Apple offers a small reprieve to advertisers, marketing agencies, marketing-tech firms, software developers and other organisations who have been concerned about the planned changes to its user monitoring policy by the business.
Instead of implementing the rule with the proposed changes to its different operating systems that could be published as soon as this month, the company is giving more time to plan for the move to mobile advertisement players. The impact is also likely to be important for mobile advertisers, whose in-app ad spending had been forecast to rise from $90 billion this year to $226 billion by 2025, according to an estimate published by Grand View Research before the pandemic hit advertising demand.
The changes in questions were revealed at its annual developers WWDC event two months ago, with Apple announcing that it will soon require apps to request device users’ opt-in consent to access the Advertisers Identifier (IDFA), a randomly created code that the company gives to devices. The IDFA, which users can already block by modifying their Apple devices’ settings, allows advertisers to monitor consumer behaviors and enhance their targeting for advertising.
I’m not at all amazed that Apple has delayed the IDFA user certification process, said Mike Woosley, COO of Lotame, a data management company, in an emailed statement. This change will affect the app developer space and individual publishers a great deal.
The Weather Company, which runs weather.com, predicted that the policy shift introduced by Apple could cause a 40 per cent drop in the price of media placements in iPhone applications that sell ad space, said The Wall Street Journal. The IDFA restriction may spur a longer-term change in audience-based marketing of ads on mobile devices to context-based targeting that lets advertisers buy media placements based on publisher content, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s CEO, informed the Journal.
Last week, Facebook informed that Apple’s privacy security could result in a 50 per cent drop in revenue for its User Network, enabling developers to use Facebook data to target in-app advertising. The social media giant won’t gather IDFA data from Apple devices running iOS 14 and didn’t expect the move to impact their advertisement enterprise. Facebook said it will release an update to the iOS 14 software development kit, including support for Apple’s SKAdNetwork API which restricts advertisement data sharing.
