Managing the Unexpected as a Digital Marketer
The craft of being a Digital Marketer facing iOS 14
Digital Marketing now and Marketing previously, have been accompanied by perpetual change.
What are marketing earthquakes?
A marketing earthquake is a recurring event that changes the way marketing strategies are built. These kinds of events are always accompanied by some sort of drastic headline claiming “this will be the end”.
Since marketers seem to still be around, this has obviously not been the case and what has been learned is that surprises are second nature to the marketer’s profession and change management is what marketers have to eat for breakfast.
Periodically, in fact, marketers have been faced with obstacles aimed at making this discipline more of a humane one ( by limiting the breadth of action) and, always periodically, marketers have found creative ways to work around the obstacles to obtain the same results as before.
One of the latest earthquakes is all about Apple iOS 14
Just to make some examples, we can look to current news about Apple who announced it will be drastically limiting functionality and data accessible to marketers, in order to improve user privacy. This will all happen with the release of the Apple iOS 14.
What will happen exactly?
Apple is making marketers open up about how they are going to use the data collected and, instead of making this info difficult to users to keep track of, Apple chose to be on the customers’ side and to make all this available directly in the phone’s privacy settings.
Customers will have to give their explicit permission to be tracked online by websites and apps in order to view ads that suit their profile.
The end of an era?
Probably not. Retargeting will not die and there are of course other ways for Facebook to use its data to allow marketers to track and retarget users, although a lot remains TBD.
It must be said that marketing is hardly ethical, although one can work with ethics. So, will marketers ride the wave and work around this one too? Sure they will!
