Apple has nearly doubled its workforce in its burgeoning digital advertising business, less than 18 months after introducing sweeping privacy changes that have plagued larger rivals in the lucrative industry. are planning
According to LinkedIn, the iPhone maker’s advertising platform team has about 250 people. Apple’s careers site is considering hiring 216 people, four times the 56 it was hiring in the second half of 2020. Apple disputed the numbers, but did not provide further details.
The digital advertising industry has been under pressure since Apple announced a privacy rule last year that overturned the $400 billion digital advertising market and made it more difficult for Apple to tailor advertising to its more than 1 billion iPhone users. Nervous about advertising ambitions.
Facebook’s parent companies Meta, Snap, and Twitter have lost billions of dollars in revenue and even more in market valuations since the policy was introduced, but there were additional factors.
“It was like a global panic,” said Jade Arenstein, global services lead at Incubeta, a marketing performance company based in South Africa, of the impact of Apple’s change.
Meanwhile, Apple’s once fledgling advertising business is now “growing incredibly fast,” according to a job ad. Revenue from the business has grown from just a few hundred million dollars in the late 2010s to about $5 billion this year, according to research group Evercore ISI. The company expects Apple to have his $30 billion advertising business within four years.
Apple’s ad business is small compared to Google and Facebook, which had $209 billion and $115 billion in ad revenue in 2021, respectively. But what the digital advertising industry fears is that critics and rivals could proliferate quickly by setting rules that give them an unfair advantage.
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“Building a new advertising system to effectively compete with incumbent companies with tens of thousands of employees and 10 to 20 years of maturity is typically an impossible task,” he said. Adtech Group Branch CEO Alex Austin said. “Unless you were able to put your competitors at a disadvantage in some way on your platform,” he added.
Apple has long been a major big tech outlier for not engaging in “surveillance capitalism” (the practice of targeting ads and profiting from data while offering free services to customers). did.
In 2018, CEO Tim Cook said, “If you monetize your customers, you’ll make a ton of money.”
But with Apple expanding where developers can buy ads on the App Store twice in the past two years and planning to do more, critics see Cook making a noticeable U-turn. I’m here.
David Steinberg, chief executive of marketing technology firm Zeta Global, said Apple is trying to be “Machiavellian” and “excellent” by adopting privacy rules that force its competitors to rebuild their advertising infrastructure. ‘, and at the same time provided an opportunity for the company to fill the void.
“They can build[the advertising business]dramatically[and]the ‘air cover’ is to protect consumer privacy,” he said.
Apple declined to comment on its long-term ambitions. But job ads tell prospective employees that their goal is nothing less than “redefining advertising” for a “privacy-centric” world.
The 216 jobs Apple is filling include product designers and managers, data engineers, and sales specialists.
An ad for engineering leaders posted on August 24 referred to “Apple’s most sensitive strategic plan” and called it “the most privacy-preserving and technologically sophisticated . platform and demand-side platform”.
These are key components of the ad tech business where advertisers buy and sell ads on multiple exchanges and may place ads in mobile apps downloaded from the App Store. It’s no surprise that Apple considers mobile apps to be “first party” data. That’s because all activity happens on his iPhone and is subject to its own privacy rules that prohibit tracking users without their consent between third-party his apps.
Positions are primarily in the United States, but include at least 27 positions in Europe, 12 in China, 12 in India, 4 in Japan and 2 in Singapore.
“This is a huge team, bigger than most small companies,” says Arenstein. “Where there is smoke, there is fire, and it is smoke.”
Apple has never objected to advertising per se. Company founder Steve Jobs even tried to make iPhone apps available for free by starting an in-app advertising business in 2010. What Cook opposes is the way private information is bought or sold by opaque third parties without the consent of iPhone users.
Still, Apple’s setting the rules for how advertising works and expanding into that area seems problematic to many observers.
“Right now, from a surveillance economy standpoint, it’s safer to use an Apple phone than a Google phone because Google designs its products to help with surveillance, while Apple is not an advertising company per se,” said Claire. Atkin, co-founder of watchdog Check My Ads, said: “But if Apple suddenly digs into that territory, the competitive advantage is gone.”
Apple could jeopardize its reputation if consumers and regulators resist debates about privacy, a key component of its recent iPhone campaign. If that claim wins, Apple will have an open runway.
Margo Kahnrose, chief marketing officer at omnichannel ad platform Skai, said it “absolutely makes sense” for Apple to follow in the footsteps of Google, Facebook and Amazon and build its own ad network. said.
For years, the power of ad tech flowed from a decentralized “open web” to a “walled garden” maintained by a single company that could control how ads were bought, served, measured and reported, she said. added.
“The world has long been uneasy about Apple’s ambitions: ‘There are a minority of players who are clearly disproportionately powerful, and Apple is a sleeping giant.'”
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