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The Attribution Stack: How to Make Budget Decisions in a Post-iOS14 World

52 points by hammer_mt 4y ago

jeroenhd 4y ago
Good to see that Apple's anti tracking features are having a real world impact on the cyberstalking done by marketeers. Clearly the war isn't won yet, but if Apple can keep thinking up new privacy features to advertise their products with, things can only get better.
iinnPP 4y ago
One side effect I noted in working through the mentioned iOS upgrades was how it impacted various groups. Our marketing efforts began seeing a skew towards groups more likely to own either an older iPhone or an Android device. The product has died, thankfully.
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
It's hilarious how they call privacy features "apocalypse." Kudos for Apple for making the lives of these folks more difficult.
- pete_nic 4y ago
  Perhaps a bit idealistic but I aspire for a world where companies can segment and target their market while consumers maintain a level of privacy.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    If we assume that privacy is 100% respected, "segmenting and targeting" is still not something that benefits consumers.
    - pete_nic 4y ago
      Do you believe privacy is 100% respected in the offline world? A billboard for a personal injury lawyer on the highway or an ad for headphones at a subway stop are all examples of segmentation and targeting we experience in the offline world.
      - dev_tty01 4y ago
        How is that disrespecting privacy? The billboard (so far) is not doing facial or license identification and recording that I drove by the sign at 2:23 on Monday at 63 mph.
      - theamk 4y ago
        The equivalent of this is showing gaming keyboard ads on ign.com, and bank ads on bloomberg.com. As long as same ads are shown to every visitor, this is no problem at all. The people hate it when their actions on one site affect ads on completely unrelated sites. Real wold equvalent would be a salesman saying "I was passing by your house yesterday amd noticed you got a new bed.. Want to buy some bedsheets at a great price?". I think we agree this would be super creepy.
        pete_nic 4y ago
        Contextual advertising https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/contextual-advertising.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/contextual-advertising....
      - jen20 4y ago
        People can do that kind of online targeting without the need for privacy invasion. For example, if I wanted to target Apple users who probably have some disposable income, I'd buy an ad slot on John Gruber's blog. If I wanted to advertise to frequent travellers, I'd advertise on FlyerTalk. That kind of thing.
    - shostack 4y ago
      How do you reconcile that with small businesses for example needing to reach prospective customers?
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  > You’ve probably had this experience: you spend some time on the whiteboard mapping out your marketing funnel and growth loops, and you’re really fired up ready to grow your business, but then the ultimate question hits you like a sledgehammer: “How are we going to track this?”. No, I have not. One wonders how Sony in the 1950's (as an example) "tracked".
- trurl 4y ago
  And still folks think that if side loading is forced on Apple, that companies will not force us to start side loading their apps to escape this "apocalypse".
  - glowingly 4y ago
    I agree. We only have to look 3 years ago to see exactly what happens when those same companies get sideload access. Facebook did something very similar, using their Apple App Store Developer certificate to enroll users as "employees," allowing them to defacto sideload their market research application. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19033451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19033451 I also fully expect the last browser holding against Google's browser monoculture - Safari - to die soon after. I hate this state of affairs, where Apple's sheer greed is the main force stablizing this fragile environment.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Those instances show that Facebook is willing to do that to small incentivized groups of users- in that case, volunteers offered monetary benefit via gift cards, but difficult to say such a model is accomplishable on a wide scale. This is a situation where the users were self-selecting. Certainly, companies will misuse and abuse the freedoms associated with sideloading, but I disagree that it’s as an easy task as people think. First they actually have to build competing app stores that are compelling enough for users to overcome the friction of switching. I don’t think these companies, other than game platforms like Epic, and perhaps tech companies in politically sensitive markets such as China or Russia, have it in them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30808926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30808926
      - trurl 4y ago
        I don't understand why you think building alternative app stores is somehow a limiting factor. If you want to use some software, and the company wants to bypass Apple's protections, they'll just put a download link on their website. Why go through the hassle of registering with any "app store" at all?
pete_nic 4y ago
> The truth is we’re in a post-truth world, where more than one opinion is valid. You should never trust just one single source of information, without validating what it's telling you, and thinking about the potential motivations and incentives behind that conclusion. Wisdom applicable beyond the topic of this article
- throwmeariver1 4y ago
  There was never a truth world it was always a world of trust and the trust got eroded in the last decades but it's still there. If you trust your business partner or your life partner you can make decisions without checking them. If you trust no one, your decision making is so hampered that even if you come to the right conclusion it's most certainly too late.
username223 4y ago
I always feel strange seeing these walls of pseudo-scientific marketroid babble. Their fundamental purpose is to make some fraction of people choose Crest over Colgate, or vice versa, but they've fallen so far down the rabbit-hole of this mundane task that they can come up with competing "models" and multi-thousand-word articles promoting and explaining them. From an ordinary human's perspective, it's like shopping for groceries and getting side-tracked into a discussion of the natures of free will and the fundamental building blocks of matter. I just want to buy some decent-tasting apples, not grasp the neural correlates of my apparent "choice," or the string-theoretic basis of their multicolored skins. That's not to say there aren't useful nuggets to be gleaned. For example, the fact that "third-party consumer data" and "customer matching" are the highest form of marketing surveillance tells me they're buying data from credit card companies and shady "data brokers," and correlating that using whatever identifiers they can. So I should probably keep entering fake phone numbers, zip codes, and email addresses when I can.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > Their fundamental purpose is to make some fraction of people choose Crest over Colgate Their fundamental purpose is to convince their boss or client that they are indeed making consumers choose one over the other and make up data and/or theories to support that assertion so they can justify their fees/salaries/bonuses. They don't particularly care whether consumers are actually choosing the product.

