Why iOS is the Big Winner in Google’s Latest Cookie About Face

Google’s latest stance on deprecating third-party cookies is a precursor of cloudy days to come for Chrome and more confusion on the horizon for advertisers. Given the lack of clarity about the roll out of Google’s own version of Apple ATT, it’s impossible to know how users will adopt “the new experience in Chrome”, who will opt-into cookies and who will be targetable via the privacy sandbox. The unpredictable pace and magnitude of this transition will affect the accuracy of audience data and the effectiveness of media budgets.

With this new wave of programmatic confusion, iOS should more than ever be the go-to environment for programmatic performance. Here’s why:

iOS’s cookie-less environment is easily activated as a complement to cookie-based campaigns, delivers audiences with the most desirable attributes for advertisers and performance can be compared side-by-side with cookies.

• Scale: The iPhone has a market share of 61.3% of the US business audience.

• Value: The average household income of US iPhone users is 40% higher than that of US Android users ($85K vs. $61K). Moreover, around 41% of iPhone owners have household incomes exceeding $100,000, compared to only 24% of Android users.

• Performance: Revenue and margin opportunities are higher than with Android users due to the lower CPMs, higher conversion rates and better ROI from uncluttered media delivered to affluent users.

• Privacy: The user experience is privacy-safe and fully deprecated of third-party cookies.

• Addressable Audience: The US addressable programmatic audience for iPhone users is valued at over $90 billion.

While this audience has been “available” for a while, marketers are just now turning their attention to it as they should, given Google’s most recent cookie pivot. Marketers have become acutely aware of Google’s ability to turn off Chrome third party cookies with a flick of a switch, with an ATT-like outcome. As a result, they’d be better served to focus on cookieless environments such as Safari—that are not controllable by Google—and provide much more predictable advertising environments.

The Early Results Are In

As marketers begin to test the waters with iOS, they’re recognizing they can drive better campaign results than with Chrome—using Alternative IDs that work in that environment rather than depending on traditional cookie-based strategies.

Some recent results are illustrative: A site-retargeting campaign for a dining brand generated three times more loyalty program sign ups on iOS devices than in cookie environments; A prospecting campaign targeted at recruiting students for a prestigious education program delivered 77% additional candidates via iOS activation than cookies, while achieving a lower cost-per-lead.

Proven alternative identity solutions can now reach hundreds of millions of unique individuals and hundreds of millions of households. And with that scale and addressability across the cookieless ecosystem come lower CPM’s, CPL’s, and CPA’s.

How marketers deploy these alternative ID-based campaigns is a bit trickier though. They need an end-to-end solution that eases activation friction, attributes across cookieless and cookied environments and addresses interoperability concerns. Relieving the marketer from building their own supporting tech stack—from targeting to deployment to measurement—fast tracks adoption, encourages more testing and lets the results speak for themselves.

Publishers, brands and agencies need to innovate and continue to test beyond Google + Cookies to reach their target audiences—and specifically iOS—which represents a significant and valuable swath of the digital media landscape. Google has, perhaps inadvertently, created the opportunity and impetus for marketers to test, validate and now outperform with a new—and improved—combination: iOS + Alternative IDs.