Today in Digital Marketing - Special: How Will Apple’s IDFA Changes Affect Digital Marketing

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Apple's aggressive push toward being a more privacy-friendly brand will have some dramatic fallout on the digital marketing world. In this special episode, I chat with SocialMediaToday.com's Andrew Hutchinson about IDFA, the move to first-party data, and how we'll need to adapt our future digital marketing programs.➡ Review the show: https://RateThisPodcast.com/today➡ Join our free Slack community: TodayInDigital.com/slackHELP SPREAD THE WORD:Tweet It: bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publishReview Us: RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST:Ads and Classifieds: TodayInDigital.com/adsLeave a voicemail at TodayInDigital.com/voicemailSources and Transcripts: http://bit.ly/tidm Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio)TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA:Twitter: twitter.com/todmaffinLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/todmaffinTod’s agency: engageQ.comTikTok: /tiktok.com/@todmaffinTwitch: twitch.tv/todmaffin (game livestreaming)Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://TodMaffin.com) and produced by engageQ digital (https://engageQ.com). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's Wednesday, January 13th, 2021. Happy Day of the Russian Press. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. This is Today in Digital Marketing. A special episode today. As you may know, Apple plans to be more aggressive in its privacy initiatives. One big change coming could radically affect

your digital marketing campaigns. Soon, we don't know exactly when, but soon Apple will start popping up warning boxes when people open a mobile app that wants to track them, apps like Facebook. That box will let people opt out of tracking entirely in that app. It's all part of their new approach to IDFA, and it means your ability to retarget, build smart audiences, and do all the fun things more or less disappears. I don't often devote an entire episode to a single topic. God knows there are

enough long-form interview podcasts out there about marketing, but this, I think, will have such a big effect on us that I think it warrants it. So I am joined today by Andrew Hutchinson. He writes for socialmediatoday.com. Andrew, let's start with the basics. What is IDFA? So IDFA is the tracking system that Apple provides for app developers to be able to track data within their apps. So any activity that happens in an app

can be sent back to the developer. So transactions, browsing history, all the things you're doing in an app can be sent back to a developer. So transactions, browsing history, all the things you're doing in an app can be sent back to a developer. That has enabled apps like Facebook to track everything that people are doing in apps, which then gives them the capacity to build their all-powerful ad system because you can target people based on very specific activities. And retargeting in particular is probably a big one in that if someone's bought something in an app you can then know about and you can know whether you need to target them with

ads for to get them to buy like if they've gone through to the to the checkout and they haven't checked out then you can retarget them with ads to get them to buy stuff or if they've just expressed an interest in an item you can then target them with different ads based on trying to get them to then go through to that stage. So that's the type of example of what IDFA facilitates. And it's always been available. It's been available in Apple's backend systems for a long time. But, yeah, now they're looking to change things up. Is it any different than those sort of web-based applications, those SAAS services that exist for app developers to understand what's going on in their app?

Like there are tools you can buy if you're an app developer that will report, okay, there's, you know, 30% of people did this in your app in 20. Is it the same thing? Yeah, it's similar. It's similar to cookies on the web as well in that it tracks what people are doing on your website and then it can tell the app developers, you know, they can gather that information back in,

they can reuse that data to help advertisers target the right people with the right types of ads, which I would say makes their systems, yeah, all powerful. And Facebook, yeah, in particular, tracks every single thing that people do or everything they can within apps, which then enables them to give you the thousands of different ad targeting options that they have get in particular tracks every single thing that people do or everything they can within apps which then enables them to give you the thousands of different ad targeting options that they have to

be able to get to the right people with the right messaging is it am i right that apple has always offered a way to turn this off yes so it's always it's in the settings in uh in your ios uh device you can go down you can turn off IDFA tracking whenever you want. It's always been available to everyone. Apple just doesn't make it, doesn't put it up front, I guess. And I guess that's what's the biggest change is that now that Apple's trying to move more towards a transparent and privacy-based model, so they're saying people should have the right

to decide whether they want their information, their personal information tracked in this way. Therefore, they're setting up these new pop-up alerts, which will say, this app is tracking all of this information on you. Are you okay with that? And you have the option to say yes or no. So is that pop-up that, you know, people will probably, when they see the, because it's a pretty, the message on the app is pretty direct and blunt. It's basically, you know, Facebook wants to track you using your iPhone through this app. Do you consent? Yes or no?

So I guess it's sort of the shock value that Facebook is thinking may cause a lot of people to just say no. Is that right? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, people aren't aware of this tracking at the moment. As I say, it's been in the back end of iOS for a long time. So people have been able to turn it off, but not many people would be aware of it.

