Navigating Digital Advertising in a Privacy-Driven Future
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Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature has rolled out to its devices, requiring apps to ask permission to track the activity of its users across apps and websites. With about 85% of users worldwide opting out of ad-tracking when prompted, the new iOS update represents a significant uphill battle for advertisers. I’m excited. I’m nervous. I’m curious. Here’s why…
The Future of Advertising
ATT is ushering in a new era for the advertising industry, forcing it to get more innovative and creative. On the innovation side, artificial Intelligence (AI) will slowly start to play a more prominent role in balancing privacy with relevant advertising. For example, personalized dynamic creative technology can tailor and deliver customized content and ads to customers. AI can also cipher through a massive broad dataset and discern certain behaviours and traits without needing to know the specific consumer at an individual level. Additionally, Facebook could develop a method for companies to keep users within the Facebook ecosystem (where they’re trackable) — for example, when clicking on an ad, instead of going to a website, the website loads within Facebook and the purchase or experience can take place all without leaving the app. On the creative side, advertisers are simply going to have to rely more on creativity when they can’t target an audience as precisely as in the past. Facebook claims that the creative of an ad can affect the estimated action rate (i.e., whether someone clicks on/watches the ad) by up to 50%. This number jumps to 70% on TikTok. I expect creativity to become even more important. This is an exciting next chapter for advertising.
The Future of Privacy
As mentioned earlier, ATT is proving to be even more popular than expected with about 85% of users worldwide opting out of ad-tracking when prompted. This number jumps to 94% in the U.S. While these numbers represent early-adopter behaviour, as it takes 3–5 weeks for about 60–70% of users to adopt a major iOS update, they still present a major hurdle for advertisers, including myself. Oh and this isn’t just an Apple thing, just yesterday (May 18 2021), Google announced new privacy features in Android 12. From the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to CCPA and GDPR, to popular Netflix films like The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack, privacy concerns about online tracking are on the rise. In a Pew Trust study, 80% of social media users report being concerned about businesses and advertisers using their social media information. However, being able to track a purchase or page visit from, for example Instagram, to an owned website is critical to an efficient advertising campaign. So, I’m a little nervous on how ATT will continue to affect targeting and measurement. (That being said, I’m all for more online privacy.)
Strategies for Advertisers
It’s clear that advertisers will need to get creative with their advertising strategies. While I think AI will come to the forefront of advertising in the mid to long-term period, I’m curious to see how advertisers adapt their strategies in the immediate future. Here are five strategies that you can start to implement:
- Focus on and invest in first party data: Email lists, subscriptions, text messaging services, etc. are all becoming more vital to obtain and nurture.
- Consider other advertising strategies and invest in the creative: Influencer marketing may be a great option.
- Leverage other targeting options to produce creative and personalized ads: For example, perhaps you create an ad focused on the benefits your product/service brings to customers in the morning. You can run that ad only in the mornings to make it more relevant to those seeing it.
- Retarget based on creative performance: For example, instead of (or in addition to) retargeting based on website views, you can retarget based on an audience of those who watched 25% of your video ad.
- Diversify your investment among platforms: Besides Facebook and Google, try TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, or LinkedIn.
As we shift towards a privacy-driven digital world, advertisers will need to navigate how to respect consumers’ privacy while still developing effective and compelling ads. If you’re an advertiser, you can start to experiment with new strategies that don’t rely on tracking as much. Whether it be through A.I or sheer creativity (or both), I’m convinced that privacy and advertising can co-exist and for that, I’m excited.
Originally published at https://joshdviner.com on May 19, 2021.
