Month: February 2021

For some, the efficiency of being able to work remotely without traveling to the usual industry boondoggles has made them less likely to return to those events even after it’s safe.

“Companies are more focused on what employee models will look like — back to the office or hybrid — [as well as] revenue stabilization, etc.,” said Mack McKelvey, founder and CEO of SalientMG. “This year showed CEOs/CFOs what revenue/expenses look like with little to no travel/sponsorships, etc. and boards love the returns they are seeing.”

That being said, some marketers and agency execs are aiming to figure out exactly when in-person events will make a resurgence. Gaming it out ahead of time is necessary, according to on agency exec, as brands don’t want to be “too late” to invest once in-person gatherings do return.

Even as brands and agencies look to a crystal ball to figure it out the exec lamented feeling in limbo when it comes to trying to do so: “Nobody knows. Nobody wants to be late. Nobody wants to be early. It’s insane.”

Noah Mallin, chief of brand strategy for IMGN echoed that conversations about a return to in-person events are beginning to taking place as the vaccine rollout gets underway. The assumption for some is that the earliest in-person events would take place is this fall. That being said, the real question is not when events will return, but rather will people want to attend when they do. “No one really knows what actual demand will be like,” said Mallin.

Others say they aren’t worried about in-person events this year as they expect a return to regular business travel patterns to come in 2022 or 2023. Instead, there’s more onus on teams to build virtual communities. “Community is virtual which is why Clubhouse and Spaces are so important,” noted McKelvey.

Figuring out how to breakthrough and foster that community online in a healthy way that avoids burnout is key, said agency execs and industry analysts (The ability to work remotely and have meetings via Zoom quickly led to major screen fatigue). For brands and agencies focused on building online communities rather than the possible return of in-person events, finding ways to make those communities dynamic, engaging and useful is essential.

3 Questions with Chipotle CMO Chris Brandt

What is the biggest challenge you’re facing as a CMO today? And how do you plan on tackling that challenge?
Measurement of ad effectiveness across channels is the biggest challenge.  Having accurate information and attribution towards sales, in addition to cross channel consumer identification, is a formidable challenge that makes estimating the return on ad spend difficult and an inexact science

What’s top of mind for you as a CMO right now?
Being flexible in media spend given Covid unpredictability and gaining consumer awareness of our brand values, which are more important than ever to the consumer.

As a CMO, how do you think marketers should be approaching a post-cookie world?
Collect as much first party data as you can (such as via a loyalty program) and be flexible in spending so you can pivot to the channels that are able to most successfully generate effective ROI when we enter a cookie-less world. — Kimeko McCoy

By the numbers

Going into nearly a year of coronavirus-induced lockdown, consumers are increasingly glued to their screens. The cultural shift is one marketers are taking note of, with brands like Guinness and Babe Wine investing ad dollars in e-commerce apps like Drizly. Even as marketers are diversifying and eyeing e-commerce apps, social media advertising is still king, according to new data from social ad automation platform Smartly.io. Find the breakdown here:

• Most retail organizations will increase social advertising spend on Facebook (76%), nearly half (44%) will increase spend on Twitter and over one-third (38%) will increase spend on Instagram in 2021.
• 36% of companies spend more on Facebook than other platforms; however, Instagram yields the best ROAS among the platforms for 42% of companies. 
• 90% of the retailers surveyed this year said they buy ads on Instagram, compared to 56% last year. — Kimeko McCoy

What we’ve covered

• Anheuser-Busch is continuing to build out its in-house team, reports senior news editor Seb Joseph.
• Companies are considering adopting ‘asynchronous working’ to manage burnout.
• Speaking of burnout, our latest Confessions is with an agency staffer who feels overworked as the agency is still understaffed.

While the earliest version of ForbesOne began with 22 audience segments built using user behavior across its website, the platform now synthesizes data from 70 different datasets, allowing every part of the organization to have a nearly real-time picture of how content, users and customers are all behaving across Forbes’s products.

Leadership hopes ForbesOne can help insulate Forbes from the revenue crunch coming with the end of third-party cookies. But there are also hopes the visibility and insights available from ForbesOne can be used across the organization: A product manager might use the way people consume Forbes content before and after virtual events to change the experience future attendees get, or an editor might use content consumption reports to inform future coverage or distribution strategies.

