According to The Economist, in April 2021, Apple, which supplies one-fifth of the world’s smartphones and around half of the United States', introduced a software update that will end targeted advertisement by companies. Its latest mobile operating system forces apps to ask users if they want to be tracked. Many are expected to decline. It is the latest privacy move forcing marketers to rethink how they target online ads.
By micro-profiling audiences and monitoring their behavior, digital-ad platforms claim to solve advertisers’ problem of not knowing which half of their budget is being wasted. According to Group M, the world’s largest media buyer, in the past decade, digital ads have gone from less than 20% of the global ad market to more than 60%.
Stronger privacy protections may make corporate ads less effective. In 2018, the EU imposed its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) making it harder to harvest user data. Since 2020, Apple’s Safari web browser has blocked the “cookies” that advertisers use to see what people do online.