Over the last few years, Apple has focused heavily on privacy, preventing established tracking and profiling methodologies across the iOS operating system in the name of user experience. It’s no surprise then that the new iOS 14 update includes even greater restrictions with regards to app install and usage data.
Why should you care?
As iOS makes up circa 49% of the UK market, advertisers are increasingly losing the ability to measure campaign performance on a granular level. The technology partners you use (including Facebook and Google) are also reliant on device-level data signals to power their AI optimisation, however the newly aggregated data from Apple’s SKAdNetwork means they don’t know which devices undertook which actions based on their exposure to advertising.
The good news is that because Apple’s behaviour isn’t new, tech companies have been working on cookieless solutions since ITP nearly three years ago and systems that don’t rely on 3rd party Software Development Kits (SDKs) for over 12 months. Google’s huge Universal App Campaign ecosystem uses data from the Google SDK found in 69% of the top 200 apps and Facebooks App Event Optimisation can use their SDK found on over 80,00 apps so although affected, they still have a vast data pool (for now).
At The Kite Factory, we are more interested in the other innovations that can be found across the digital ecosystem, so we’ve compiled our top three companies to keep an eye on over the next 12 months as we continue to face these ongoing measurement challenges (in no particular order):
- MediaIQ – A partnership with Skyrise data provides them with constantly refreshed cookieless telco data on 20 million UK users. GDPR compliant data on location, browsing, app usage and demographic will allow you to buy not just Display & Video but programmatic audio and DOOH using their real-time bidder.
- Crimtan – They have developed their own ActiveID combining consented data, non-cookie-based user IDs and data triangulation for probabilistic modelling which can power both their targeting and measurement across all ecosystems including iOS and they have recently added LinkMAX mobile technology to their offering.
- Quantcast – Quantcast’s stack was historically turbocharged by data from publishers using their free insight tool that collected data and they pivoted this approach into their free CMP tool which is now used by over 25,000 publishers to collect GDPR compliant data signals at scale.
If you would like to find out more about how these companies can futureproof your digital activity, or you think there should be other media and technology companies on this list, please get in touch.