“This is not to replace [our existing products], but to build something better,” Forbes chief revenue officer Jessica Sibley said.

Like most publishers’ first party data platforms, ForbesOne relies principally on the kinds of content people read on Forbes’s site, which newsletters people subscribe to as well as attendance at virtual events and affiliate data pulled from its shopping content.

For demographic data, it relies on a combination of inferences and zero-party data provided directly by Forbes readers, such as job titles. A number of recent product additions have expanded the scope of who ForbesOne can reach.

Forbes put up a paywall on its site last October, a move expected to provide more logged in, known users in addition to incremental consumer revenue; in December, Forbes announced the launch of Forbes Global Properties, a real estate marketplace aimed at high net-worth users; then in January, Forbes launched a newsletter program designed to attract new writers to bolster the publisher’s paid newsletter program (it operates 30 paid newsletters already).

Forbes even sent readers messages asking if they’d answer questions about themselves in return for a more relevant advertising experience. All those, plus dozens more, are pooled to offer advertisers different segment, including several proprietary ones, many of which are anchored to existing Forbes franchises and communities, including Under 30s, small business owners, luxury travel, and finance professionals. All told, Forbes can reach 40% of its audience using ForbesOne, either through a combination of logins, subscriptions, email or lookalike modeling, a spokesperson said.

The higher cost of reaching those segments is “competitive” with what it would cost to target those people with third-party cookies, said Adam Wallitt, the group vp of data strategy, though he did not provide specific prices.

“We want to be able to look at that core audience and figure out what they do across all our platforms,” said Alyson Williams, Forbes’s svp of digital strategy and operations.

Weaving those platforms together took time, as did coaching up Forbes’s sales staff to sell it. The company made ForbesOne the top priority at its semi-annual sales meeting in the summer of 2020, and Forbes’s sales team still has weekly meetings where large chunks of the sales organization, including Forbes’s pre- and post-sales teams, sit in on meetings in which Wallitt and other senior executives walk them through Forbes’s platform. Other parts of the organization, including product and editorial, get regular, in-depth looks and ForbesOne and shifts in the industry. To date, ForbesOne has a 40% renewal rate.

While ForbesOne has been available in some form for most of 2020, it is off to a strong start in 2021. “We’ve seen interest double just coming out of the gate this year,” Sibley said, though that growth may be coming from a small base; during her interview with Digiday, Sibley said that the number of brands that had used Forbes One was “not on the level” of Vox Media’s Forte platform, which had drawn more than 100 different brands into deals in 2020.

That continuous optimization will be needed to keep clients coming back, said Raphael Rivilla, partner of media and analytics at the independent agency Marcus Thomas.

“They’re going to do whatever they can [to keep their data out of open environments],” Rivilla said, noting that, over time, he expects that many publishers will be forced to allow their proprietary segments off their properties and into a kind of open one. “I don’t know how many are going to be able to hold it down.”

“Technologies are controlled by a handful of companies that have amassed unprecedented power,” said Klobuchar during her Jan. 29 State of the Net Conference keynote. The powerful Democrat and chair of the Senate Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee said tech giants have control of “gateways over our personal data, power over what ads we see and what news we watch and monopoly power in key digital markets.”

‘The money is long overdue’

Cosponsored by other Democratic members of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights — Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Hawaii’s Brian Schatz — the CALERA bill aims to reform antitrust law to address anti-competitive horizontal and vertical acquisitions and acquisitions of rival companies.

Lawyers and Senate staff interviewed by Digiday expect that the policies presented in Klobuchar’s bill could have momentum in part because of her position on the antitrust subcommittee. “I think her bill will be a jumping off point for a lot of dialogue about what antitrust legislation might look like,” said Haidee Schwartz, a former FTC acting deputy director of the bureau of competition and a partner in the antitrust group at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld.  

The bill would give the two agencies that oversee antitrust investigations and enforce antitrust laws — the FTC and Justice Department’s antitrust division — more penalty power against companies, more resources and more money for hiring additional personnel. It would nearly double the FTC’s annual budget to $651 million for 2022, and boost the DOJ’s antitrust division’s budget to $484.5 million. While the government agencies may not be able to compete head-to-head with tech industry salary offers, funding will be imperative when it comes to attracting more knowledgeable tech experts.

“The money is long overdue,” said Barry Pupkin, a senior partner focused on antitrust at law firm Squire Patton Boggs. “You’ve had basically flat budgets for probably a decade.”

