Do you know the expression “When a service is free, you are the product”? It is a maxim that is heard in many circumstances and that could distract us from the true nature of advertising and its role in monetizing services and that thanks to this we can enjoy them for free.
For some time now, Apple has been taking steps to change the way we expose ourselves to advertising. Gestures like building apps should ask us if we want to be tracked or Safari’s smart tracking prevention might leaves us with the impression of an anti-advertising stance, but that’s not so.
Publicity and privacy are two very different things.
One thing is publicity, and the other is privacy. Apple has always stood for privacy, and many of its actions in advertising support change the way it works, never eliminate it. In 2010, as we can see in the video above these lines, Steve Jobs himself presented iAd, Apple’s advertising platform.
“On the App Store, there are 49 cent and 99 cent apps, and we like that. Users like it. But these developers have to find a way to monetize those apps. So what a lot of one of them are starting to do is put ads on in their apps. And, for lack of a fancy way to put it, we think that advertising really sucks. So we thought we could help.
This is how Steve Jobs opened the presentation of a platform which, although Apple subsequently closed, constitutes a clear position on the part of Apple in the field of advertising. And why did you close it? just for another of its clear positions in the field of advertising: privacy.
Apple’s advertising platform did not provide as much data as advertisers wanted. Compared to the hyper-accuracy of other platforms such as DoubleClick, later acquired by Google, what Apple offered was quite behind the times, albeit in the best sense for us users.
Change things up by forcing yourself to look for more privacy-friendly alternatives.
And that’s where I think Apple has been trying to change things lately. Let me give my personal opinion following more than one conversation in which I heard that Apple is against advertising. For me Apple is trying to change advertising. Advertisers and advertisers have been present from the print media, radio, television, and have never needed so much data to accomplish their mission.
Now it seems that if we can’t advertise to men aged 30-47 who live within a 10 minute walk of a certain mall that they desperately need to buy a new vacuum cleaner, we don’t we can no longer monetize anything. It shouldn’t be like this, and Apple knows it. I think at Apple they have very of course the ad won’t go anywhere, it’s not their intention to make it go away.
Gradually closing the doors to advertisers to blatantly obtain our data, Apple is forcing the major advertising platforms to work with us to find more respectful alternatives. Google has already made proposals, although they have not yet been implemented. Apple has made proposals in the form of SDKs to analyze ad clicks in apps without having to compromise on advertising.
Publicity is one thing, privacy is another. I think at Apple they are very clear about the difference and are looking change things by forcing technology to evolve and looking for new ways to achieve almost the same results without having to know everything about us. In other words, Apple is not and has never been against advertising, but in favor of privacy.
In Applesphere | My privacy is very important to me, these are the apps that have passed my filter and that I use
