Facebook will report its financial results this Monday, October 25. However, there is already an advance, and it is not good: there were problems in the “excel” that accounts for advertising in Mark Zuckerberg’s company, and Tim Cook, indirectly, is to blame.
That’s right, everything indicates that Facebook’s finances will be greatly affected, according to Reuters, compared to other technology, for the last changes in iPhone privacy, from Apple.
What needs to be seen now is whether the blow is as lethal as it was for Snap Inc, which last week acknowledged that it could not meet revenue targets, largely due to changes at Apple.
Apple’s privacy settings began to apply from April 2021 and, among other things, prevent advertisers from being able to track iPhone users without their consent.
This, of course, has worried agencies and companies that invest in digital advertising for fear that limitations on access to this data will disrupt the market for smartphone ads.
It is not a minor issue, it is estimated that it moves around 100 billion dollars annually.
Snap, on Thursday, October 21, disclosed that Apple’s privacy rule adjustments impaired its ability to know whether or not its advertisements led to website visits or one-off sales.
While providing another tool to measure the impact of digital advertising, Snap said that “it did not work as well as expected.”
After Snap’s results were released, its shares fell 24 percent, dragging down those of Facebook and Alphabet, as both also receive income from the sale of digital ads.
For Facebook, the impact will not be less. It is the second largest digital advertising platform in the world, only behind Google.
Like Snap, most of Facebook’s digital ad business comes from direct response advertising (direct response advertising), a term that refers to sellers and buyers of ads using information about what devices potential customers are using and what they are looking for.
In this way, the algorithm of the networks (in this case, Facebook), places specific ads in front of them for specific audiences with the idea of optimizing sales.
Facebook was one of the large companies in the advertising and digital marketing business that criticized Apple’s changes the most, arguing that they would harm small companies that rely on targeted marketing to optimize their investments in advertising communication.
Will Apple’s changes affect Google? Analysts say no, because Alphabet’s business in digital advertising (the world’s largest in this regard) comes, to a large extent, from desktop computers.