Apple recently announced features from its new macOS, dubbed High Sierra, at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California. But what drew major applause from attendees (and struck fear into the hearts of some advertisers and publishers) was the unexpected shift in digital advertising through Apple’s Safari browser.
Apple prides itself on positive user experience and protecting users’ privacy, so it’s perfectly understandable that the open web should benefit from these types of user-centric approaches. Yet, what’s historically been good for the user hasn’t always been the priority of advertisers, particularly when you take a look at the invasive – and sometimes maddening – auto-play video and display retargeting ads that relentlessly stalk users around the internet for weeks.
Sure, both are clearly effective at converting eyeballs into customers, but they often come at the cost of a user’s sanity and privacy. Now, with Safari on High Sierra, all of that could be preparing for a big change before the end of 2017.
Auto-Play Blocking
Safari on High Sierra will be the first desktop browser with significant market share to combat one of the most annoying elements of publisher websites today: the auto-play video. While it isn’t clear yet if blocking auto-play will be a default setting, we have been given some clarity on it being uniformly applied to both Flash and HTML5 video (sorry, Google Chrome).
To be fair, many publishers use auto-play videos to highlight news stories and aren’t simply bombarding visitors with ads. But if we’re looking at the functionality honestly, the pre-roll ad has served a key objective in that it monetizes the page and delivers a decent amount of revenue. In other words, publishers and advertisers are being sized up for what could amount to a significant financial hit.
When a video is blocked from auto-playing and the ad doesn’t roll, an advertiser can’t be charged by the publisher for an impression. It’s a tough pill to swallow for struggling publishers looking at every possible way to pay their staff, but it’s the right decision for users who prefer their first action on a web page to be scrolling through an article as opposed to searching for the video’s pause button.
Intelligent Tracking Prevention
Without getting into too much of the technical detail, display ads rely on cookies to determine where a user has been and what they might have viewed. These cookies also help with keeping you logged into accounts, making a simple cookie purge more of an inconvenience to users than having to ignore repetitive retargeting ads.
With Apple’s “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” (ITP), however, login cookies will be partitioned from cross-site tracking, effectively limiting the retargeting of a user with a display ad to a mere 24 hours after their last visit.
Now, while ITP isn’t strict ad blocking, it will prevent advertisers from stalking a visitor to an unsettling degree with a display ad. What does this mean for the future of publishers and advertisers? First, the 24-hour time limit will certainly alter the effectiveness of display retargeting as we know it, and second, it has the potential to interrupt user feedback to ad networks like AdRoll and Google Display. Cross-device attribution has been a hot topic in digital advertising for quite some time. If Apple is taking the axe to cross-site tracking after just 24 hours, then we may be continuing the cross-device battle well past 2017.
The Expected Impact
It’s important to note that as of the date this article was published, Intelligent Tracking Prevention has only been announced for desktop Safari users running macOS High Sierra. NetMarketShare, a web stats provider for recording browser and OS trends, puts the share of desktop users on Safari at just over 3.5% as of May 2017. What percentage of Mac users will adopt High Sierra in 2017 still remains a mystery. And based on the concerns publishers, advertisers and web developers have expressed since the announcement, it remains to be seen if ITP will roll out in its current form. The workarounds that will ultimately come from the largest ad networks prior to ITP’s rollout aren’t apparent at this stage either.
If nothing changes with Apple’s plan or in the ad space, advertisers using display networks for simple retargeting within Safari (where a visit originates from Safari) will almost certainly be impacted. Ads that are served via DoubleClick or AdRoll, and not directly from the website’s server, will very likely be blocked after the first 24-hour interaction unless a user continues to visit the site and the session is renewed. Essentially, unless a user is continually interacting with a site, they will be spared the persistent dogging of retargeting ads.
As marketers who understand the value of video and display retargeting, we shudder a bit at thinking these productive tactics could be severely limited with a change by such a major player. On the other hand, as web users ourselves, we appreciate Apple taking the lead on combating abusive practices that make some websites practically unusable. I suppose our dueling personalities will have to await the final outcome.
