Bullish AppLovin boss Adam Foroughi has suggested the firm could run a Super Bowl as it expands beyond mobile game UA.
Buoyed by blockbuster revenue and profitability in recent years, AppLovin’s share price has risen from around $85 in mid 2024 to pass the $600 mark at the end of trading yesterday. It was also announced earlier this month that AppLovin would be included in the S&P 500.
And a large part of the buzz around the company is due to its efforts to bring its adtech to a broader set of advertisers, ones outside mobile gaming. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology conference last week, Foroughi said:
“The way we look at the business in the future is we took 13 years perfecting a product in a niche market, the gaming market. It turned out it was economically a pretty big market, but broadly speaking, in economic terms, the gaming dollar spent versus the total TAM in the economy is not that big. Now we’re about to tap into the whole world.”
Foroughi later claimed that AppLovin’s ad platform is “going to create millions of jobs” for the businesses that use it due to the potency of its model. He also namechecked several rivals, claiming that they are also benefitting from AppLovin’s rampant growth.
“You see other competitors, like Unity, Liftoff, Moloco, Mobvista…all these companies are growing 30% plus,” continued Foroughi. “At the same time, we’re huge and we’re growing 70% plus. And so you’ve got a company that’s the ‘whale’ in the market going that fast. If it was truly constructed like these other ecosystems, you would think that the other companies should be suffering, but they’re not.”
Foroughi added later: “We’re the market and the lead market maker…we fuelled growth in the economy. Every time growth happens around us, we grow with it, and that’s a fantastic equation to sit on top of.”
As it offers its services beyond mobile gaming companies, AppLovin intends to market its services much more aggressively, Foroughi continued.
“I fundamentally believe we can run a Super Bowl ad in a couple years, if we’re doing a really good job as a product, and serve it to the audience that watches the Super Bowl, which is going to be inclusive of a whole bunch of small business owners and employees of other businesses who can benefit from a platform like us and may not be getting that benefit because they haven’t heard of it yet,” he said.
“If you start seeing Axon ads promoting the Axon platform everywhere out there, that’s going to catalyse even more growth, because we’re really good at performance marketing.”
Mobile players will likely start to see more non-gaming ads in their games as part of this shift, he added. “If the user is telling us 99% of time ‘we like the game we’re playing, stop showing me games’, we’ve done a disservice to our technology on the business side,” he said.
“So where did we go? Let’s prove that we can make it work across other industries, transactional industries, where we’re not showing the user another game, we’re recommending them products that they can go transact on and then come right back to the game that they were playing.”
