Advertisers call out Apple's 'hypocrisy' over ad tracking
William Gallagher
The Interactive Advertising Bureau has used its annual conference to accuse Apple of "cynicism and hypocrisy" over how it treats advertisers compared to its own ad business.
Speaking at the organization's 2023 leadership meeting on Marco Island, Florida, CEO David Cohen said that the trade group was ready to confront Apple. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) members include Google and Meta, and Cohen said that Apple's app tracking transparency continued to represent a growing threat.
According to AdAge, Cohen has accused Apple of using double standards. Where a user has to be asked for permission for a third-party advertiser to track them, Apple's own services ask them to accept only "personalization."
"While there are no shortage of extremists attacking our industry from the outside, there are some attacking it from the inside out," said Cohen at the conference. "Most notably, Apple exemplifies the cynicism and hypocrisy that underpins the prevailing extremist view."
Speaking to AdAge ahead of the meeting, Cohen said that Apple is not interested in a "fair fight," and that it had ignored the industry.
"It can't be that 'personalization' in the Apple ecosystem equals 'tracking' outside of it," he said. "We were imploring them to not go with this kind of language around tracking... the very binary 'turn on,' 'turn off' [choices]."
"Apple basically said, 'Thank you for the feedback,' and they did what they did," continued Cohen. "[They] have not been back to the industry table again."
"So, we want to call it out for the hypocrisy that it is, and we want to invite them back to the table," he said.
Apple has not responded to Cohen's remarks, but it has previously argued that its privacy features are not intended to boost its own business at the expense of others. However, Apple's ad business has grown significantly while others have fallen.
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
9 Comments
There's no way the ad guys are going to get what they want. If Apple is tracking users without consent then the solution is to stop Apple from doing that, not to allow advertisers to do it too.
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
If Apple are tracking me without me knowing I want them to stop too!
Ad men accuse others of hypocrisy. That’s rich. Hypocrisy is basically advertising’s business model.
The moment you buy anything from Apple and you give them your name address, phone number, and the normal bits of information needed to buy something from a store, however ad companies appear to consider that basically a ad? Despite the fact that Apple is not sharing that information with anyone else.
Apple will always be one up on the Internet tracking companies (Google, Facebook) because they sell a products whereby information has to be exchanged in the normal way when you buy something from someone (a store). So the crying will never stop similar to what is happening with Epic or Spotify.
Apple and the ad agencies are going to have to be much more specific on what and how personal information is being used. General arguments are not going to cut it, at least for me.
Plenty of tracking is happening as it is. Youtube and Facebook definitely tracks what is see. For example, I've watched Simple White Underbelly interviews recently and now many individual interviews are showing up on Youtube. I'm okay with that, as these interviews are quite informative. That's tracking which I don't find problematic. I'm not seeing ads or other content.
At the same time, I'm not seeing any e-mails, messages, that are related to any content I've seen through Apple products, such as News+.