The bill itself states, “Federal antitrust enforcement budgets have failed to keep pace with the growth of the economy and increasing demands on agency resources, significantly undermining the ability of the Federal antitrust agencies to fulfill their law enforcement missions and contributing to the rise of market power in the American economy.”

While the CALERA bill limits the additional funding for the DOJ to its antitrust division, it does not set parameters for how the FTC uses the additional funding. Schwartz, who served with the FTC under both the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations from 2015 to 2019, suggested the extra FTC funding could be applied to all three of the commission’s bureaus focused on competition, economics and consumer protection. That could mean new staff and resources to address other issues adjacent to tech antitrust, such as data privacy.

“You would think that, with a significant influx of resources, they would use them for enhancing the staffing at all three bureaus,” she said.

Increased scrutiny of tech companies’ anti-competitive practices

Efforts related to anti-competitive practices among the big digital platforms are already underway at both the FTC and the DOJ.

The FTC in December launched its investigation into Facebook, alleging the company has maintained its monopoly on the social media industry by acquiring emerging rival Instagram in 2012 and mobile messaging app WhatsApp in 2014.

The DOJ, several states and even a publisher group have filed antitrust lawsuits against Google, arguing that aspects of its search, digital ad business and decisions about third-party cookies are anti-competitive.

New government divisions are being created elsewhere in the US and overseas in response to a tech industry that has expanded drastically with little regulation. California’s latest privacy law, for example, establishes a new California Privacy Protection Agency to oversee enforcement of the law. Meanwhile, in the UK, where the Competition and Markets Authority is conducting an investigation into whether Google’s proposals for replacing third-party cookies is anti-competitive, a new Digital Markets Unit to oversee “a pro-competition regime for platforms including those funded by digital advertising, such as Google and Facebook” is in the works.

A new FTC division to evaluate the impact of prior acquisitions

Earlier last year, the FTC launched an examination of acquisitions since 2010 by five tech behemoths: Amazon, Apple, Google-parent Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft. The FTC issued special orders to the companies as part of the inquiry in the hopes of better understanding how these firms report their transactions to the federal antitrust agencies.

That examination is ongoing, according to the FTC. However, it’s an example of the sort of work the agency could conduct more of if the CALERA bill passes. That’s because it would establish a new Division of Market Analysis inside the FTC to conduct investigations and publish reports evaluating the competitive conditions and dynamics affecting markets. That division would also assess the competitive effects of acquisitions after they are completed and recommend enforcement actions to remedy anti-competitive impact.

“As someone who has been representative of companies that have merged, you make arguments to the government that the deal is going to be pro-competitive or efficiency-enhancing, and the arguments, by their very nature, are hypothetical,” said Pupkin. He alluded to Facebook’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp. “Having a Market Analysis Division to check into whether or not those claims actually were true over the long term is a good idea,” he said.

Assessing the impact of an acquisition can lead the FTC or DOJ to challenge it after it’s completed, said Pupkin. “It can sue to undo transactions that have already occurred,” he said.

News outlets experienced a surge in traffic and viewership during Donald Trump’s presidency right through to when he left office in January. In fact, between the inauguration of President Joe Biden and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, CBS News Digital received more readers to its site and attracted more viewers to its video programming in January than in any previous month in its history, according to CBS News Digital evp and gm Christy Tanner.

But now that Trump is out of office — and hopefully without another Capitol attack on the horizon — news outlets have been faced with the question of whether people’s interest in the news would subside. In other words, whether the Trump Bump would turn into a Trump Slump.

“I do not expect to see a slump. We still have some major, major compelling stories that are not going anywhere anytime soon,” Tanner said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

The election may be over, but there remains a pandemic, a racial reckoning and a climate crisis for news organizations to cover, said Tanner. “In many ways, what I’m happy about is we can focus on these really important stories now that we have a different president in office and a different type of news cycle,” she said.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

On Facebook reducing the reach of political content

We’ve seen a lot of announcements from the platforms over the years. Without singling out any particular platform, what we’ve seen is a proliferation of lies and an increase in the number of people who don’t have a shared version of facts and truth. So whether this latest announcement will have an impact on some of the plagues that are affecting our society remains to be seen. We’ve seen too many announcements and not enough results.”

