaller apps that must be profitable from day one often build better marketing muscle than well-funded competitors.
“For us partnering means an extended reach — and the mathematics are positive for us. For our partners, bringing music to their clients brings emotional connection and helps them connect better with younger target audiences. It's really about finding a win-win relationship.”
Bundles Are a Retention Tool, Not Just a Discount — They Raise the Floor
Deezer built distribution through hardware and retail bundle partnerships — Sonos in the US, Mercado Libre in Latin America — treating each bundle as a retention mechanism, not a revenue discount. Users bundled into a service they already pay for churn far less than direct subscribers. For smaller apps, the same principle applies: embedding into platforms users already pay for converts acquisition economics and improves long-term retention simultaneously.
“The concept behind it is that through incrementality testing you are able to calculate sort of a score between what you actually see as direct tracked data and what was more hidden — maybe you over-attribute to search and under-attribute to social ads that come earlier in the funnel. You use that score to modify your statistic model.”
Media Mix Modeling Needs Incrementality Calibration to Be Actionable
Raw media mix models have a known flaw: they assume a static baseline and can't fully account for cross-channel influence. Deezer's approach is to use incrementality tests — geolift, conversion lift, brand lift — to calculate adjustment scores for each channel, then apply those scores to the MMM. The result is a calibrated model that better reflects the true contribution of upper-funnel spend on final conversion events.