I think most people would be shocked that they had the opportunity to be able to do that. But now that they're making it more explicit and upfront, the concern is that it's going to spook so many people that they're just going to switch it off for as many apps as possible. And a lot of people already turn on ad blockers and things like that.

As soon as they realize they have the opportunity to avoid ads and avoid tracking, they generally do take it. But no one knows what percentage of people are going to actually take it on. The big concern is there's a huge amount of uncertainty as to how many people are going to see those warnings and go, well, that's a big concern. I need to turn that off. And how many are just going to go, well, ads are a part of the common digital interactions these days and who really cares? So most of the time when you go through the terms and conditions, as everyone knows, you

just go through the bottom and you tick the box and no one really pays much attention to what the details are in between. This is essentially making those details more explicit. It's saying, here's exactly what you're signing up for. Here's exactly what they're tracking on you. And as soon as people see that they're tracking their browsing history and their transaction history then people will get a lot more concerned about what they're doing in apps and basically just switch it off you and i and the people who listen to this podcast um probably know this but i would bet

that the vast majority of people when they see that pop up on their screen actually read that differently than what it actually says. And they may believe it to say, would you like ads? Yes or no. When that's not at all what it's saying, you know, like if you opt out, you're still going to get ads, right? It's just, they won't be, you know, targeted to you. Is that essentially the effect on the end user? Yeah. I mean, in a way it's more about the tracking in this sense. It's more about like, definitely you're going to get less accurate ads and that will be the outcome um like you're going to get ads anyway the same as when facebook says you can switch off all different categories it doesn't mean you're going to get

less ads it just means you're going to get less relevant ads and i feel like if they explained that better and they said you know the the payoff is that you get better ads that are more attuned to your interests um that might be a better sell than trying to sort of rail against it uh but yeah you just get less relevant ads and i think that's the thing is as you say not most people didn't know that you can switch this off but most people also probably don't know they're being tracked in this way at all and i think that's the biggest freak out that people are going to have is that a lot of people aren't will have no not like they'll think this is new they'll see this thing and say oh now facebook's tracking all of this information on me.

They didn't know that they were tracking this before. And that would be the concern is that people aren't aware that this was happening in the first place. So immediately they switched off thinking, I don't want to be tracking this way. What effect does this have on digital marketers? How will this change our ad campaigns in the future? It just removes your capacity to reach people

based on the more specific parameters. As I say, the biggest one is probably, or the best example I would say, is probably retargeting people based on their transactions and what they've done in apps. Because if someone's bought something in an app, you don't want to retarget them with ads for that product that they've bought, right? That's a waste of your ad dollars, a waste of their time. That won't be possible if you don't know what they've bought and what they haven't. So it just changes how market is going to have to track that sort of information. And Facebook's argument is that small businesses are the most impacted because they're

the ones who benefit the most from those targeted ads because they can then hone in on very, very specific audiences and save their money by not having to go with these broad scale campaigns. If you can hone in on the very specific people who've done these things via that app data, then you can save money and also have more effective ad campaigns. But without this data, you won't be able to do that. We have to go to different ways. And I guess in some ways it just pushes businesses more towards

their own first-party data in tracking people based on subscriptions and based on what they can get out of them through in-store loyalty schemes and things like that, if they can get more information that way. But it just changes the way that you're going to be able to target. And again, no one knows for sure what the impact will be. Like if 50% of people switch it off, then yeah, that's significant. But how significant, you don't know.

It'll come down to the individual users and how, how much the people who actually are spending money start switching that off. And you referenced first party versus third party. I mean, this is sort of a reckoning in our industry coming in 2021 in terms of the elimination, essentially of third-party cookies, you know, off of a lot of platforms. And so we'll have to rely on being smarter and not sort of relying on these things. For those advertisers that do not have apps, and so thus are not necessarily running retargeting based on events that have occurred in their app,

does this have any impact on us? Will this like increase CPM, decrease CPM on the broader ad market? Yeah, I mean, no one knows exactly how that's going to impact. But yeah, definitely all targeting would be theoretically impacted depending on how many people get spooked by these pop-ups and turn it off. So the less data that Facebook has, the less accurate their systems can be. And not just Facebook, every other platform that runs ads. So Twitter and LinkedIn.

