Has YouTube Found a Crack in Apple's Ad Privacy Wall?

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In This Issue:

• Is YouTube sidestepping Apple's privacy framework?

• Gen Z shows a preference for targeted advertising

• Reddit introduces new ad measurement tools for brands

• YouTube Shorts has hashtag advice and explains why thumbnails aren’t a thing

• Podcasts and on-demand audio surpasses terrestrial radio for the first time

• Dark skies ahead? U.S. consumers shift from splurging to need-based spending

• Instagram faces continued scrutiny over “illegal” ads

🛡 Can YouTube Bypass Apple's Ad Policies?

Two years ago, Apple changed the online ad business significantly by requiring app developers to seek explicit permission to track user’s behaviours.

Prior to that, users could revoke that permission, but that was buried in a setting screen deep in the OS.

This new setup, though, which Apple called ATT — the App Tracking Transparency framework — popped a message up on people’s phones: Track or Don’t Track.

Not surprisingly, most consumers said “Don’t Track,” and within an instant — poof! — marketers lost a huge chunk of data, and platforms like Meta, a whole bunch of ad revenue.

But today, AdWeek is reporting that YouTube may have found a way around ATT.

The data comes from Adalytics and finds that YouTube’s iOS app adds a special identifier called WBraid to sessions where people watch and tap an ad, and then land on the brand’s website.

Quoting AdWeek:

“WBraid is a parameter designed specifically to attribute conversions back to ad campaigns, according to Google documentation. WBraid is then available to other trackers and data brokers that communicate with the website. In the research, each WBraid appeared to be unique to each click on the ad, with the code changing significantly each time.

“There are serious doubts whether some ad click parameters such as WBraid are ATT compliant,” given that WBraid appears to track users without their consent, said Thomas Petit, a mobile ad-tech consultant. “Especially as YouTube doesn’t ask for consent, Google offloads the responsibility onto advertisers and yet is able to process [user behavior] to attribute and report conversions. There are both privacy and antitrust issues in this case.”

For its part, back in 2021, Google said it wouldn’t need to pop that ATT consent prompt up in front of its users anyway because they didn’t plan to use any signals banned by ATT for ad tracking.

That’s actually where WBraid came from — as a response to ATT. At the time, they described it as a privacy-compliant identifier that uses conversion modeling to hide actual user identities.

An executive from Adalytics says they believe WBraid falls well within the scope of what Apple intended to control. At the very least, he said, it certainly violates the spirit of the policy.

[read more at adweek.com]

📊 Gen Z Prefers Targeted Ads Over Older Generations

One of the surprising things that came out of the ATT prompt is that more people actually said Yes to tracking than anyone expected.

New research out this week suggests the generation most likely to not have an issue with that kind of tracking is Gen Z — depending on who you ask, that generation is currently between the ages of 13 and 25.

Quoting MarketingDive:

“Compared to older consumers, Gen Zers are three times as likely to allow tracking when presented with prompts such as those for Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, according to research from Tinuiti. Approximately 37% of Gen Z consumers allowed tracking in order to see more relevant advertising.... For baby boomers, the vast majority opted out.”

So how do Gen Z consumers use privacy tools online when they’re shopping or moving around the web? Compared to other generations, Gen Z consumers were:

• less likely to clear their browser cookies (41% vs. 59%)

• less likely to use an ad blocker (27% vs. 32%)

• more likely to use a VPN (32% vs. 27%)

Also learned: Gen Z consumers are more likely to research a product online before buying it. The difference is notable when you compare to the Baby Boomers — only 7% of whom will search for a product or brand on social media, while a third of Gen Zers will.

And, as we’ve learned from other young generations, they’re not just looking for product info. Almost three-quarters of Gen Z CPG shoppers say the values and beliefs of the brand are important — that’s more than for any other generation.

The numbers came from five different studies, with a total pool of more than 5,000 people. The data was collected between February and April of 2023.

read more at marketingdive.com

📈 Reddit’s Brand and Conversion Lift Metrics

Reddit this week added some new measurement tools to help brands with their campaigns — specifically Brand and Conversion lift metrics.

• Brand lift is a measure of how many people will remember seeing your ad after a period of time. (Meta’s had this as a campaign objective for a long time now, though unless you’re spending millions, you will get a modelled estimate of that lift. When you bring the big bucks, Meta will actually put small surveys in users’ feeds to get real numbers.)
  

• Conversion lift will pull data from the Reddit Pixel to look at what actions were taking after an ad impression.

Both of these can be pulled into third-party platforms like DoubleVerify if you want a second opinion.

read more at socialmediatoday.com

🎥 YouTube Shares Advice for Shorts

YouTube has released a video packed full of advice for marketing managers and creators — all about Shorts, their TikTok competitor.

