“A top advertising executive at Apple has left to help lead Drawbridge, a fast-growing startup that helps marketers track user identity across mobile devices,” Douglas MacMillan and Elizabeth Dwoskin report for The Wall Street Journal. “Winston Crawford, the former head of Apple’s mobile ad marketplace, has joined Drawbridge as its first chief operating officer, he said in an interview.”
“Crawford’s experience overseeing ads on iPhones and iPads lends credibility to Drawbridge’s business of monitoring users as they move between mobile devices,” MacMillan and Dwoskin report. “Crawford said he joined Drawbridge because he saw an opportunity to expand this tracking technology to other areas.”
Crawford’s departure from Apple comes at a time when the iPhone maker’s chief executive, Tim Cook, has grown increasingly critical of companies harvesting user data to make money from advertising. While Apple’s iAd service does let marketers advertise within apps on iPhones and iPads based on users’ age, gender, home address, iTunes purchases and App Store downloads, it has been unwilling to push the envelope in how much data it will share with advertisers. ‘I don’t believe they are interested in this capability because they have a strict policy around what they do with user data,’ Crawford said. ‘iAd has great assets and great capabilities, but they are going to follow Apple’s policy to the letter of the law,'” MacMillan and Dwoskin report, “That’s an opportunity for Drawbridge.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: iAd might be hamstrung by Apple’s strict privacy policies, but would you rather have less relevant ads, many of which you might not be interested in, but which allow you to maintain your privacy, or more relevant ads via user tracking like Drawbridge’s? Do users even get to opt in or out of Drawbridge’s type of tracking?
iAd might not offer much in the way of granular user tracking to advertisers, but at least iAd advertisers know they are getting access to the world’s best customers; those who can recognize quality and have demonstrated the means and will to pay for it.