Each week, NDA Editor Justin Pearse will be casting his eye over some of the week’s more important industry stories and highlights must-read articles you may have missed.
An industry still digesting the news of Google’s final confirmation of its decision to stop supporting third-party cookies in Chrome, received its latest Google jolt as the company kicked off the week by announcing an end of August deadline for its decision to block ads that violated its heavy ad intervention policy.
As Digiday discovered, despite the move being first announced back in May, the launch caught some publishers unprepared, just the latest example of such upset caused by the continual march of tech platforms updates and evolution.
Another tech platform dominating the news is TikTok, which this week saw a joint Microsoft/Walmart bid for the company’s US operations, joining a seemingly never-ending list of suitors, including Oracle. Amidst the torrent of news coverage, Campaign had a superb interview with TikTok’s Lionel Sim, recently appointed to heat up a global agency team at the company. Jessica Goodfellow’s interview is a great insight into how the company, that has been hoovering up digital talent in the UK ad industry, plans to further integrate itself into the ad industry.
The interview also outlines how Sim is “eyeing integrated partnerships that go beyond just million-dollar deals, hoping to work collaboratively with agencies across three key areas: product innovation, digital excellence and thought leadership.”
A must read for anyone looking for insight into the impact of TikTok in this industry.
The week ended with a furious spat between Apple and Facebook, which loudly complained that the upcoming change in ad tracking consent in apps, widely seen as an IDFA Apocalpse for the ad industry, could lead its Audience Network ad business plummeting 50%.
“We know this may severely impact publishers’ ability to monetize through Audience Network on iOS 14, and, despite our best efforts, may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS14 in the future,” Facebook said in a blog post.
In a nice piece of analysis on Digiday, Seb Joseph argues Apple’s latest privacy move is, in a similar way to Google’s upcoming abandonment of third-party cookies, likely to add extra impetus to the re-focus on contextual targeting by advertisers. As he points out, “While contextual targeting has previously seemed too far from precise user-level targeting, advertisers are reassessing that stance given the lack of alternatives.”
Finally, while online personalisation continues to perplex and excite the digital an industry, The Drum has a fascinating case study showing just how effective it can be, looking into Adidas’s personalisation-at-scale approach to ecommerce. The piece describes how “a big push into dynamic digital creative has helped lessen the blow [of the pandemic] for Adidas, which has seen e-commerce grow 93%.”
Have a great weekend.