First — and this is something we hear from all the platforms — they say focus on your audience, not the algorithm. The Shorts algo is entirely different than the YouTube one, and people consume those videos differently.

We also learned a little more about what they consider a view. Unlike other sites, where a view is counted as soon as the video is displayed on the screen, Shorts are a little more complicated.

“What we try and do with a view is have it encode for your intent of watching that thing, so that creators feel like that view has some meaningful threshold that the person decided to watch. It doesn’t mean it’s their favorite video ever, it just means that they are deliberately watching it.”

Yes, there is a calculation involved here, and no YouTube won’t tell you what precisely it is, for fear of people gaming the system

They also said they’re not considering letting Shorts go longer than 60 seconds, like TikTok has done, which I guess isn’t a surprise considering YouTube’s bread and butter is long-form video.

As for why you can’t add a YouTube-like thumbnail, the company said that’s because most people come across a Short by swiping into it from a previous video. Most people wouldn’t see a thumbnail. Like TikTok, though, you can pick a frame from your video and annotate it to use as a thumbnail.

YouTube also says hashtags might indeed help you get more reach:

“Sometimes a hashtag can be associated with a real world thing that’s happened, like an event, and you [want to] associate it with it. Other times they’re focused on topics, and I think in both those cases, creators should consider using them.”

And on the age-old question of quantity or quality, YouTube said aim for quality, hinting that if you keep posting low-quality videos that get minimal engagement, that could hurt your reach of future uploads. And the rumour that deleting and re-uploading a Short can improve reach is, according to the company, not true — and, in fact, might get the video flagged as spam.

YouTube says more than 50 billion Shorts are viewed each day.

read more at socialmediatoday.com

🎧 On-Demand Audio (Finally) Killed the Radio Star

Well, it finally happened. Podcasts have killed the radio star.

Well, not killed, exactly, but certainly beat it.

Edison Research says that on-demand audio (that’s podcasts, paid streaming, and music you own) has — for the first time — consumed more listen time than linear audio (like terrestrial and satellite radio).

“At the end of 2015, a scant seven and one-half years ago, the margin between linear listening and on-demand listening was 38 percentage points. But drop by drop, quarter by quarter and year by year, the margin was erased, and now on-demand leads.”

“The growth of podcast listening is part of the reason for this change.

“Podcasting has attuned hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide to the habit of choosing the right audio content at the right time and hitting play. The same goes for music – once people got used to the ability to choose a specific song or playlist, and of course skip songs – it became hard for many to go back to the ‘lean back’ experience of listening to radio or linear streams.”

So, pour one out for the Wolfman Jacks… the Art Bells… the Garrison Keillors… the Stuart McLeans. Tuned out, but not forgotten.

read more at edisonresearch.com

🛍 U.S. Consumers Show Signs of Spending Caution

Some early trends going into the holiday buying season look like cloudy skies might be ahead.

After the pandemic, U.S. consumers spent big on items like TVs and experiences like travel. The industry even had a name for this — "revenge spending."

But now, some analysts quoted in a New York Times piece this morning say a change is again coming, driven by inflation eroding savings accounts, and the fact that 44 million Americans will start making student loan repayments in October after a pandemic relief measure put those payments on hold.

Big stores like Macy’s and Foot Locker are seeing this change. They report that people are buying less of what they want and more of what they need. Stores that offer discounts, like Walmart and Dollar Tree, are doing well. People are buying cheaper brands and cutting back on extras.

Meanwhile, retail executives told investors this week that credit card delinquencies and retail theft are both on the rise.

There is a canary in the marketing coalmine, though — a historical indicator which could tell us how Christmas will be… that canary is Hallowe’en. It’s a season which is entirely optional — no gifts to give, no social pressure to do much at all. If people don’t spend much for Hallowe’en, it could spell lowered sales for the important holiday buying season at the end of the year.

read more at nytimes.com

🚫 Instagram Limits Reach of 404 Media's Drug Ad Investigation

Yesterday, we reported on a 404 Media investigation that found Instagram was allowing all sorts of crazy ads on its platform — from hacked credit cards, to guns, to illegal drugs.

The news site says just hours after posting its story online, Instagram restricted the reach of its story because their story contained information about — you guessed it — hacked credit cards, guns, and illegal drugs.

The author of the piece says right after getting a notice that their article didn’t follow the platform’s “Recommendation Guidelines,” he got an ad for the illegal sale of MDMA.

Instagram removed the block, once 404 Media removed the words “guns, meth, pills, and weapons” from their caption.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

read more at 404media.co

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