Google and Facebook are the two dominant online ad companies and have been for years. 

While the companies do very different things and have faced their own unique issues, their five-year stock charts look pretty similar.

Until you hit late 2021.

Add it all up, and Facebook just told Wall Street that Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature is expected to cost the social media company $10 billion in revenue this year.  

Google, meanwhile, reported blowout fourth-quarter results earlier this week on the back of a 33% jump in ad revenue, compared to 20% for Facebook.

When it comes to targeting, Google has Android, the world’s most popular operating system, giving it control over its own policies. 

And while Google still needs iOS distribution, it has a cosier relationship with Apple than Facebook.

WHY?

Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser.

'Cookies' as we've come to know them have provided a wealth of covert low cost data to allow ad tech platforms the ability to continue to spew out a Tsunami of zillions of programmatic intrusive, fraud ridden ad messages. 

Many of these Cookies were being used to regurgitate those retargeting spammy adverts that follow you around the web regardless of device, and they're also the main driver for people to install ad blockers.

Facebook’s apps rely almost entirely on Apple and Google for distribution. So when Apple changed its privacy policy last year, limiting the ability of app developers to target users, Facebook was suddenly stripped of one of its most important assets.

Google also relies on ad targeting to connect marketers with users on many of its properties, but search advertising is a unique asset, users tend to “self target” as they’re typing in a search query that explains exactly what they’re interested in at that moment.

A recent blog of mine (found here) highlights that today over 50% of searches end without a click to the creator of the search item that surfaces. 

This is mainly because 'Google' are prioritising searchers over brands and clicks to websites.

Which means that Google prefers you to get your answer from them, not divert it's valuable traffic and data to your website.

Historically getting traffic to your website was the whole point of playing search optimisation with Google's bat and ball?

With the ongoing rise of 'social commerce' it seems that people are electing not to go to your website and navigate your 'funnel' first - so what is a retailer to do?

Today’s internet experience is somewhat decentralised, which in plain language means a lot of our virtual experiences are funnelled through just a few institutions, like Google and Facebook. 

The new iteration of the connected internet is being dubbed 'Web3' and despite all the current hype around it being the 'internet on steroids' it is still being created so it’s hard to say exactly what it will look like or what it will do for us - even with or without 'Zucks' 'Meta'.

I have no doubt that we will see a dumbing down of the Dot.com bubble we experienced in the late 90's, but the signs of brands and companies jumping on the NFT hype whilst trying to figure out what this 'Metaverse' is all about is starting to create its own bubble for sure.

So, whilst Zuck is trying to figure out how to harness even more of your data with his new offspring 'Meta' is this a huge moment in time for retailers to innovate, immerse, and excite by thinking media and entertainment rather than just the transaction - the most relatable brands tell stories not category propositions.

As the awareness on privacy continues unabated, and inertia is eventually being provided to those unwitting audiences ad land and it's clients need to find another way of remaining front of mind - but what are the options? 

Is it to continue to rely on cookies and other such covert and invasive tracking methods that's turning people off in their millions, or is it to consider how applying the skill of being authentically social, leading with media content that educates, informs, isn't intrusive, encourages engagement and allows brands to 'listen' as opposed to just paid ads. 

Now that might just be something worth exploring?