And I think there was a report last week that said both Snapchat and Facebook will be the worst impacted by the changes because you're honing in on as tight an audience as you possibly can. And without that in-depth data as to what people are doing in each app, you're just not going to have the capacity to do it. So, I mean, it's impossible to say what the full extent of those impacts will be because, again, we just don't know how many people are going to switch it off. But the anticipated impact is that a lot of people will, and as they do, yeah, that reduces the amount of information, reduces the amount of insight, and every advertiser

who uses any digital advertising system won't have as accurate an information source to be able to go through and find the right people with their ads. Is Google not doing anything with their phones around this? Google is less impacted, apparently. That was what some of the reports have said, that Google is not impacted in the same way. But a lot of their data comes from search anyway. So a lot of their data comes directly through them. So it really is first-party data for Google in a lot of ways. But most of their information, much of their ad targeting information comes through

search and behavior based on search activity. So I don't think Google is going to be as badly impacted. Sorry, I don't mean that they as an advertiser or an advertising platform. I mean, I'm talking about their phones. Will Android phones also have this message pop up? No, not in the same way. I think Android is looking into some level of transparency as well. I'm not sure what their measures are, but Apple's one is a lot more upfront, a lot more in people's faces. So that's the bigger concern. So I guess then we could draw sort of an assumption of the types of apps or the types of products that would be affected by this, just given the demographics of the different users on iOS versus Android.

You know, iOS users generally tend to be more affluent or higher educated. Sounds awful. But stats bear me out here, you know, versus Android platform. So there could be some sort of shift there. Andrew, are you an iPhone or an Android user? I'm an iPhone user. iPhone is the most, iOS is the most used system in Australia. So yeah.

And when that message pops up, what button are you going to push? It won't bother me. I'll let it go through. It doesn't bother me what they're tracking. I mean, you're exactly right. You're not going to get less ads. You're going to get less accurate ads.

And for me, it's not really a big deal that sort of information being tracked in apps. It depends. There's a variance as to how people see what that personal data can be used for. And we saw with things like Cambridge Analytica that there can be ways in which your personal data can be honed in on and used against you. But the biggest impact there is scale. And it's the amount of data that Facebook or a company is able to gather. Once they've got a certain amount of data, you can a company is able to gather. Once they've got a certain amount of

data, you can start to find really specific trends. So for me, at a personal level, I'm not overly concerned about what they might be tracking on, whether I bought something in an app or whether I used a certain app or what my browsing history might be. But I do understand that many people would be concerned about that or would have reservations about what is being tracked in their information. Like, it depends on what you do. It depends on, you know, how paranoid you are about how that information is being used. But, I mean, we even saw this with the debate over TikTok

and how TikTok might be transferring data back to the Chinese government and then what the Chinese government might be doing with that data. We don't know what they'll be doing with it. We don't know how they'll be using it. And that's the concern. We don't know what's happening with it. And there might be a case that data. So we don't know what they'll be doing with it. We don't know how they'll be using it. And that's the concern. We don't know what's happening with it. And there might

be a case that comes up in future where suddenly all that data becomes a big concern because it's like we've given them all this information and now it's being used against us. But how exactly that comes about, we don't know, I guess. I have to say, and I don't know that this is just because I turned 50 the other day and I'm now turning into that guy, you know, stand on the stand on the lawn. You kids get off my lawn guy. But in the last six months, I have slowly been sort of evolving my own digital practices to be more anonymous. I now run a VPN all the time in it is in a server in a country that I'm not in.

I run a DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice. I run the DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice. I run the Brave browser. I don't know whether I've just become paranoid because I turned 50 and I'm that guy now or whether, but like you say, we don't know how that's all going to be used. But it's interesting. Yeah, and that's it. We don't know exactly how it's all going to be used,

but there's more and more cameras in the home. There's more smart devices tracking all these different things about what we're doing. And yeah, potentially that could be used against this in varying ways. The biggest example, as I say, is probably something like Cambridge Analytica, where it's been used to influence your political opinions and used to influence how you vote, because they're leaning into your tendencies and your psychological preferences. And they can measure that through your likes and through your activity and get to a point where they can say, well, these people are going to

be concerned about the economy. These people are going to be concerned about immigration. And they can start to narrow and hone in on those specific things, which then push you towards undertaking activities, which maybe you don't agree with, or maybe you didn't want to vote that way, but you've been pushed that way by the information that's being shared to you online how how effective that is how how much that uh happens it's very hard to tell but it's seemingly something that's growing and it's going to happen in future and you know how much how much of an impact that's going to have it's hard to tell so i can see why people would be concerned about it um personally i'm not overly worried about it but and i've spoken to lots of privacy experts

and people who've conducted large-scale studies on Facebook and how it can influence people. And most of them have basically said, you know, the only way to avoid it is to not be involved in the digital economy in any way. You're being tracked, you know, so many different ways that it's not really going to matter what, you know, what you try to do unless you just

