In early February, Facebook parent company Meta Platforms ended its trading day with its biggest one-day drop ever, after the company forecast weaker-than-expected growth. Among other pieces of business-challenging news, the company said that Apple’s iPhone privacy changes, which impact Facebook’s ad targeting and measuring, would result in a $10 billion revenue decline for Facebook this year. The company also said macroeconomic challenges were weighing on advertiser budgets. Neither of those advertising challenges should have come as a big surprise. As early as August 2020, and numerous times since then, Facebook had said that privacy changes in Apple’s iOS14 operating system would create headwinds and harm the company’s ability to place personalized ads. Around the same time, other companies stated that the new privacy rules would negatively impact marketing and consumer acquisition costs.
In the 18 months since, things have become even more challenging for the digital advertising business, as government scrutiny of tracking and surveillance marketing has become more intense, the effects of changes to some privacy rules have become more evident, and alternatives to advertising based on tracking have become more apparent as the Battle for Consumer Time spreads peoples’ attention to different digital mediums. The state of digital advertising, concentrated and focused on tracking across the web, is over, folks.