The Big Story
Apple to Potentially Expand Advertising Capabilities
Earlier this month, Apple released a job listing for a senior manager for a Demand Side Platform. This has led many to believe that Apple will be expanding its current first-party advertising offerings with the addition of a demand-side platform.
Apple has notoriously been known for objecting to advertising-centric business practices like that of Facebook due to their strong stance on data privacy. However, they have been showing signs of slowly building out their advertising capabilities with new ad placements on the App Store and Apple News. It is still unclear if the potential DSP is aimed at serving ads solely on Apple’s owned and operated properties or if they plan to expand outwards.
For years, Apple has built a vast walled garden with their connected products and services rich in user data. Because of this, Apple will have full control over how and where this data is used without the risk of the data leaving their walled garden. This could potentially result in a huge increase in ad revenue for Apple as advertisers flock to their first-party data.
Social Updates
With over 200 million businesses using Meta applications, Meta recently introduced new targeting options for B2B advertisers. This new B2B targeting options will be available when creating a new campaign and will include:
- IT decision-makers: People who are information technology decision makers, based on their job titles.
- Business decision-maker titles and interests: People who are business decision-makers based on their job titles and interests.
- Business decision-makers: People who are business decision-makers in engineering/IT, operations, human resources, strategy or marketing, based on their job titles.
- New active business: Administrators of engaged businesses that were created in the past six, 12 or 24 months. Meta noted that this option reflects three segments—one for each timeframe.
Twitter to Add Podcasts to its Platform
Twitter has announced their “all-in-one, personalized audio destination” with the addition of podcasts into their platform. The podcasts can be found in the Spaces Tab that is designed in three sections: Stations, Spaces Spotlights, and Upcoming Spaces. ‘Stations’ groups content together based on different topics while also giving recommendations based on user themes and people you follow. ‘Spaces Spotlight’ lists the top curated audio content currently out. Lastly, ‘Upcoming Spaces’ details future content that users can set reminders for. Users are also able to like or dislike a podcast to help Twitter make more educated recommendations.
Digital Updates
Better Content For People, by People
This month, Google has rolled out two major updates aimed at making helpful and relevant content more accessible for users. The first update, which is coined the “helpful content update,” works to filter out irrelevant content that was created solely for ranking purposes. With so much content being developed now, Google continuously works to ensure that high-quality content that is useful to users takes precedence over content that is created only to appease Google’s ranking system. The second update aims to help users find more helpful product reviews written by experts. Since product reviews play an important part in a consumer’s decisions making, Google has been working to make high-quality, in depth and original reviews easier to find.
For the second time, Google has announced their delay of removing third-party tracking cookies. This will now be pushed off until 2024. Advertisers, who are probably not surprised, have already been turning to alternate solutions like first-party platforms and data clean rooms. In the meantime, Google is slowly rolling out their Privacy Sandbox trials as their solution to cookie-less technology.
Google Takes on Digital Out-of-Home
Google’s Display & Video 360 digital platform introduced a new digital out-of-home piece this week. With digital OOH placements, advertisers are now able to serve ads in public places such as airports, bus stops, elevators, shopping centers, stadiums and taxis all through one centralized platform. This even allows for advertisers to run multiple versions of creative based on the time of day. Google, however, has stressed that these placements are not personalized and do not use individual identifiers or user location data to serve ads. Instead, this relies on contextual information of the actual screen location. Not only does this broaden advertisers’ toolsets, but it also streamlines the process by allowing one self-service location for strategy, activation, reporting and optimization.
