Justin Warshavsky

Meet Justin Warshavsky, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at DraftKings. He focuses on innovative approaches to creative and mobile advertising, ensuring the brand stays ahead in a competitive market. Justin’s expertise lies in identifying effective programmatic channels and tactics, optimizing ad performance, and influencing consumer behavior through strategic in-app advertising. His commitment to data-driven decision-making and creative excellence makes him a key player in DraftKings’ growth initiatives.​

Justin and Julia Eggiman are a Mobile Heroes duo from DraftKings, each bringing unique insights to drive performance marketing success.

DraftKings is a well-known name, but how would you explain its offerings to someone unfamiliar with them?

DraftKings is a leading digital entertainment brand specializing in online sports betting, daily fantasy sports, and casino games.

What does your typical day look like at DraftKings?

A typical day involves collaborating with stakeholders across paid digital, analytics, creative, and integrated marketing to make sure we’re executing effectively in the moment, while also staying proactive and aligned for the next major sports tentpole.

Events like UFC or Super Bowl Sunday are important for any sports betting app. How do you approach your campaign strategy around these events? Do you have any advice for marketers about making holidays or special events work? 

Major sporting events like UFC or Super Bowl are pivotal moments for any sports betting app, and we approach them with a carefully crafted, data-driven strategy. One key lesson we’ve learned is that you always have less time than you think to ensure everything runs flawlessly. That’s why we start planning well in advance, building out creative, offers, and media plans early, while also maintaining the flexibility to pivot quickly if external factors change.

I advise marketers to treat these moments as unique, not just larger-scale versions of their day-to-day efforts. Focus on relevance, timing, and execution. The more seamlessly you can align your messaging and offers with the cultural and emotional tone of the event, the better your chances of cutting through the noise and driving meaningful engagement.

What challenges do you face regarding attribution? How do you approach tackling them? 

One of the biggest challenges with attribution is that there’s no single source of truth. Accurately understanding marketing performance requires triangulating across multiple data points, such as SKAN, MMM, MTA, and incrementality testing. Each methodology has its strengths and limitations, so the key is combining them to form a more holistic view. At DraftKings, I’m fortunate to work with a strong analytics team that enables marketers to make informed, data-driven decisions about where to invest to drive true incremental impact for the business.

Without device IDs on iOS, what are your thoughts on the future of mobile attribution?

The loss of device IDs on iOS has reshaped mobile attribution and encouraged smarter, more privacy-conscious approaches. Moving forward, I think incrementality testing will be crucial. It allows us to understand the true impact of our campaigns without relying on 1:1 user tracking.

We’re also embracing a mix of attribution models to triangulate performance across platforms. No single model gives the whole picture anymore, so it’s about layering insights and testing rigorously to understand what’s truly driving growth.

The future of mobile attribution will be less about precision at the individual level and more about actionable, aggregated insights that still empower performance-driven decisions.

There’s a lot to balance running creative for a DraftKings app. Can you describe your creative strategy? What is your approach to creative production and testing? 

Since our company ebbs and flows with the sports calendar, staying relevant with our creative is critical. We prioritize personalization, making sure each piece of creative speaks directly to the specific cohort we’re trying to reach at any given time.

Our approach is all about diversity. We run a healthy mix of display, video, dynamic, and interactive ads, which gives us the flexibility to meet users across different touchpoints and moments. We’ve also invested heavily in UGC and influencer content, which has been a major driver in keeping us connected with our core demographic. It brings authenticity and relatability that traditional creative can’t always deliver.

By staying agile and leaning into a wide range of formats and voices, we keep our creative fresh, relevant, and high-performing throughout the sports cycle.

What are the biggest challenges you face in your role? 

With so much data available today, one of the biggest challenges is aligning which metrics truly matter and are worth acting on. Not taking data at face value is critical — context is everything. You need to understand the source, question the narrative, and apply a healthy level of skepticism to every insight. This is a daily challenge, but I’ve found that the more deeply you understand your data and its story, the more effectively you can drive meaningful growth. It’s all about cutting through the noise, focusing on the right signals, and ensuring the team is aligned on what success looks like from both a creative and performance lens.

Another core challenge is balancing short-term execution with long-term strategy. We’re constantly pivoting to seize real-time opportunities in a fast-paced, sports-driven environment. Still, at the same time, we need to stay ahead of upcoming tentpole moments and make sure our creative and media plans are built to scale.

Lastly, navigating the ever-evolving digital landscape presents its own set of challenges, from privacy changes and attribution limitations to platform shifts. Staying agile, adaptable, and tightly aligned across teams is key to making smart, data-informed decisions without sacrificing impact.

What would you predict for the future of mobile marketing and performance marketing?

We’re moving beyond last-touch attribution as the gold standard for measurement. As privacy regulations evolve and tracking becomes more limited, marketers will need to embrace more holistic, full-funnel approaches. Blended attribution models will become more mainstream. The focus will shift from granular user-level tracking to understanding the broader impact of marketing efforts across the entire journey, from awareness to conversion.

Do you have any predictions for the future of mobile sports betting? What challenges and innovations do you foresee? 

The future of online sports betting is shaping up to be fast-paced and competitive. As more states hop on board and legalize it, the market will grow big time, but that also means higher costs to attract new users and a tougher fight to stand out.

Operators can’t just rely on flashy promos and sign-up bonuses anymore. The brands that emerge victorious will offer smooth, personalized experiences, from smarter onboarding to real-time content and fun, gamified features that keep people coming back. First-party data will also be a game-changer, helping with everything from more targeted marketing to better responsible gaming tools and overall user experience.

We’ll probably also see betting and media blending even more—think live streaming, in-game bets, and influencer-led content becoming the norm. On the tech side, innovations like predictive analytics and AI-driven personalization will help sharpen targeting and improve users’ overall experience.

In the end, the real winners will be the ones who can scale up while staying smart, keeping up with regulations, moving quickly, and building real brand loyalty in a fast-moving and tightly regulated space.

What resources—websites, blogs, podcasts—do you use to keep up with performance marketing?

AdExchanger, Mobile Dev Memo, and eMarketer are all good places to catch up on the latest trends in the space.