The future of app marketing in a privacy-centric age

venturebeat.com:

Presented by Adikteev

The mobile ad industry is built on data. And as most marketers know, in 2021, Apple unceremoniously turned the industry on its head when it cut off a crucial user data stream. The new privacy feature, App Tracking Transparency (ATT), caused an uproar.

“ATT was heavily marketed by Apple as an enhancement to consumer privacy, but it also created a massive shock for the iOS app marketing industry, because app marketing was relying tremendously on IDFA,” says Loïc Anton, Chief Product Officer at Adikteev. “Only now, three years after, we’re starting to have something that looks usable for app marketers with SKAN 4 .”

With the FLEDGE (First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment) initiative, now known as Protected Audience API, Google is also developing alternatives to ad targeting and tracking methods without cookies inside the Chrome browser and Android platform. The goal is to allow personalized marketing campaigns, even without a device identifier. But even though FLEDGE will still allow marketers to do precise retargeting at scale, user-level ad personalization will be much more difficult.

And while the iOS changes have been the biggest wildfire to put out, and Google’s program is still currently in trial, developers should be updating their strategy to stay competitive in a very different landscape.

“Regardless of what these two allow or don’t allow, app marketers must change their strategies to adapt to an increasingly privacy-centric world,” Anton says. “And a complicated economic context requires app marketers to also get smarter about how they target their users. But the overall purpose of marketing and retargeting is still relevant.”

Reporting has been hit the hardest by these changes.