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votes
Here’s what the opt-in app tracking in iOS 14.5 means to marketers — and how they might respond
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- Title
- As the cookie crumbles - what iOS 14.5's updates mean for your marketing plans.
- Published
- May 7 2021
- Word count
- 1378 words
Their response is unsurprisingly unethical:
In other words, despite the user explicitly telling us they do not want to be tracked, we will find other ways to track them.
Marketers are motivated to track the people to whom they want to reach. Heck, they did that by putting up road signs on the routes where their target customers traveled.
This obliquely raises the really interesting question about user tracking: how much does it actually even benefit the advertisers? Billboards and broadcast TV ads, while annoying, didn't raise anything like the privacy concerns that the modern internet does. You're totally right that they were still targeted, but tracked the broad demographic and where they were likely to be found (city commuters, suburban shoppers, tech enthusiasts, grandparents, etc. etc.) rather than monitoring the individual.
It's how a lot of YouTube creator monetisation happens too: a single advertiser buys a sponsorship slot within a program that is relevant to their target audience. We've come absolutely full circle and reinvented the iconic 1960s "And now a message from our sponsors..."!
The whole industry can still benefit from digital advances (real time bidding, keyword matching, geotargeting) purely based on the content, no information about the individual user needed. DuckDuckGo claim it works just as well as more invasive kinds of targeting, for example.
So is there actually even a significant win from all of this monitoring, or is it just being cargo-culted from advertiser to advertiser because it's what their client demands and because it's now accepted wisdom that it's more effective?
Like you said, they managed it by putting up road signs, and it worked! Would they lose that much by doing the same thing in the digital world?
There's evidence targeting doesn't really work:
New Study Shows That All This Ad Targeting Doesn't Work So Well
If Big Tech Has Our Data, Why Are Targeted Ads So Terrible? - This is a reprint from the Financial Times, but doesn't require a subscription to read. It's mainly opinion, but shows that you're not alone in your thinking.
Anecdotally, I've never seen an ad I wanted to click on on the web. (I've literally never intentionally clicked on a web ad in 30 years of web browsing.)
Well that certainly reinforces my suspicions! It seems a shame that all of this has been potentially for very little gain, but I suppose the silver lining is that returning to a more privacy-conscious world might not be quite so difficult.
There was an article posted here a while back that basically posited that the reason targeted advertising metrics looked good was because they optimized to show ads for products to people who were about to buy them anyway. The analogy was with someone contracted to hand out coupons getting insane use rates on those coupons, resembling very effective marketing, because they gave them to people already in the checkout line at the store. I think there's a lot of that sort of thing going on in advertising these days.