52 points by hammer_mt 4y ago

Good to see that Apple's anti tracking features are having a real world impact on the cyberstalking done by marketeers. Clearly the war isn't won yet, but if Apple can keep thinking up new privacy features to advertise their products with, things can only get better.

iinnPP 4y ago

One side effect I noted in working through the mentioned iOS upgrades was how it impacted various groups. Our marketing efforts began seeing a skew towards groups more likely to own either an older iPhone or an Android device. The product has died, thankfully.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

It's hilarious how they call privacy features "apocalypse." Kudos for Apple for making the lives of these folks more difficult.

pete_nic 4y ago
Perhaps a bit idealistic but I aspire for a world where companies can segment and target their market while consumers maintain a level of privacy.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  If we assume that privacy is 100% respected, "segmenting and targeting" is still not something that benefits consumers.
  - pete_nic 4y ago
    Do you believe privacy is 100% respected in the offline world? A billboard for a personal injury lawyer on the highway or an ad for headphones at a subway stop are all examples of segmentation and targeting we experience in the offline world.
    - dev_tty01 4y ago
      How is that disrespecting privacy? The billboard (so far) is not doing facial or license identification and recording that I drove by the sign at 2:23 on Monday at 63 mph.
    - theamk 4y ago
      The equivalent of this is showing gaming keyboard ads on ign.com, and bank ads on bloomberg.com. As long as same ads are shown to every visitor, this is no problem at all. The people hate it when their actions on one site affect ads on completely unrelated sites. Real wold equvalent would be a salesman saying "I was passing by your house yesterday amd noticed you got a new bed.. Want to buy some bedsheets at a great price?". I think we agree this would be super creepy.
      - pete_nic 4y ago
        Contextual advertising https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/contextual-advertising.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/contextual-advertising....
    - jen20 4y ago
      People can do that kind of online targeting without the need for privacy invasion. For example, if I wanted to target Apple users who probably have some disposable income, I'd buy an ad slot on John Gruber's blog. If I wanted to advertise to frequent travellers, I'd advertise on FlyerTalk. That kind of thing.
  - shostack 4y ago
    How do you reconcile that with small businesses for example needing to reach prospective customers?
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> You’ve probably had this experience: you spend some time on the whiteboard mapping out your marketing funnel and growth loops, and you’re really fired up ready to grow your business, but then the ultimate question hits you like a sledgehammer: “How are we going to track this?”. No, I have not. One wonders how Sony in the 1950's (as an example) "tracked".
trurl 4y ago
And still folks think that if side loading is forced on Apple, that companies will not force us to start side loading their apps to escape this "apocalypse".
- glowingly 4y ago
  I agree. We only have to look 3 years ago to see exactly what happens when those same companies get sideload access. Facebook did something very similar, using their Apple App Store Developer certificate to enroll users as "employees," allowing them to defacto sideload their market research application. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19033451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19033451 I also fully expect the last browser holding against Google's browser monoculture - Safari - to die soon after. I hate this state of affairs, where Apple's sheer greed is the main force stablizing this fragile environment.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Those instances show that Facebook is willing to do that to small incentivized groups of users- in that case, volunteers offered monetary benefit via gift cards, but difficult to say such a model is accomplishable on a wide scale. This is a situation where the users were self-selecting. Certainly, companies will misuse and abuse the freedoms associated with sideloading, but I disagree that it’s as an easy task as people think. First they actually have to build competing app stores that are compelling enough for users to overcome the friction of switching. I don’t think these companies, other than game platforms like Epic, and perhaps tech companies in politically sensitive markets such as China or Russia, have it in them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30808926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30808926
    - trurl 4y ago
      I don't understand why you think building alternative app stores is somehow a limiting factor. If you want to use some software, and the company wants to bypass Apple's protections, they'll just put a download link on their website. Why go through the hassle of registering with any "app store" at all?

pete_nic 4y ago

> The truth is we’re in a post-truth world, where more than one opinion is valid. You should never trust just one single source of information, without validating what it's telling you, and thinking about the potential motivations and incentives behind that conclusion. Wisdom applicable beyond the topic of this article

throwmeariver1 4y ago
There was never a truth world it was always a world of trust and the trust got eroded in the last decades but it's still there. If you trust your business partner or your life partner you can make decisions without checking them. If you trust no one, your decision making is so hampered that even if you come to the right conclusion it's most certainly too late.

username223 4y ago

I always feel strange seeing these walls of pseudo-scientific marketroid babble. Their fundamental purpose is to make some fraction of people choose Crest over Colgate, or vice versa, but they've fallen so far down the rabbit-hole of this mundane task that they can come up with competing "models" and multi-thousand-word articles promoting and explaining them. From an ordinary human's perspective, it's like shopping for groceries and getting side-tracked into a discussion of the natures of free will and the fundamental building blocks of matter. I just want to buy some decent-tasting apples, not grasp the neural correlates of my apparent "choice," or the string-theoretic basis of their multicolored skins. That's not to say there aren't useful nuggets to be gleaned. For example, the fact that "third-party consumer data" and "customer matching" are the highest form of marketing surveillance tells me they're buying data from credit card companies and shady "data brokers," and correlating that using whatever identifiers they can. So I should probably keep entering fake phone numbers, zip codes, and email addresses when I can.

Nextgrid 4y ago
> Their fundamental purpose is to make some fraction of people choose Crest over Colgate Their fundamental purpose is to convince their boss or client that they are indeed making consumers choose one over the other and make up data and/or theories to support that assertion so they can justify their fees/salaries/bonuses. They don't particularly care whether consumers are actually choosing the product.