Let's All Commiserate

Does Mozilla have a solution to Facebook's attribution problems? YouTube has been on a tear, but what do they have planned for 2022? And the 5 things email marketers should do but never want to.

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Does Mozilla have the answer to our Post iOS-14.5 attribution blues?

Since Apple turned digital marketing upside down in April '21, big tech searched for a solution. Google proposed FLoC, which was a flop. And Facebook has primarily laid on the floor and cried.

Enter Mozilla...

For the last few months we have been working with a team from Meta (formerly Facebook) on a new proposal that aims to enable conversion measurement – or attribution – for advertising called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA.

IPA aims to provide advertisers with the ability to perform attribution while providing strong privacy guarantees. IPA has two key privacy-preserving features. First, it uses Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to avoid allowing any single entity — websites, browser makers, or advertisers — to learn about user behavior. Mozilla has some experience with MPC systems as we’ve deployed Prio for privacy-preserving telemetry. Second, it is an aggregated system, which means that it produces results that cannot be linked to individual users. Together these features mean that IPA cannot be used to track or profile users.

IPA is designed to provide a lot of flexibility for advertising businesses in terms of how they use the system. Cross-device and cross-browser attribution options in IPA enable new and more robust attribution capabilities, while maintaining privacy. The IPA proposal aims to ensure that all sites benefit from these features with the match key concept, which allows smaller players to access the greater reach of entities to cross-device attribution.

via // Privacy Preserving Attribution for Advertising

The most interesting part of this proposal is its author. I can't fathom lawmakers, privacy experts, and big tech competitors agreeing on a universal solution from a big tech company. The optics appear too self-serving.

But Mozilla has been a good internet citizen since the Web 1.0 days. And they have a track record of quality solutions that aren't...creepy. And Meta obviously knows the problem intimately. So perhaps this is a partnership that makes sense. Time will tell.

YouTube offers an inside look at their 2022 product plans.

The biggest benefactor of the iOS 14.5 privacy hammer has been YouTube. Ad budgets previously spent on Meta, but now lacking attribution clarity, have been reallocated to YouTube for cheaper, targeted top-of-funnel.

This week, YouTube announced their product plans for 2022. Highlights included both collaborative and live video tools, as well as new features coming to YouTube's TikTok competitor, Shorts.

Building on a feature we introduced last year that lets you remix audio from videos across YouTube, we’ll introduce new capabilities that empower creators to express themselves even more - new video effects, editing tools, and more. And to help Shorts creators engage with their audience more personally, we’ll also introduce the ability to reply to individual comments by creating a Short.

TikTok 🤝 Reels 🤝 Shorts

Lastly, extending a long time Cache thread, TV continues to make a resurgence among cord-cutters - just in unusual ways.

TV was once again our fastest growing screen in 2021 — as of January 2022, on average viewers are watching over 700 million hours of YouTube content on TV daily. And in the year ahead, we want to give these viewers easier navigation and even more interactivity. One of the ways we’ll do this is through a device that you always have within reach: your phone. Soon, we’ll be unveiling a new way for viewers to use their phones while they watch YouTube on their TV to read or leave comments, share videos with a friend, and much more — stay tuned!

As always, where creators and content flow...advertisers follow.

via // blog.youtube.com

Quick Hits 🥊

  • Twitter's growth in the US is slowing, which is a problem because most of its revenue comes from the US. // Prnewswire.com
  • 5 Email Marketing Habits to Leave Behind // Entreprenuer

Prune those lists with vigor! ✂️

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