shut it off and go and live out in the forest and have no connection to anything. So theoretically, there's not a lot of ways to avoid it. And for me, it's like I'd rather get semi-targeted ads than non-targeted ads. 12 years. 12 months from now, when you are writing that article for socialmediatoday.com that reviews 2021 for digital marketers and social media managers, do you think 2021 will end up being a good year for us? Bad year for us? Confusing? Where do you think we'll end up? terms of technological advancement and things like that there's lots of things that are happening in the ar space and all that sort of stuff that are very interesting could have lots of implications for marketers and the new shifts that have been caused by the pandemic in terms of uh streaming usage uh live video connection all that sort of stuff i expect a lot of those trends to hold but in terms of the broader trends around regulation and around privacy um there's lots of cases that have significant implications if they go through so in in Europe for example I think there was a case recently where they

have started pushing to make all of the social media companies most specifically Facebook store information on European users in Europe if every country does that that's significant right every country starts to say you can only store information on each user in each nation. Not only does it have implications for how data is tracked and, you know, privacy, but it also has implications for how those companies are then taxed because if they have to have a local presence rather than offshoring some

of their stuff, then they have to pay tax at a different rate. So they're going to fight those changes everywhere they can. There's also the new discussion around regulation based on the banning of Donald Trump just this week. Like, is there going to be new regulation where we have to establish definitive rules as to why a platform can or can't de-platform someone? Like what's the regulations? Like should Facebook be able to switch someone off and then give them no access to the 2.7 billion people they have on their platform? Like they've become such influential platforms now that there should be some level of regulation

and I think that's going to be a big discussion as well. So all of the privacy, data privacy and regulation, that could change everything about how marketers operate especially in terms of targeting and finding the right audiences and that's the biggest benefit of social media advertising at the moment is you're able to hone in on such specific groups and get so much value out of it if that starts to reduce then we have to reassess everything about how you know how data is tracked and how how each company tracks that how each you know business tracks data and what they can use it for so it's very like all

of those debates are all just starting to gain momentum now whether they gain momentum or whether they die out it's hard to tell like no one knows whether facebook's going to be able to lobby enough politicians to be like let's not look at that too hard or whether it's going to become you know a much bigger issue. I mean, it's all on the precipice of gaining momentum and snowballing. And when you see the GDPR in Europe and things like that, all those movements have significant implications. But it's very hard to tell whether they become much bigger shifts or whether they slowly die out every time. Andrew, let's talk about your website, socialmediatoday.com. We use it daily.

And like every time we're developing scripts, it's honestly, it's the first bookmark that we go to to kind of get a sense of what's been happening. Share with us a bit about the site and what you folks offer there. So yeah, Social Media Today is the latest digital marketing, social media marketing news we try to make sure that what our posts are is practical information i don't want to sort of i

want to make sure that as much as possible we look at what the changes are we say here's what the change is here's how it works and here's how it affects you and i try to sort of hone that in on small businesses in particular and people who are not overly tech savvy like trying to sort of translate some of the especially like google's updates which are very very dense trying to translate them back down to say this is how it practically applies to to you so uh hopefully uh and over time we've seen you know more and more people coming back to the site hopefully that sort of approach is uh helping to boost appeal and uh in the last uh four years we've really boosted site traffic and been able to sort of focus on the right issues to be able to help people but I mean that's the

the main thing is we're trying to translate the latest trends latest happenings and make sure that people understand not only what it is but how it impacts you and what it actually means to targeting from a from a basic level so it's looking at the trends we look at you know what's coming up and you know what's coming next at the trends. We look at, you know, what's coming up and, you know, what's coming next at the same time, try to make sure that there's a practical element to it and keep it going that way. So we've sort of shifted over the last few years to making sure

and making our focus on the latest news and trying to get that information through. And that's what we try to do as much as we can is get experts where we can and, yeah, communicate the latest stuff as soon as we possibly can, get it up on the site and keep it updated every day, which keeps me very busy, keeps me writing seven to eight posts every day

to keep all the latest stuff in. And on the busy days when there's lots of changes, like when Twitter announced 40 different updates in the last week before Christmas, yeah, my fingers were hurting a lot. But yes, that's the focus

is making sure information is, yeah, just communicating what the latest changes mean in a practical sense, not just from a high level. Do you folks have a podcast? We don't have a podcast. Okay, good. Keep it that way. I don't want to compromise. Or by my mind, require us and let me retire on an island. We're always looking at different stuff. We are looking at a podcast or whatever.

But yeah, as you know, all these things take time and effort and yeah, just trying to work out what we do next. Andrew, thank you so much. Andrew Hutchinson from socialmediatoday.com, top-notch website, one of the best when it comes to digital marketing. Andrew, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me.

Again, Andrew's at socialmediatoday.com, an outstanding source of news in our space. All right, back tomorrow with the regular show.