Financial Times: Experts Question Apple Ad Moves in Wake of Tracking Changes
Image by Lisa Johnson from Pixabay
07 SEPTEMBER 2022 - Do you ever do a story on your daily podcast, just so you can say “nailed it”?
Last Thursday I did a piece on a Marketwatch story that said that site had “found two recent job postings from Apple that suggest the company is looking to build out its burgeoning adtech team with folks who specialize in working with small businesses.” Marketwacth said Apple was/is looking to serve the small businesses hurt by the cratering of Facebook advertising. Those ended up being not so great once Apple made Facebook ask users whether it was cool to track their online activity, rather than just doing so secretly.
I said a week ago that the hires seemed likely to prompt cries of hypocrisy against Apple, and accusations that the company killed Facebook’s ad business to bolster its own. And now, please allow me to say, nailed it. A piece from the Financial Times comes to us under the headline, “Apple plans to double its digital advertising business workforce,” with the sub-header, “Move comes just 18 months after tech giant introduced privacy changes that disrupted market.” The piece quotes one ad-guy saying:
Building new ad systems to effectively compete with incumbents with tens of thousands of employees and 10 to 20 years of maturity would normally be an impossible task… Unless you were somehow able to disadvantage those competitors on your platform.
Meanwhile, the piece has another ad-guy saying:
…Apple was being “Machiavellian” and “brilliant” by adopting privacy rules that forced rivals to rebuild their ad infrastructure, simultaneously creating an opening for itself to fill the void.
“They could build out (their advertising business) dramatically (and) the ‘air cover’ is they are protecting the consumer’s privacy,” he said.
Nailed it.
To be fair, the Financial Times piece circles close to Mike Peterson’s Apple Insider editorial I mentioned last week. That’s the one that says “Apple has never been against advertising — it's against invasive data collection.” Quoting the Financial Times:
Apple has never been against advertising per se. Company founder Steve Jobs even tried to launch an in-app ads business in 2010 so iPhone apps could stay free. What [Apple CEO Tim] Cook is against is how personal information is bought and sold by opaque third parties without iPhone users giving consent.
Still, Apple setting the rules for how ads should work, and then expanding into that very area, strikes many observers as problematic.
Nailed it.
