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The term “digital transformation” is being thrown around a lot and is more important than ever today. Rather than worrying that existing advertising tactics and results will be impacted every moment, marketers should invest in their martech stack and make sure it is optimally integrated and media ready – gathering and connecting siled first and third party data sources to maximize the highly accurate Signal acquisition, personalization and measurement.

In July 2020, Apple first introduced iOS 14, its latest operating system, which includes a number of privacy features in line with Apple’s stance on user rights.

The most important change is for all apps to clearly describe what data is being collected and then obtain user permission to share that data through a series of push notifications.

All of digital advertising will be affected by these changes, and media companies are only now beginning to understand the implications and therefore the steps we need to take to mitigate these changes. Right now, Facebook is still the noisiest in terms of attitudes and needs to make drastic changes that will affect the performance of its powerful advertising technology in order to comply with Apple’s new guidelines.

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Gone is the ability to track every single event on your website (we’re now limited to 8 per domain), the allocation windows have shrunk, and the conversion reporting no longer shows the demographic granularity we’re so used to having just one name some of the changes.

This, of course, is just another step in the direction of the fundamental shift in the digital marketing ecosystem that began in 2018 when Apple’s Safari browser blocked third-party cookies by default. Firefox followed in 2019. The biggest event is yet to come. As of 2022, Google Chrome will no longer support third-party cookies.

As of March 4, 2021, Google has reiterated that there will be no shortcuts or workarounds when this change goes into effect in 2022. This puts an end to new solutions proposed by martech companies like Unified ID 2.0 that use authenticated logins like anonymized emails for promotional purposes.

Workarounds or new technologies aside, it’s getting harder and harder to create targeted, personalized campaigns.

And while this shouldn’t be new to advertisers, it kind of is because the latest iOS changes and their impact on our favorite advertising tools are surprising, upset, and feared by advertisers and marketers alike.

Many think that they need to turn back to broad-based, contextual advertising, and that the digital budgets they have worked so hard to grow will be slashed in favor of traditional tactics across the board.

However, this goes against everything that consumers are telling us. Yes, the modern consumer is privacy conscious, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want a bespoke personal experience with your brand.

The ability to buy hyper-targeted ads and receive detailed reports in return has only been available to us for less than a decade. If we could create valuable and meaningful experiences for our customers by then, we could do it again.

Marketers just need to focus on getting to know their consumers better and speaking one-on-one with them by collecting and maintaining first-party data, just as we did not too long ago.

Jaime Nosworthy is Tiger Pistol Australia’s Chief Client Officer.