The Big Story: Reality Checks

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The ad tech industry is innovative, resourceful, agile – and so full of BS that it’s become a meme.

Ad tech vendors often boast about their scale, claim that their solutions have HAL 9000-level AI and gloss over the difference between correlation and causation.

In some cases, they’re purposely trying to obfuscate and overcomplicate what they do to make their tech sound more useful than it is.

“That’s why it’s absolutely critical for you to keep your BS detector on at all times,” advises Shiv Gupta, founder of U of Digital, who penned a highly entertaining column on the topic.

This week, he joins as a guest on The Big Story and goes beyond the column with even more advice on how publishers, marketers and agencies can cut through the jargon and get at the truth.

The best way to not get taken for a ride is to not be a mark – and that requires asking the right questions.

“I think it’s important to be able to ask the partner to lay out the strategy, to be able to demonstrate what they’ve done for other advertisers in the past,” he said. “It’s important to ask partners to actually call out their own flaws, as well … the second you hear somebody say, ‘We’re perfect, we’re never going to screw up,’ that’s a red flag.”

Also in this episode, we get into the weeds on how Facebook is planning to deal with Apple’s IDFA restrictions coming up in iOS 14. In summation: Facebook’s own apps will no longer collect IDFA for iOS 14 devices, and Facebook won’t request the identifier from apps in Audience Network, either.

What does that mean in practice? If app developers and publishers aren’t able to monetize as effectively through Audience Network sans IDFA, Facebook will consider shutting it down on iOS 14.

But you heard it here: The writing is on the wall for Audience Network. Don’t be surprised if Facebook eventually kills its mobile ad network completely.