How Will iOS 14 Impact Agencies?

Another summer, another WWDC … another Apple privacy iOS announcement! This time Apple has unveiled its next step in the consumer privacy journey. While “Limited Ad Tracking” (LAT) had its day in the sun, Apple has chosen to go one step further. Now they have created a process that will mask the IDFA until a user explicitly opts in, unlike the current model which requires a consumer to explicitly opt-out. See below.

Apple has always prioritized privacy and security. The new iOS 14 release is just the next step in their mission to provide customers transparency into the data being shared with any entity outside of the mobile publisher collecting the data. While this clearly affects the market’s ability to access iOS consumer data, that data will not disappear, and the available supply will prove more valuable to marketers.

What does this mean?

First, the IDFA has not disappeared. Data will decrease in scale, but no one knows by how much. Do GenZers care about their data being exchanged for free content? Will someone want their Lyft to pick them up several blocks away from their location? Or prefer to opt-in to precise location permissions?  Ultimately, the four ad-tech functions that will be most impacted are attribution, onboarding, targeting, and fraud.  We anticipate that there will be a significant dropoff in addressability on iOS in Q3 2020 with a modest recovery in Q1 2021. We’ll have to wait and see how consumers adapt to the changes in the fall and take another look.

Second, context is back for good. As addressability becomes more limited, the context the user resides in will be more important. In-app, that means what app they are in, what content they are consuming, and what function they utilize within the app. You can expect a lot of industry innovation around the mobile context.

What does this mean for agencies and your brand partners?

The good news is that the industry, with TrueData taking a leadership role,  is working on additional, privacy-compliant, addressable signals to resolve activities back to a consumer in a privacy-compliant manner. Hashed emails, IP addresses, plus new “Private IDs” being created by the leading AdTech and MarTech partners will enable marketers to counter any decrease in IDFA-mapped data.

For now, it’s important to educate your clients. Here are the four key points:

• iOS 14 will decrease the scale of iOS data across the board; however, it also makes the available data 100% opt-in, privacy-compliant, and incredibly valuable.
• New identifiers will create independent standards for addressability that resolve consumers’ activity without touching any PII.
• Context regains its foothold. Understanding the composition of a brand’s target customer and competitors’ customers through a contextual lens unleashes the opportunity to optimize planning/strategy/buying across all screens and platforms. 
• Google is likely to follow suit, but will give the industry plenty of notice. Any strategic work done to address the deprecation of the IDFA will be a hedge against any move that Google makes.

From our point of view, this update complements the work legitimate data organizations have been doing to deliver privacy-compliant, opt-in, and deterministic audiences to increase ROAS across all screens and platforms. Here at TrueData, we will continue to ingest data directly from verified and vetted sources, and deliver that data to our agency partners to drive target outcomes for their clients. See our recent analysis of Dunkin’s customers during COVID using place visitation data and all the other mobile data attributes.

We will have more to share as we see more data on the impact of iOS 14 to overall scale in the coming months. Stay tuned!