Google-backed groups criticize Apple's new warnings on user tracking

It’s more similar to investment management business. You could likewise say it’ll be easy for competitors to prove a firm is having bad quarters of portfolio underperformance, yet firms with bad track records consistently keep getting new business. Why is that?

The underlying business proposition is more like consulting and blame protection. You can always fire your ad attribution partner and claim their “number crunching” was bogus to save your own ass. You don’t pay them to give you actionable ad strategy or performance measurement, just like eg the investment board of a pension fund doesn’t hire an investment manager to actually get higher returns.

You pay them to make it look like you, the board member or the ad account manager, did all you could and any failings are down to uncontrollable poor performance of your vendor, which you then look like the good guy for firing, or look like the visionary for jumping ship to sexy AI solutions then jumping ship back to “classic” solutions when the AI solutions predictably don’t work. You do this for a while collecting bonuses and protecting your job, at the massive expense of the pension fund or advertising campaigns you are supposed to oversee, then you quit or get fired and play musical chairs to fail up into the same role at the next place.

In many companies that run advertising, the ultimate choice of what ad spend to pursue is an unbelievably political shitstorm. There are arguments for spending on generic brand awareness (which has no goals related to attribution at all) vs ambitious “creative” ads & extravagance like Super Bowl ads, vs scientific ad experiments on defined cohorts of users.

Nobody knows about (or gives a shit about) actually tracking the performance of all this beyond doing a bunch of headless chicken scrambling around to make some spreadsheets and slide decks to keep a job or argue for a bonus.

To the executives a layer up it’s either a big cocktail party of all the different styles of pursuing ads and business is good and they don’t really care, or else it’s a needless cost center when business is bad and they give grain offerings to the advertising gods to decide what to cut.

But nobody is seriously pursuing quant advertising. That is all just fluff branding. And this play by Apple is more of the same, just branding for professional services through using their anti-competitive moats around iOS.

We are well passed the second internet bubble where Instagram et al can get billion dollar valuations on market share alone. There needs to be a business plan to generate revenues and profits.

So what us Apples business plan for identity? If it’s to add value to iOS and MacOS by providing convenient privacy secure logins to customers, I hardly see that as forcing themselves into the business.

The story used to be "they are making money on hardware", then when that peaked it became "they are making money on services", once they peak in that market it's going to be "they are monitizing the content delivered through the ecosystem to provide a curated and safe experience" - it's all about showing growth an keeping stock prices.