On TikTok users’ hard news appetites

Our TikTok account — which is very straightforward, no dancing, basically just factual news — is growing tremendously and exponentially. It may be one of the more boring TikTok accounts in that nothing more whimsical is happening there. But that really encourages me, to see that users of that platform are embracing the type of straightforward, hard news we are delivering day in and day out.

On bundling news into a broader, subscription-based streamer versus distributing it as a free, standalone service

From a business standpoint, news creates retention, loyalty and duration for the [subscription-based streaming service]. We have seen that with CBS All Access over the years. We know that it will continue to be valuable when we rebrand All Access as Paramount+. At the same time, there are people who just want news and don’t want to pay for the bundled entertainment that will come with it in the [subscription-based] service. So we’re taking two bites of the apple with this strategy.

“We felt that this group of people would drive additional subscriptions, while also making existing subscribers happier and more engaged,” said ESPN vp of digital content Nate Ravitz.

ESPN wouldn’t say how many new subscribers can be attributed to the repositioning. Ravitz says the company hasn’t seen much impact on traffic. “We expected to drive incremental subscriptions, we expected to see people who had streamed but not read start to read, and we’ve seen subscribed readers read more articles than they were before,” he said.

ESPN+ now boasts more than 12.1 million subscribers, as of Jan. 2, up from 11.5 million in December. It’s benefited from its place in the larger Disney ecosystem; the launch of a bundled offering alongside Disney+ and Hulu late in 2019 coincided with ESPN+ nearly doubling its subscriber count, from 3.5 million to 6.6 million, in under two months.

“I think they’ve been much more successful in terms of attracting subscribers than most people expected,” said Macquarie analyst Tim Nollen.

The changes at ESPN occur as freely available, long-form sports writing grows increasingly scarce. VC-funded subscription site The Athletic has spent the last five years luring writers from sports sections all over the country. WarnerMedia’s Bleacher Report shut down its ad-supported long-form unit in August. Internally, some ESPN writers have reportedly expressed concern that placement behind a paywall would limit their audience.

“Our response was that first and foremost, the company was totally committed to this new DTC strategy, so they were part of something that was deemed extremely important,” said Ravitz, who acknowledged the shift would impact articles’ reach “particularly in the short term.”

News and investigative pieces remain available to non-subscribers. In addition to Ravitz’s philosophy that matters of public interest should be free, ESPN’s site and mobile app help to bring in free audiences that can be converted to paid subscribers.

In December 2020, ESPN’s site and mobile app received 88.6 million unduplicated users in the U.S., down 5% year over year and down 5% compared to October 2020 — the last full month before more content was moved behind the paywall — according to Comscore.

“One of the beauties of the DTC business is we get to use data and analytics on a daily basis to see what’s working,” said ESPN+ evp and gm Russell Wolff. “We’ve got an enormous audience that comes to us every month, who we know a lot about. We love the top of the funnel and we will continue to feed it.”

While each writer’s personal following — as well as the likelihood that their readers would subscribe to ESPN+ in order to keep reading — was a consideration, Ravitz stressed that analytics weren’t the only factor in determining which content would go behind the paywall. Writers who contribute with a predictable frequency — especially around certain parts of the sports calendar, such as leagues’ off-seasons — can provide value to subscribers on a year-round basis.

ESPN is likely moving a broader scope of content onto ESPN+ as part of parent company Disney’s broader transition to streaming, according to Nollen. “The more ESPN can lay the groundwork with content that attracts paying subscribers, the more they’ll be in a position to go completely [to streaming],” the analyst said. “It’s the more in-depth articles, the insights that you can’t get elsewhere, that are being put behind the paywall.”

But success on the DTC side hasn’t isolated ESPN from the impact of the pandemic or the decline of traditional television. Coupled with declines in TV advertising in the spring and early summer, ESPN has likely seen an impact on digital display ad revenue as well, making those millions of unique monthly visitors more difficult to monetize on advertising alone, said Nollen.

“They’re walking this fine line of trying to find a balance between keeping the 75 to 80 million people who have ESPN right now, which is going to depreciate over the next ten years, versus ESPN+, which is growing,” said Daniel Cohen, svp of global media rights consulting at sports marketing agency Octagon.

Brands that were agile and able to lean into the dramatic shift in consumer demand quickly found themselves successfully riding the wave. By virtue of its nature as a data-driven and pay-for-performance channel, performance marketing technology was able to lead brands in those efforts.

