The move by Apple to promote user privacy, which makes it harder for brands to track billions of consumers, are creating a money-making opportunity for advertising companies that were hit hard by the response to COVID-19.
Ivan Levingston for Bloomberg News:
Apple is requiring app owners to ask for explicit permission to track users across other companies’ apps. The changes make it harder for companies to follow our every move online, so marketers are devising new ways for brands to find out what consumers are doing and pitch products to them… Yet it’s an opportunity for ad agency groups such as WPP Plc, Omnicom Group Inc. and Publicis Groupe SA to reassert their relevance.
Adtech firms that develop alternative tools to target consumers have seen a rise in demand, in particular contextual advertising companies that target ads based on the content of web pages, not who is viewing them.
One such company, GumGum Inc., just raised $75 million from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. That came with a $700 million valuation, according to a person familiar with the matter… “The industry over-used the cookie, clearly,” said GumGum Chief Executive Officer Phil Schraeder. “Contextual is a good alternative to cookies because it will be here to the end of time.”
MacDailyNews Take: We can’t wait to see how it all shakes out! The online ad situation as it exists today isn’t working very well (or at all), so hopefully it results in a positive change that doesn’t just benefit Big Tech, but also helps long-suffering independent publishers like us, too.
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us. — Alexander Graham Bell
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“Contextual is a good alternative to cookies because it will be here to the end of time.”
I was just saying this the other day (but much less eloquently).
The problem has been scalability. Advertisers want to use one or two networks, and not have to scour the earth for the 50 or 5000 individual publications that might be attracting their audiences.