How will iOS15 affect Digital Marketing in 2021?

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Recently, tech giant Apple finally started rolling out iOS 15 to its iPhone users. Catering to iPhone 6s and beyond, the new OS brings new tools like focus mode, Shareplay, and significant updates to FaceTime, enhancing on-device intelligence to discover information and more ways to explore the world using Maps, Weather, and Wallet.

The new software version also adds some features to help improve productivity. These include voice memos playback speed, and font size for individual apps, among others. iOS 15 also includes new privacy controls in Siri, Mail, and more places across the system to further protect user information.

This is not at all a shocker, as the iPhone maker first announced a stunning new privacy feature that requires all apps to ask for explicit permission to track when it released iOS 14.4 earlier this year.

What iOS 15 Means for Digital Marketing

Some of the major ad platforms have been known as “self-attributing networks” because of their whim for holding onto advertising data and not allowing marketers to assess the accuracy of the reported performance. Smaller advertising networks have also been responsible for receiving postback data from app conversions post-iOS14, which means marketers are still kept at arm’s length from performance data.

With the launch of the latest iOS, app advertisers will now gain access to the complete, raw data of all postbacks from StoreKit Ad Network (SKAdNetwork). This will enable marketers to see the whole picture and compare it to what ad platforms and networks are reporting, getting publisher-level visibility in what drives the results. This greater visibility will allow marketers to execute better planning and budgeting decisions.

Now, for the changes that will make marketing trickier.

iOS 15’s Mail Privacy Protection

iOS 15’s Mail Privacy Protection will give Apple’s native Mail app users the option to opt-out of email tracking. This means 48% of all email users will potentially be impacted, according to research by Litmus. High opt-outs are also expected, considering only 4% of Apple users opted into app tracking after iOS 14.5’s release.

Apple Mail users will now be able to make sure that email marketers won’t see if emails have been opened or see IP addresses. This would directly impact automated email campaigns relying on knowing whether the receiver opened an email.

For email marketers, the lack of data shared by iPhone users will affect:

• Measurement and revenue tracking
• Automated triggers and logic
• Segmentation
• List hygiene

There is also another new Apple Mail feature that will heavily impact advertisers. The tech giant is introducing “Hide my Email, ” making it easy for iPhone users to sign up to services using “burner” emails. Apple aims to give its users more privacy from sharing email data and reduce the number of promotional emails people receive.

This is important to advertisers for the following reasons:

• Email addresses and IP addresses are used to map users as they travel around the Internet. If a person opts to use around 50 burner emails through Apple, the industry will have a tough time matching those up and correctly identify one person.
• Email addresses are essential in building a homogenous list of audiences.
• Facebook and Google will be business as usual, thanks to its server-to-server tracking and its logged-in environments. This will only widen the already growing divide between major ad platforms (while this will make them stronger, it does at the expense of smaller, independent ad techs).

iCloud Private Relay

The more vigilant web users have long used VPNs in browsing, disguising who they are and their actions on a website. With iOS15, Apple introduces the iCloud Private Relay as its own VPN to help people blur their IP addresses. And Apple is doing so in a way that even they won’t be able to see what their users are doing.

From removing IP addresses to the Private Relay, expect a restriction of most geo-targeted digital ads. This will be a blow to personalization capabilities as well as the suppression of ads in non-relevant locations.

The Future of Digital Marketing with iOS15

While Apple is only responsible for about half of the market, is it safe to say that others will follow suit where they want to go. We see other browsers and email providers catching up to avoid losing their users.

We see digital marketing’s two decades’ worth of building blocks needing to be replaced.

The new foundation will be first-party data. Marketers must prepare and develop comprehensive first-party data strategies centered around consent and provide real value in exchange for permission to use people’s data.