Performance marketing: A safe haven

Before the pandemic, performance marketing was known for being cost-effective and risk-free, thanks to its pay-for-performance model. The past 12 months have stress-tested that assertion, serving to prove the channel as a safe haven to secure return on marketing spend during even the toughest economic climates.

Amid the early months of the pandemic, one of our major luxury retail brands harnessed affiliate benchmarking to compare their traditional paid search marketing with an affiliate paid search trial. By their second month, they had generated more than $600,000 in incremental sales revenue and turned the trial into an evergreen strategy, complementing their existing paid search campaigns while continually adding to their bottom line during a period when they needed it most.

Additionally, a well-known large retailer in our network leveraged the accountable nature of the performance marketing channel when COVID-19 hit and saw more than 50% in same store growth. Due to stay-at-home orders, this retailer was not able to fulfill its marketing photo shoots, so they turned to influencers and editorial publishers within our ecosystem to get fresh, authentic, on-brand content into the market for their wider business, all at an efficient cost — along with the ability to measure engagement and conversions against their KPIs. This retailer’s focused effort with performance marketing yielded a ROAS that is 160% higher than the returns of their other channels.

At its core, the innovative and agile nature of performance marketing allows partnerships between advertisers and publishers to evolve rapidly, adapting to shifting consumer demand. Publishers have the pulse on their audiences’ needs and continue to release new consumer-focused solutions. Brands can easily tap into these partnerships by working with diverse publisher models that meet consumers where they are. Ultimately, this allows brands to scale marketing efforts while benefiting from third party brand promotion. This scale, combined with the accountability of a pay-for-performance model and the transparency that technology and data provide, are the important foundations that enabled brands to drive value throughout 2020.

Performance benchmarks: Driving revenue-critical decisions

Even during the best of economic times, it is always important to understand both the bottom-line value a channel brings to a business and its performance against others in the same vertical. But over the past 12-months, tracking that value and performance has been vital.

The good news is, data allows brands to evaluate the channel’s true incremental value and compare program performance against standardized benchmarks on global, regional, country, industry, vertical and product category levels. Through global trends and insights, advertisers can act on emerging micro-trends highly relevant to their business. A powerful example is the surge in mobile conversions and traffic during the beginning weeks and months of the pandemic as people began to work from home. With early insight into this change, advertisers and publishers were able to adapt and hone strategies, affording them a competitive advantage — not only in their marketing but elsewhere in their business as well.

Defining success in 2021 and beyond

While performance marketing has offered increased levels of accountability since its inception, its benefits have never been realized as completely as the industry has witnessed in the past 12 months. The level of innovation and adaptation required to survive and thrive during this volatile time has accelerated digital marketing, shining a light on the immense value that partner-based marketing provides. Given a future poised for further rapid-paced evolution, especially as vaccines are rolled-out and economies recover, these vital tools will further define brand success.

As the world begins to reopen, performance marketing is well-positioned to continue to be a mainstay for businesses seeking to drive consumers into physical venues when it’s safe to do so. 

Given the global recession, it will be key to tap into consumer desire for discounts and offers that ease the cost-burden of purchases. Coupon, voucher and rewards strategies — potentially combined with in-store redemption where applicable — have the potential to drive new, existing and lapsed customers to conversion.

Advertisers currently using performance marketing should also consider recruiting new and diverse publishers to their program. Examples that have shown success in recent months include buy-now-pay-later fintech publishers driving incremental business for brands throughout the pandemic, tapping into their existing audiences to prompt purchases that otherwise would not have occurred. Further, these publishers are shown to drive high-value purchases, with average order values upwards of $375, while increasing new-to-file customers by up to 60%.The global pandemic accelerated the consumer shift to e-commerce by around five years, but it’s not just consumers that have evolved. Businesses and their marketing functions have learned valuable consumer-focused lessons about harnessing data and insight, accountability in performance and the value of an agile, scalable channel.

There are, however, some significant changes underway.

Here’s the background. Last summer, Apple announced several upcoming privacy changes for apps running on iOS, including a user permission requirement for Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) collection. An IDFA is a unique, random identifier assigned to each Apple mobile device, which advertisers can use to target ads and measure effectiveness at the device level; this is the long-standing way advertisers have measured their mobile ads. 

