Report: Leaked Facebook Memo Shows How Advertisers Will Be Impacted by Apple Privacy Changes

A leaked internal Facebook memo reveals how Apple’s long-awaited iOS 14.5 App Tracking Transparency feature may affect advertisers. Facebook reportedly expects ad campaigns will “fluctuate” as iPhone users update their devices.

Business Insider reports that a memo sent by Facebook to advertisers on Wednesday gives greater insight into how Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency feature which is set to release this week will affect advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook says that it expects that ad campaign results will “fluctuate” gradually as users update their devices to the new iOS version in the coming weeks.

According to the memo, advertisers will lose the ability to target an advertisement with an estimated time frame to result in conversion when it comes to iOS users. The privacy changes are likely to impact the way advertisers not only target their ads, but the analytics and information they can access about the people viewing their ads.

For users running iOS 14.5, the Facebook and Instagram apps will automatically opt them out of tracking settings. Facebook has clarified that it will not be possible to create things like Mobile App Install campaigns with iOS 14.5 users as the target audience as a result of the update.

Facebook CFO Dave Wehner has stated that the company is expecting “increased ad targeting headwinds in 2021 from regulatory and platform changes, notably the recently launched iOS 14.5 update.”

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg added that Facebook is doing a “huge amount of work’ to prepare for the changes to personalized advertising. Sandberg stated:

We’re doing a huge amount of work to prepare. We’re working with our customers to implement Apple’s API and our own aggregated events measurement API to mitigate the impact of the iOS 14 changes. We’re rebuilding meaningful elements of our ad tech so that our system continues to perform when we have access to less data in the future.

And we’re part of long-term collaborations with industry bodies like the W3C on initiatives like privacy enhancing technologies that provide personalized experiences while limiting access to people’s information. It’s also on us to keep making the case that personalized advertising is good for people and businesses, and to better explain how it works so that businesses don’t have to understand the alphabet soup of acronyms they’ll need to comply with. But they do need to have confidence that they can still use our tools to reach the people who want to buy what they’re selling in a privacy-safe way. We’re confident they can and that they can continue to get great results as digital advertising evolves.

Wehner stated that he believes the impact to Facebook’s advertising business will be manageable, stating:

Overall, the impact of these specific ‌iOS 14‌ changes are one element of some of the challenges with Apple, but we think the impact of the Apple approach is really much bigger than this particular update. Apple has a number of private APIs on hardware and software that advantage their own products and services in ways that are challenging. We face that issue in places like our messaging products, and even with the hardware products we’re launching. So we generally don’t think this closed approach is the best one for the industry from an innovation perspective.