Apple made an announcement on June 5th that will change the economics of the internet. They plan to improve the Safari experience by adjusting ad tracking. Ad tracking is in-market research that monitors a brand’s performance including brand and advertising awareness, product trial and usage, and attitudes about the brand versus their competition.
Companies can follow you around the Internet in order to get further insight to better their advertising campaigns. This is how we are marketed to on the Internet.
Most consumers do not appreciate the attempts to be marketed to while on the internet. These online advertisements feel threatening when they take over your whole screen, and are annoying when they start playing sound when you haven’t allowed them to.
Not only are these inconveniences, but since these advertisements can follow you around and track what you do on the internet, it is a security breach to many consumers and Apple never wants their customers to be in a position where they feel uncomfortable.
So Apple created a new feature,
“Intelligent Tracking Prevention [ITP] is a new WebKit feature that reduces cross-site tracking by further limiting cookies and other website data, Intelligent Tracking Prevention collects statistics on resource loads as well as user interactions such as taps, clicks, and text entries. The statistics are put into buckets per top privately-controlled domain or TLD+1.”- Apple’s John Wilander.
In plain English: ad-tracking can only follow you around for 24 hours and Safari will delete all of a site’s tracking cookies if you do not visit the site for 30 days. This means that their ability to track you is fundamentally limited, and will improve your privacy and experience online.
Will Safari’s numbers rise with the promise of less advertising traffic? To a browser like Google’s Chrome, less advertisements would not be quite as beneficial as it will be for Apple — Apple’s business model doesn’t revolve around advertising sales. Thus, Apple is not intimidated by a lack of advertisements. They would prefer happy, safe customers and they may have found another way to give them more security and a better experience.
Now, this announcement did not make everyone happy; 6 major trade groups expressed concern with these plans. With this in place, it restricts the tracking abilities of websites and advertisers which could cut into their bottom line. What is good for the consumer privacy, would not be good for them. They explained this in an open letter to Apple.
“Blocking cookies in this manner will drive a wedge between brands and their customers, and it will make advertising more generic and less timely and useful.” — The Data and Marketing Association and the Network Advertising Initiative.
Advertisers will not be able to use target marketing to select their audiences and it will be more difficult for them to know how well or poorly their strategy is operating. These associations wanted to make their concerns very clear to Apple and the rest of the Internet.
For many small businesses that use these marketing tools, they will find themselves needing to adjust strategy. This means that some of Panda Rose’s clients might be affected as well. We agree with Apple that ensuring consumer privacy should be top priority, and will help our clients to work with these new restrictions.
Tess Houcher
