KEY POINTS
Facebook is launching a new ad campaign called “Good Ideas Deserve to be Found,” which makes a case for personalized advertising.
The company says the campaign is meant to “help people understand how the personalized ads they see help them discover new things they love, and support businesses in their community.”
It comes as Apple’s privacy changes draw near, which will impact personalized advertising on Apple devices.
Facebook is continuing its very public defense of personalized advertising with a new ad campaign called “Good Ideas Deserve to be Found.”
The company says the campaign is meant to “help people understand how the personalized ads they see help them discover new things they love, and support businesses in their community.” It will appear on TV, radio and digital platforms starting Thursday.
Facebook executives said the initiative is meant to support small businesses that are struggling during the pandemic.
But Facebook has another motive: Apple is making a change to the iPhone that’s expected to upend the mobile advertising sector, making it harder for advertisers to target ads to mobile phones and track their performance. The change will essentially take a privacy option for users to share their advertising ID, or “IDFA,” that was previously buried deep in users’ phones and put it front and center when they open an app. The change is expected to hurt Facebook’s business as soon as this quarter, the company warned in a recent earnings report.
Facebook executives have been publicly decrying Apple’s change for months. Facebook even launched a print ad campaign late last year arguing that the change will harm small businesses, and suggesting online content makers will have to turn to subscriptions to replace lost ad revenue, forcing users to pay for what once was free.
When Apple’s changes go into effect in early spring, Facebook will begin showing a prompt to encourage users to share their information. The company started testing prompts last month that say Facebook uses that information to “provide a better ads experience.”
The new advertising campaign is partly designed to spur users to say “yes” to this prompt.
Facebook’s head of company marketing Andrew Stirk said the company’s research found that 47% of small businesses fear they won’t survive the next six months, or are unsure how long they will stay afloat as the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have devastated everything from retailers to restaurants.
But he said that Apple’s changes “add some urgency to this,” he said.
“The goal is to help people understand the role that personalized ads play for small businesses, for their ability to grow and thrive, and also the role they play in helping discover ideas that might not otherwise exist, that they might not otherwise find,” he told CNBC in an interview this week.