Apple’s new user permission requirement will change the use of IDFA by apps from default to opt-in, meaning that users will get a prompt from every app using IDFA asking for consent to track. This is known as app tracking transparency (ATT). After an initial delay, Apple has announced the change will go into effect in early spring 2021. 

Five ways to address Apple’s IDFA changes

Asking mobile app users to directly opt-in to data collection is a big change for the mobile ecosystem. But if in-app is part of the advertising strategy, it’s not time to panic or reduce spend. 

Steph Lee, senior manager of Partner Success at Activision Blizzard, sums it up: “There’s no doubt Apple’s privacy changes will create a substantial industry shift, but publishers who are committed to creating great games will find success. Since the audiences will continue to grow and stay engaged, advertisers will want to be a part of these premium outlets where they have access to quality content, brand-safe environments and target customers.”

There are five things advertisers need to know today to continue to reach mobile audiences in-app successfully. 

1. IDFA is not going away

There’s been a lot of talk in the industry about “the post-IDFA world,” but that’s not the right way to think of what’s coming. 

First, no one knows what the opt-in prompt’s true impact will be; mobile app publishers are a smart and innovative group, and they’ll be testing, iterating and refining their app prompts to help users understand the value exchange of this data.

Second, keep in mind that these changes only impact Apple devices. Android systems use the standard Google Advertising ID for tracking, and there’s no change to tracking and measurement in the Android world at this time. That’s significant because Android dominates market share globally. At MoPub, we saw that about 60% of ad opportunities on our platform came from Android devices in January 2021.

2. In-app is viewable and measurable

In-app inventory is inherently viewable, and there’s no “below the fold” for mobile apps; there’s typically only one ad viewable to a user at a time. Furthermore, the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement SDK (OM SDK) brings transparency to advertisers by enabling third-party standardized viewability and verification measurement for mobile in-app. These are important factors to consider, and advertisers should keep them top of mind, making sure their buying partners are working with supply platforms that support industry viewability measurement standards.

3. Contextual advertising is a powerful option in the app world. 

Contextual advertising, which is based on a user’s current visit to app content and doesn’t require collection or retention of their online activities over time, provides marketers the ability to leverage unique signals in the IDFA-less portion of the app environment. 

For example, every app is defined and organized by a category, and there are correlations between app store categories and demographic attributes. Advertisers looking for even more granularity can focus on subcategories such as strategy games, which is one of 16 subcategories within gaming. Other contextual signals include app description, company headquarters location, average star rating, daily active users and more.

4. Buying partners can help curate inventory packages tailored to marketing goals

App store rankings, reviews and other data points provide a wealth of information that advertisers can use to target apps with specific parameters via bespoke deal IDs or inventory packages. Working with buying partners to look for unique supply packages is a powerful way to tap into top apps as classified by in-app revenue. It’s also a pathway to apps curated by age, gender and regions of users — and by leading categories such as entertainment, sports, news and lifestyle. Curated inventory packages help make contextual buying easily scalable.

5. DSPs are critical to leveraging SKAdNetwork 

SKAdNetwork is an approach to measurement that Apple introduced in 2018, allowing mobile app attribution to take place without making user-level data available. As for SKAdNetwork— SK stands for StoreKit, which is how app developers interact with the App Store, so StoreKit Ad Network is the idea. 

Especially for performance advertisers, it’s crucial to make sure buying partners support SKAdNetwork and view-through attribution (VTA). An important box to check — does the partner allow advertisers to submit signed clicks to the SKAdNetwork API? (Note that DSP buying partners wishing to provide this information must also register with Apple).

The path forward is innovation

As everyone in the advertising and tech industry knows, change is constant. Still, there’s almost always a path forward for publishers to effectively monetize and advertisers to reach their audiences and campaign goals. If the industry survived GDPR, it will survive changes to the IDFA.

As Peter Rice, associate director of Strategic Campaign Operations at Kepler, notes: “The mobile app space is still an important opportunity for advertisers. Even for those who haven’t yet made the jump into mobile, it’s worth recognizing that upcoming web browser updates to the third-party cookie will introduce similar personalization changes for the desktop advertising world, which will ultimately even the playing field for mobile.” 

When it comes to Apple’s privacy changes, advertisers armed with knowledge about what’s happening will continue to reach their audiences in mobile apps with confidence.